After a while my trusty desktop withered away in the corner as a relic of an era gone by.
Before entering the 8th grade I got my first laptop times were good I had moved away from dial up and had discovered the wonders of wireless internet of course at the time I didn’t know I was leeching off the neighbors wifi. (Since then I’m currently on my 4th laptop my current prized possession)
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| Image By Sinchen.Lin
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This period though is a pretty naive and uneventful time in the world of my media use. My true jump into the the world of the digital and technology came during high school.
In New York city high schools are divided into different interest there also supposed to specialize in are you're given a book to look through to help you make a decision. Conveniently the one I decided on was close to home but that wasn’t my main reasoning the other was it’s specialization. It was the High School of Computers and Technology.
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| Author Unknown |
Purportedly we were going to learn Computer Maintenance,repair,networking and other such skills. Which all things considered we did.
My transformation into a Digital Librarian began there. The things available to do on the school internet access were pretty limited eventually individuals found a variety of ways around school restrictions.
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| UltraSurf Proxy Image by denharsh |
The most prominent of these methods was a program called Ultrasurf a free digital proxy. Ultrasurf was a hot commodity one could bargain with others if inclined to. Aside from Ultrasurf other digital commodities were traded like Windows 7 tiny,various games and other software.
Most of the time trades were one sided you asked and received other times exchanges were made but overall the philosophy on software was that it was available to flow freely.
(Couldn't find better quality video of this. In context this is a clip from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger a Japanese TV show in which characters can transform into various Super Heroes. As an aside this show was something I really got into during this period and I'm still quite heavily obsessed with it. Using various file sharing sites and fan translations I mange to keep up with this show and a variety of other foreign TV shows some current and some not so current.)
I didn’t realize it at the time but looking back it now this time and experience is what birthed me into the digital librarian. The individuals I associated with had heaps of various games and software they kept archived that they shared with others and just accessed when needed. Before I meet them I was scared of torrenting and digital downloads due to horror stories with the RIAA and MPAA suing individuals but that fear went away and now torrents and file sharing are like second nature.
 (The documentary highlights the trail in Sweden of the Pirate Bay founders the biggest peer to peer bit torrent tracker in the world.) | |||||
| Original Image by Tooby Doo (The text in this image is a reference to a segment in the documentary Pirate Bay:AFK. | ) |
(On a another aside note later me and my core group got jobs at the school as Mouse Squad (don’t know what that stands for till this day) which allowed us to gain access to the administration wifi connection as part of our privileges nicknamed “GOD”)
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| Image From Waiting For The World |
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