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Thursday, March 7, 2024

Story of My Life - part 21

The mineral oil I used is the same kind used to cool high-voltage transformers. It doesn't conduct and is an excellent coolant. My experiment was successful. The computer ran while fully immersed in oil and when I overclocked it. It also passed a CPU stress test with a lower temperature than any similar computers I found through online research. I named the computer Deep Dish, in homage to the real computer Deep Blue, the fictional computer Deep Thought, and because I like pizza.

I sent an email with Deep Dish to my closest friend. Strangely, its internet browser stopped working a few days later even though I could still get on the internet through my laptop. Shortly before it went on the fritz, I had mused in my mental sandbox about using Deep Dish to take down the Chinese banking system. Immediately after, the browser on Deep Dish stopped working, I checked YouTube on my laptop and the top clip suggestion was a cartoon in which a scientist character was told to stay in his own dimension. Perhaps it was just another coincidence. I had previously written in my mental sandbox that I could build NSA the cyber equivalent of a death ray and that I work cheap. Those remarks probably made them nervous about Deep Dish. 

One last event of note that happened to me in November was when I was assaulted by three guys on bikes, got bashed in the head with a club, and had to pull out a knife to defend myself. I was walking on a well-lit path around 8:30 PM. No one else was in sight. After some time, three young men on bikes came riding toward me from the front. I was walking on the right side of the path so they should have been on the other side. As I moved to the left, they turned to follow, so I decided to move right and stand still. They rode right at me and slapped me on the shoulders as I passed. At this time, I was convinced they would return to assault or rob me, so pulled out my folding knife and kept walking. My instincts were right. Less than a minute later, they came up to me from behind on foot and began yelling at me. I flicked open the blade of my knife and yelled at them to leave. One bashed me on the head with a club, so I brandished the knife to get them to back off. Once I had some distance, I called 911, and they retreated. I'm convinced it was a random attack that happened merely because I was in wrong place at the wrong time. A minor assault is often a prelude to a robbery and the fact that one had a club suggests they were out looking for someone to beat up or rob. I defended myself with minimal force. It's best not to stab people if it can be avoided. They appeared to be about 15 or 16 years old. The only people who ride around bikes at night are people who don't have cars. Fortunately, the police and the paramedics came quickly, and my injury was minor though it bled a lot. The police arrested some people not long after and asked me to look at them, but they were not the right guys. 

It's possible, even likely, that the NSA is monitoring me as I type this on my laptop. This is amusing for several reasons, not the least of which is that I am supposed to submit anything I intend to publish to NSA first so they can check it for classified information. However, I doubt very much the NSA will give their stamp of approval to a work which accuses them of doing the very thing they have so often denied doing. All I can say is I hope I get a job offer soon. It's January 2022 now and I applied to NSA almost six months ago. Regardless, I'm hopeful for the future and proud of the work I did for the Army and the NSA. It was a long shot for me to get into the Army at all, and I beat the odds. I regret nothing. Here ends my tale of triumph and woe. 

Epilogue

Many odd things happened after I shared a draft of my autobiography with a close friend and computer expert in late January 2022. I was invited to apply to a Swahili teaching job, received notice that a background check had been completed on me, and the browser on my oil-cooled computer mysteriously got unscrambled. 

Later, when I attempted to overclock it to 6 GHz, it had a kernel panic and failed to reboot. Thus, I was forced to reinstall the OS using my laptop. When I restarted the computer, I briefly saw a screen that said SSH at the top followed by 4 instructions. SSH stands for secure shell and means that some other computer was remotely connected, and it wasn't my laptop. 

In Notepad on my laptop, when my other computer had the kernel panic, I wrote: Crap. When I refreshed YouTube on my laptop, the top clip suggestion was titled "We Crashed!". Then I typed in Notepad how I had seen the SSH screen. When I refreshed YouTube again, the top clip suggestion was titled "You're Pregnant". 

The decision to share my autobiography was not an easy 1. The night I emailed it for the 1st time, I slept with a locked, cocked, and ready to rock AK in my hands and 1 eye open. A few months later when I emailed it to my sister and she shared it with my brother, they both became upset. 

Back to February 2022. I applied and got a job on an assembly line in a golf cart factory. It seemed like a nice placeholder job. It was nearby and I'd be working nights, just like in the Army. 

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