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I taught myself how to pick locks my final year of high school - in France, high school students have to take the "baccalauréat", a set of exams that cover ever
by GuiA 13y ago
I taught myself how to pick locks my final year of high school - in France, high school students have to take the "baccalauréat", a set of exams that cover everything you've studied in high school, in all subjects. It spans the course of 2 weeks or so, and you get 1 week to prepare before it.
I hadn't been doing so hot in high school (writing assembly for my TI-83's z80 was more fun than reading Shakespeare and doing derivatives), so my parents locked my laptop in the attic for me to focus on revising during that week.
Of course, I spent a few hours reading at the local library on lock picking, and managed to get my laptop from the attic on the first day (the lock was a fairly old model too, which helps). I spent the rest of the revision week writing C and hanging out in IRC :')
For the record, I did pretty well on the baccalauréat :)
- agumonkey 13y agoA lot less glorious but in junior high school, some old ATX computer cases had a keylock connected to the motherboard, with BIOS support it would stop before bootloading. Being locked out of the computer being the best motivation, I dared to open and disconnect the wires and ran the computer innocently, after all, I never took the keys so it looked an error on my parents side.
- entropy_ 13y agoSimilar thing happened with my when I was ~14, except it was the family desktop -- laptops were way too expensive for us back then -- and they had a lock on a power switch that led up to the computer. Learned to pick locks and got extensively lectured about why I shouldn't do things just because I can. My parents eventually gave up on trying to lock my out of the PC(after trying BIOS passwords, OS-level passwords and combination locks). Funnily enough, I learned C when I was supposed to be studying for the baccalauréat. I'd learned programming in BASIC for a casio calculator(mainly for making games and a few solvers for things that we were supposed to solve manually in exams but that were too tedious). A friend of mine linked me to http://siteduzero.com/ http://siteduzero.com/ (apparently it's changed to http://fr.openclassrooms.com/ http://fr.openclassrooms.com/ recently) and I ended up not studying. That really hurt me in History, Geography and Biology(which require a lot of memorization) but otherwise I breezed through everything else. PS: I'm not in France but in a country where the french baccalauréat is considered equivalent to the state-mandated exams(Lebanon, used to be under French mandate).
- sitkack 13y agoI am going to make a new word, "learnacrastinator", "learnicrastor" (feel free to fix/expound). One who learns a subject or skill while procrastinating studying for another.
- umanwizard 13y agoFixing bugs in a large open-source project while I should have been studying for major exams was what landed me a Google Summer of Code position, which (I assume) is what landed me an interview at a major tech company. Safe to say that a huge proportion of my current income is directly due to "productive procrastination" :)
- Kluny 13y agoI saw a great point in some article the other week about why Ph.d students end up doing all these incredible things in their free time - it's all an elaborate way of procrastinating from finishing their theses.
- rkallos 13y agoMaybe "procrastilearner"?
- sockpuppet42 13y agoStory of my life
- girvo 13y agoI like that better. The word, not the fact you've just described my life.
- oceanic 13y ago"educrastination" - the act of learning something while procrastinating about doing something else.