It’s a lulu.
Took a couple of big first steps today.
For one, I started my System Administrator course from SkillUp. It’s a job I am fairly certain I can do.
I did the first chapter. It’s all videos – kinda lame. But whatever. The presenter is comfortingly husky and nerdy, which is a plus.
I wouldn’t trust a good looking person to know what they’re talking about when it comes to the heavily nerdy world of computers.
Oh, one amusing little detail – the captioning keeps spelling sysadmin as CIS admin.
I mean, he probably IS cisgendered[1], but I can’t see how that’s relevant.
The first chapter is mostly just introductory stuff. What a sysadmin does, what areas of specialization there are, how to brew a cup of coffee so black it eats time, the usual.
It took a certain amount of self-control to keep myself from freaking out over how complicated he made it all seem. A lot of talk about reading tech news sites and keeping your certifications up to date and knowing all the latest hardware and so on.
Oh. And he said you should at least have a two year associate’s degree in computer science. In which case, why am I taking this fucking course?
The whole point of this exercise is to guide me to employment. I am not going to take a two year college degree just to be a sysadmin.
Just teach me how to do the job.
What I really want is diagrams. Ones that say, “this is this part, it does these things, it outputs to these things, here’s what they do…” and so forth.
Then you can teach me the software side of things.
I’m sure I will become more confident as I continue the course. I plan on doing at least one lesson a day. Maybe more.
That’s one of the reasons I am disappointed that it’s all video. I read a lot faster than I watch. If it was text base I could breeze through it at my usual top speed.
But oh well. I will learn anyhow. I will be a good student.
Heck, I might even take notes. No, really!
The other big step today was in getting my webcam working.
I learned that Windows comes with a simple video capture program called Camera, and so I can use that to capture the raw video for editing.
Oh, and get this : I downloaded a freeware video editing suite called Da Vinci Resolve because I figured if I could get a video editor other than Corel Video Studio that did NOT slap purple shit over the video I record, and I could stand to use it, I could avoid having to give Corel my $25.
So I download this thing, and it’s very impressive. Very professional looking. I recognize the things like timelines, clips, titles, audio tracks, and so on.
Totally looks like something I could use. So I boot it up and look around then decide it’s time for me to record my first video with it.
So I look for that function, and I look… and look… finally I Googled the problem, and it turns out the answer is quite simple :
Da Vinci Resolve doesn’t do that.
It’s this supposedly fully featured professional video editing program and it simply does not capture video.
And that’s fucking retarded. It’s like you started on step 2. The most basic thing a video editor should do is produce the actual video you recorded. The whole reason I downloaded your freaking program is that Corel wasn’t doing that right. And that turns out to be the one thing you can’t do.
YOU HAD ONE JOB.
Hence my looking up this Microsoft Camera thing. It has no features but it’s still a better program than Corel or Da Vinci.
Oh, and here’s the kicker : when I import the video I take with Camera into Corel or Da Vinci, the audio is out of sync.
It’s fine when I play the video by itself but put it in an editor and suddenly it looks like I have been badly dubbed.
But I am at least making progress.
More after the break.
A pink one
Felicity and Julian have already seen this, but it’s too good not to immortalize here.
Even thought it’s one of those weird YouTube vids that won’t let me embed it. Hence my having to give it to you in link form.
What is this, a Geocities site?
The long dark corridor
There’s a depressed feeling that I get sometimes that my mind has learned to express as a long dark corridor stretching infinitely ahead of me.
It’s a large and lonely feeling that contains a streak of helplessness and hopelessness, as if that corridor represents the rest of my life and what it will be like until the day I die.
Even my emotions just echo down the hall into nothingness.
It’s not a good feeling, and historically I have suppressed it, but now I am more inclined to try and slow it down and examine it and try to figure out what it’s trying to say.
It’s certainly an expression of my deep inner loneliness. An interior world in which I have always been and will always remain completely and utterly alone.
In fact, “alone” is too weak a word, but I don’t know what else to call it.
It’s a sense of “alone” which does not even contain the echoes of other people. There should be people in my head, people I have known and who have known me and who can be a warm and comforting, steadying presence, even if only in memory.
But there’s nothing but that long dark corridor to oblivion.
Even the people who should be there are absent. There were people I liked and who were at least somewhat nice to me when I was a kid. I have had online friends who mean a lot to me. I know my family and friends love me and want me to be well.
But it’s like none of that can make it through the thick layers of frost that have accumulated between me and the world from all those lonely days where I was just a sad little robot who went to school.
I don’t blame people for not being able to reach me.
I know it’s damned near impossible to do so.
And you can only leave people out in the cold for so long before they give up and go away once and for all.
And when they do, the absolute worst part of you goes, “Phew!”
Because that’s what it wanted all along.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
[[1][ Really, Microsoft? Your dictionary doesn’t recognize the word “cisgendered”?!? Read the fucking room! [[1]]