The Coburn Blog

Well, good news, final grades for the Summer came out. I received an “A” in my Access 2003 class. Who knows, I may be more like my little sister after all. hehe. I always assumed the reason I got such low grades in school, was because of blackboard issues, so far that theiry is holding true.

although, A+ core and A+ OS are coming up this semester. two of the hardest IT classes Ivy Tech offers I think, but I still have every confidence I’ll get good grades in those too. All my remaining classes at Ivy Tech will be online classes, except for Speech, which I’ll take in the Spring. I’m also signing up for the Leadership Academy, if I can find transportation to Fort Wayne once a month that is. I might be able to get my mom to take me, I don’t know yet though. I think being a member of the leadership academy will help me gain some valuable experience. I was student council president when I went to the blind school for several years, so why not, I can be a good leader I think, besides I’ll get college credit for it, and I won’t have to pay tuition fees or anything to be a member.

Well, Vocational Rehabilitation ended up getting me the Zoomtext 9.1 magnifier/reader after all. I thought i was going to have to pay $99 for the 9.0 to 9.1 upgrade, but Maxi-Aids ended up sending me the 9.1 version, so that was a nice surprise. So far, I’ve had a couple of issues with the Speech and my Panda Antivirus software’s “protection against unknown threats”, but I just had to disable that option, and it works fine. For some strange reason, Zoomtext and Pandas unknown threats protection, was preventing display properties, control panel programs, and accessories from running.. If I exit Zoomtext, it worked as normal, but I just had to disable unknown threats protection in Panda Antivirus to fix it, no big deal. It just prompts me all the time to turn that option on is the only annying part, and there’s no way to turn that prompting off.

This brings me to my next thought, there’s been alot of talk on the net lately about Windows Vista, vs other Operating systems, like previous versions of Windows and the Mac. IMHO, in microsofts history, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and Me were nothing more then just fancy MS-DOS DOSSHELL replacements. NT, 2000, XP, and Vista were based on microsofts 5th generation NT kernel, which microsoft decided to replace ms-dos with a few years back..

personally, and I’ve said this many times before, 5th generation NT, and ms-dos, and OSX all suck.. What they need to do, is replace the 5th generation NT kernel, with a FreeBSD based kernel, but instead of color coating it with OSX, like the Mac did, put Windows on top of it instead, only then will they have an Operating System that will pass my approval.

I mean, I hear people everyday argue about which is better, the Mac or PC. I think PC hardware is further along, but the problem with the Mac’s is they don’t run Windows applications, or windows executables at all, so the Mac isn’t much better. The only thing I like about the Mac is the FreeBSD based kernel, that uses a much more stable file system then NTFS, Windows and OSX are still just windowmanagers that run on top of the kernel, so why not just put Windows on it and be done with it? Its just like in Linux, you got KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and other windowmanagers , even with wine installed, they don’t run windows executables, so those aren’t any better either. In fact KDE crashes about as much as Windows does at times, why not just put Windows on a stable kernel and file system and be done with it? I don’t get it (shrugs).

In conclusion, I don’t like any of these new operating systems if you ask me.. The only reason I need Zoomtext for my computer, is because of these new GUI interfaces.. I don’t have this problem in Command line interfaces, the command line has always been on a black background with white letters, very easy to read, so if you ask me, all this new GUI stuff not only sucks, but isn’t very friendly for those with disabilities. Thats why I wanted to get into System Administration, or Networking, because I wanted to find a Career in Computers, away from these GUI interfaces as much as possible, but unfortunately, thats not likely to happen in our future of IT..