It's only Thursday, yesterday seemed to be Friday for me. I think it had something to do with the fact that for yesterday and the two days prior I had concentrated on actually learning some of the information with the Cisco class I'm taking.

There is a configuration setting on any computer that connects to a network called a subnet mask. I knew it was needed if an IP address was configured statically, and it's automatically assigned on computers configured to use DHCP. I had no clue what it was for though. I do now. The mask is used by the routers on a network, it is needed to figure out which particular legs of a network a computer resides. For the class we have to know how to set all this up, it's a topic called subnetting. Shit but the stuff is difficult to understand! The biggest hurdle for me was looking for shortcuts. I spent a lot of time looking and couldn't find any. I was hoping it was possible to understand it without learning it, and it isn't. I downloaded cheat sheets and went through the shortcuts, but you have to understand it on more than a superficial level to use the shortcuts and cheat sheets. I wanted to do well on the test though, so I finally got it down.

I paid the mortgage today. I know someone that pays rent, his rent is half of our mortgage. It would seem someone would be able to get a house half the size for half a mortgage. He does want to buy a house, but he could only afford a smaller house, and there aren't many available. Builders put up houses to maximize profit, so they are going to build the biggest houses the market will support. There is no money in building small.

In the envelope with the mortgage bill there was a letter. There were actually two stubs, one was an equity accelerator. They were offering to take out more money and payments bi-monthly in order to reduce the amount of interest and time we would be paying. Of course, after reading the fine print, I found out they were charging $9 a month to do this. That would be over $100 a year. Any bank has to accept extra money and apply it to the principle of the loan, so why would I want to pay for something like that? I have been on my wife to start sending in more money, but I can't afford to do it by myself, and she thinks she needs the money now.

I am reading Guns, Germs and Steel. I have been in the middle of it for quite some time now. It is rather dull, but there are interesting tidbits scattered throughout the book. I think I mentioned it before, that it made the bestseller list, and I can't understand why. My wife knows a few people that started it because it was on the bestseller list, but couldn't finish it. Anyway, there was an interesting bit I read yesterday about how society can hinder advancements. We all know it's true, governments can go to great lengths to discourage advancements if that 'discouragement' serves some other interest. According to this guy, US companies balked at making electronic devices with transistors because they were too involved with vacuum tubes. That is one of the reasons Japan was able to explode on world markets with their electronics, because they embraced the transistor.

Anyway, I also read that the reason we use the qwerty keyboard is because it was developed to slow typing down. Yes, old typewriters, mechanical ones, couldn't keep up with fast typists, so the keyboard was developed to slow them down so that the contraptions wouldn't jam. The most common keys we use are on the upper row, not the home row. Interesting.....