Introduction

I’m Vetle. This is where I will post entries for my reflective journal for my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Forensics at Noroff.

I want to start off this blog, or “reflective journal” as Noroff calls it, by saying that I’m extremely uncomfortable about pouring out text online that will stay here. Writing text, especially online, is different than talking, as it stays on here. Anyone can read this, and if they do not fully understand what they’re reading they can just read it again. The main difference is that with a dialog, the other party will say “what?” and I can rephrase, but with blogging, that gets harder.

I’ve never liked writing about myself, especially like this, and I think Andrew Sullivan says it well in his article “Why I Blog” for The Atlantic:

It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

This form of writing exposes me to the public with my own feelings and thoughts. Feelings and thought that can later be bashed by friends, class mates, and strangers.

Through my years at school, there have been other attempts at making students blog. I remember one of my spanish teachers wanted us to blog, but I never really got around to it. I’m not interested in publishing my thoughts and feelings, why would I do it in a language that I can’t even express them thoroughly in?

As I mentioned earlier in the entry, I’m now studying Digital Forensics. I guess there is never an easy way to quickly tell anyone why you’re studying a specific field, hell, how do you know you even know?

I’ve always been interested in computers, I’ve broken computers since I was 8 or so and never really gotten around to fixing them until I turned 15 or 16. I’ve had my best days hacking around on a computer and I’ve my worst days screwing around with crap I know absolutely nothing about. I’ve read countless articles where I do not understand anything, and I’ve read stuff that I’m proud to say that I understand.

I could’ve done a general computer engineering study or any other generic study in computing, but I have a deeper interest for information security. I like the challenges that comes from analyzing and breaking others’ creations. It’s like a puzzle game, except there is no definite answer and the puzzle is not even really made for you.

Some people have no clue about computers, no clue about security, and they use them for the entertainment, the ease of use, or any other of the, countless, reasons. I want to be able to protect people who do not really know what they’re doing, and frankly, with the fast-paced digital world we live in, they can not possibly know what they’re doing all the time without having a specific interest in it.

I’m not really sure what I want to do with my degree after I’m done. I know I want to be able to help people, but it could be by either creating an entirely new operating system for them, or simply working for law enforcement.

But does it really matter what I want to do after my degree is finished? During life, I guess, you have all the time in the world to fully decide what you want to do. And you might not even want to do the same thing for the rest of your life. And that is OK.