I spy with my little eye - Friday Five

1. Something that is red: The red art pen in my pencil cup.

2. Something that is shiny: The cover on my printer

3. Something that is ugly: Braticus's chewed up blanket over his cage.

4. Something that is made of wood: The floor

5. Something that is sharp: The scissors in my pencil cup

I wonder where aplus.net's tech support team is located?

Everyone I've talked to so far has a thick slavic accent. I think when I call back tomorrow to see if my domain has finished transferring I'll ask the person where they are.

Note: My website will be down for about a day when it happens. I'm going to have them point back to my earthlink server until after finals, but between the time they transfer it to their domain and I have them point it back, my site will be down.

Realizing I could do that and deciding to carry through has been the best decision I've made all week. Much unlike my idea of encrypting our wireless access. Of course, how was I to know it would turn out to be such a fiasco? It should have been simple.

Not much hope for the NASA/Ames jobs at this point. Both interviewers were making decisions by yesterday. I even got a call two days ago from the one I really, really wanted asking me a couple of questions because they had it narrowed down to one other person and me. I guess he didn't like my answers as much as the other person's. My bad experience with Java and the resulting grades killed my chances on that. Those are the only classes I've had in 15 years. Oh well. I'm on track to get an A or B in my networking course and plan to take more, so when the next round comes up in January I'll have better chances. Hopefully they'll have another opening.

There are also chances for openings during the next six months that I'll be in the running to get. The coordinators were anxious to get me placed somewhere, so it will happen when the time is right.

Last night I finished all the "in the lab" lab work for the course. I've only got to research and do the "Purchasing a small router" lab at home which involves a 3 to 4 page presentation with diagrams and suggested routers to purchse. That will help with the final project that is to network an entire building and come up with subnetting plans, etc.

I still have to finish 4.5 modules on the Cisco Academy website and make my flash cards to memorize all the anagrams, catch phrases and which equipment belongs on which layer of the OSI and TCP/IP um... tables? whatever they're called. Guess I need to memorize that, too. Oh, and which layers of each model correspond with the other.

And what the duplicate anagrams mean in which context.

I hate closed book/closed note tests. In the field we'll have access to our information base. But since this course is designed to have us pass a Cisco certification test that doesn't allow anything but a piece of scratch paper, I guess it is as it needs to be.

It's funny. Our instructor is shocked that I say I have to memorize things. He says he hopes we'll all internalize it instead. I'm sure we will down the road but there has been a whole lot of new stuff thrown at us pretty fast. For now, we memorize. As we gain more knowledge, the things that didn't quite click will make more sense and then it will be internalized.