Offbeat

2007 ... 19 years ago

I remember finding an old BYTE magazine from the 80s while I was cleaning out the crawl space and thought "Oh this should be fun!" expecting a nostalgic tour of ancient systems.

But the feature article was on the RSA algorithm, explaining it in simple terms using an example involving low primes you could then scale up. It was public key crypto for dummies, but it left me understanding enough to encrypt/decrypt a message from first principles by writing a short Python script. I was like holy shit that worked!

You know those school fundraising magazine-selling scams they had every kid doing back in the 2000s? I got suckered into buying one as an adult; I didn't see one magazine for 5 years! Then suddenly, they started showing up at my family's house, but not the ESPN magazine I remembered ordering. It was just a random big-name magazine for a year.

I looked into it, and a class-action lawsuit was settled, but a lot of the info was lost, so they just sent whatever to people that paid.

Three years later, I'm still waiting for my Amazon order. I guess it's not coming either.

Fortunately most of the advice in there would still apply to a college student

three years later and Im still wating for my