Week 22 & 23

Another bi-weekly post. Or at least, it is by official declaration. The final eighth week of each class in the program is only half length. Which is somewhat confusing to say at least. By my count, this is covering the 21st and 22nd weeks, which is making me think I've missed a post or two somewhere in the program.

In any case, despite how well things have gone for me thus far in the program, I find myself having lengthy moments of what I can only describe as "overextension of perception of the surrounding world." At one point I would've been able to write them off as mere anomalies. Unusual spates of activity from my, frankly, overactive imagination. Little nightmares, more often impossible, of futures bearing fruitlessness or failure. I know that this sort of thing isn't healthy. That expecting the worst means expecting to not be disappointed. But that's why I find it often helps. After a certain point, one learns that its way more fun to be surprised than it is to be disappointed. And this same mindset has actually helped me. First in some of the many computer games I've played in my time, then, more recently, here in the Computer Science program. 

The question "what could possibly go wrong?" is asked so often in cartoons, TV, and other media, that it's little more than a joke. Thinking pessimistically involves asking that same question and actually meaning it. But, I've recently learned that the kicker is what happens after the question that's says which pessimism it is. The most obvious pessimism is 'pure'(sometimes called 'fatalistic') pessimism. This is the one that says "This will go wrong. There's no point." I'm grateful to learn that that's not the pessimism that I run. The pessimism I run is apparently the safer 'defensive pessimism'. I'm apparently the guy that looks at a scenario and thinks about it like it isn't 'if ', but 'when' it goes wrong, and then comes up with countermeasures and contingency plans accordingly. If you started thinking of Batman and his contingency plans for if someone in the Justice League suddenly went full supervillain, don't worry, I thought the exact same thing.

I'm honestly curious now as to what the next course in the program, titled 'Operating Systems', is going to entail. The first place my mind went was when I was working on my associates at Gavilan. One of the courses I had to take had us toying with virtual machines running various Linux environments. I'm wondering if this next course will have something similar. Also on the subject of upcoming courses, I'm being told I need to take a foreign language. I'll need to talk to someone about that. 

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