Tag Archives: Microsoft

Do You Have to Go to College to Be Rich?

Burning the Midnight Oil

Burning the Midnight Oil

Oddly, the answer is no.

I have to breathe and close my eyes, take my time before this means something to me.  I have always been made to believe, I have always thought, that education is very, very important.

As a matter of fact, a lot of poor parents put this on top of their agenda.  They can be overheard telling their children: “Your education is the only inheritance that we can give to you.”  The unspoken plea: please graduate and take us out of this pitiable, desolate, godforsaken place.  So they sell their only cow, the grains, their time, sometimes their souls, just so their children can go to school.

But there is Bill Gates.

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Are You On The Internet?

Virgin Territory

Internet: Virgin Territory

My mother had foresight.

She had the two of us enroll at a computer school at a nondescript building, with an area not exceeding 40 square meters.  I forgot where it was located, but I remember we had to look over the shoulder of the teacher and we had to share a computer, tinkering with DOS and binary numbers and floppy discs together.  We were no longer mother and child, but two people trying to ride with the times.  I am not sure if I (or she) learned anything.  I know that back at home I continued to type my thesis with an electric typewriter.

Not that it mattered.  What we had learned would be relegated to the annals of computer history, because in a few years, mankind was to take several quantum leaps into the information age.

In his book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century”, Thomas L. Friedman catalogued the shift of the philosophy of the world – from working hard, man had to work smart.  He said, “… One way small companies flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really big.  And the key to being small and acting big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper.”

From the computer came the Internet.  And the internet is the new frontier where this is possible.

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