Networking Basics....

A long time ago,during my school days, my uncle used to show me how he used his "modem" to connect to Ariadne, the first (I think) greek BBS and went on to demonstrate all those marvellous things a personal computer could achieve.
Despite my tender age however, I was rather unimpressed (he worked for Apple after all...) and I stood firm by my decision to pursue high, mighty and lofty sciences.

Despite that, I have been online without almost any interval for about nine years. By greek standards, this is not bad for someone not in the IT studies or business.

Wary of computers and knowing that much of humanity's tribulations are brought about by improper procedural implementation (socialist state bureaucrats were right it seems in their insistence on proper "process" ...), I always performed dilligent maintenance of my hard drive, I always ran updated anti-virus and anti-spyware software and I always used authentic software which I installed and uninstalled by proper procedure.

Everything was really simple and if it was not then that meant that I had no business with it. And everything ran as smoothly as a Pentium processor at 500 MHz could allow to.

Then things changed. Instead of modems we needed routers. Riiight...Routers connect to the PC via Ethernet NICs. Riiiiight.... Routers use digital data transmission. That means that what matters is the signal to noise ratio. Because there is attenuation. And don't forget the distance to the DSLAM. And why are my torrents that slow? Are the proper ports open? How the hell do I set up my wireless router as an access point for a wireless LAN? And what in the name of the Nine Hells keeps accessing my hard drive?

I was suddenly neck-deep in more than I could manage and I realised that years of modem-slow networking simplicity had left me lagging in computer knowledge. I did not have an understanding of basic concepts and here I was, trying to configure MACs and subnet masks...

So I decided to use the one skill I have spent my life honing to bleeding-edge perfection: STUDY!

Last week,I contacted a couple of knowledgeable people in the field that I knew I could trust and were not total quacks and they directed me towards two books: For heavy duty studying they proposed Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networks 4th Ed. (Prentice Hall) and as an introduction, the Networking Basics Companion Guide to the Cisco Certified Networking Associate certification (CISCO Press).

I promptly got both (thanks cous!) and I got myself cracking on the CISCO certification companion.

I quote from page 22, explaining frequencies (get on with it, people...) :

"The length of time it takes for one complete cycle to occur is called period.The number of times that cycle occurs in one second is called the frequency. For example, the frequency shown..... ....is 3Hertz (Hz). (Hertz is a unit of measure that means "number of cycles per second."

Jesus H. Christ. According to that book, entry level CISCO Certified Networking Associates can easily come from highschool reject stock....

In this context, I am rather confident that since I hold a University degree and am quite competent in above entry-level Physics, I will one day rise to CTO for AOL.

Sweet... :-)

PS: Which reminds me of a very old strip from a Web comic that I had lately stopped following. The comic is Help Desk (yes, helldesk...) by Christopher B. Wright and can be found here. (The word here is a link for those who will no doubt ask for one...) It is fortunate that I was able to find that strip: