A sysadmin’s look at the improbable persistence of BASH in a world increasingly convinced everything must be modernized immediately. The Black Screen That Terrifies Ordinary People Technology has spent much of the last three decades attempting to persuade humanity that computers ought to feel effortless. Tap here. Click there. Swipe gently. If something goes wrong, an agreeable interface appears bearing
I promised myself I was done. Finished. Retired. Emotionally pensioned off from Philippine politics. I had decided – quite sensibly, I thought – that I would stop watching what was happening back home. No more news. No more political drama. No more headlines so absurd one initially assumes they were written by satirists with unresolved anger issues. I was going
Introduction: When Classes End, Trouble Begins Anyone old enough to remember Scorched Earth? The old DOS artillery game where two tiny combatants spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to calculate the exact angle needed to ruin somebody else’s afternoon? The one where terrain got destroyed, shots missed spectacularly, and friendships were tested over bad aim and questionable judgment? Yes.
I started getting myself re-acquainted with C programming again tonight under Linux using CLion and C Primer Plus by Stephen Prata. And immediately remembered why C has survived while entire generations of “revolutionary” technologies have quietly died behind abandoned GitHub repositories and unpaid cloud invoices. C does not flatter you. It does not tell you you are a “creator.”It does
There is a particular species of lie told by technology tutorials. It usually begins with: “Setting up Git is easy.” No.Boiling an egg is easy. Git setup is a procedural interrogation conducted by Linux, SSH, and GitHub working together like three hostile government agencies refusing to acknowledge each other’s paperwork. The mission sounded simple enough: That was the theory. Reality
At some point during this Linux journey, I looked at ubuntu-dev01 and thought: “You know what this VM needs? Emotional damage.” So naturally, I installed a C compiler. A language old enough to remember when computers were beige and programmers openly hated users without pretending otherwise. And honestly?It feels weirdly refreshing. Why C? Because C believes suffering builds character. Modern
There is a certain temptation when learning Linux to immediately build a gigantic home lab with: (Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating quite a bit) And then three days later you realize you can no longer remember which VM broke DNS. So I decided to start smaller. Way effing smaller. Instead of building a fake Fortune 500 data center in my laptop,
Spring 2026 is officially over. Four courses completed. And after submitting the final exam for the last course, I experienced a feeling unfamiliar to graduate students: Silence. No deadlines.No discussion boards.No professor casually posting: “Just one final reminder.” That sentence alone has caused more stress than actual exams. The strange part is that this is already my second master’s degree.
Excerpt I was following a Linux networking course and just wanted to run Ubuntu in GNS3. Instead, I spent the evening fixing permissions, ports, storage, virtualization, and my own bad assumptions. Post I was following a Linux course for networks by David Bombal. The plan was simple: You know… a lab. Instead, I ended up learning and debugging the damn
So… I Wandered Off for a Bit At some point, I drifted. Not in a dramatic, “I quit everything and moved to a mountain” kind of way. More like… I opened one academic door, then another, then suddenly I’m deep into GIS, writing papers, and thinking about spatial relationships like I’m plotting a crime documentary. It was good for me.