This is my hope to get on Google with the following search term: asdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjkl which I shall shorten to: asdf…jkl for the remainder of the blog (its kind of an obnoxious phrase really).

I was googling for no reason today. While my mind was trying to think of what to Google, my fingers got bored and typed asdf and the suggested search results intrigued me. It turns out that there isn’t a whole lot of Google stuff for asdf…jkl

asdf autocomplete with Google

So I’m hoping that some day when someone else google’s asdf and sees asdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjklasdfghjkl, they will find me!

12/16/2009 – I’m surprised at how many people have “found me” by leaving a comment on the blog. Keep it up, it’s very fun.

1/11/2010 – It is insane how many hits this site is getting per day. I’m in the process of making something even cooler for everyone who does do this search, on a different domain. Its on http://www.digil.net, but there isn’t a whole lot there yet.

1/28/2010 – When I first started this, the huge asdf…jkl autocomplete was the third suggestion for asdf and not even a suggestion for asd. It’s now the first asdf suggestion and the 3rd asd suggestion. Rock on!

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Ever since I was a 13, I have always been intrigued by fiber optics. My first exposure was a Christmas gift, my parents gave me one of those fiber optic spray lamps.

Fiber Optic Spray Lamp

The notion that light could bend — I don’t mean slight refraction, I mean 180 degrees of bending — was just fascinating to me. Later on, in high school, I attended a lecture by Cisco on the future of fiber and learned how fast data moved through fiber. In my CS 404 class, we have been learning much about the history of computing and of the internet. While many view the “dot-com” bubble of 1999 as a bad memory, it did have at least one powerful consequence: the urgency to install a huge fiber optic infrastructure throughout the world. Luckily for the world, nobody tried to get a refund on the fiber networks after the dot-com bubble burst. The ability to send data internationally at super-fast speeds has helped to “flatten the world.” For companies that are based on information and services, distance is now a irrelevant. Does it really matter if the person who is processing your order is in Texas or in India? Not really!

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The beautiful thing about open source is the ability to look at the source files. The ugly thing is that I don’t really care to. As I have progressed through the Computer Science program at Brigham Young University, I have come to realize this simple fact: I don’t want to be a programmer. I find myself with little motivation to read other people’s code and try to make improvements on it. This is probably why I am trying to switch my major from Computer Science to Information Systems; although I’ll still get a CS minor since I have done so many classes. There are many who swear by open source software, and they prefer open source over their commercial equivalent. Such an example is Sun’s Open Office (open source) vs. Microsoft’s Office (closed source) for office productivity software, or The Gimp (open source) vs. Adobe Photoshop (closed source) for graphics editing. In most cases, I find the open source software to be usable, but less user friendly, slower and sometimes downright ugly. I am not bashing all open source products by any means, I use Linux based web servers running Apache and PHP–all of which are open source applications. I just think that commercial (usually closed source) applications have their perks as well. In conclusion, despite my love of computing and my knowledge of programming, I don’t think open source is the solution to all things. To me, open source is to socialism while closed source is to capitalism.

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