April 20, 2005 Wednesday
So much for instructor-to-class communication. There is a day or two missing here because nobody knew for sure when the last day of class was. Half the class thought it was this Friday, and myself and the other half believed it was next Monday (skipping the two network classes we doubled up or class would have gone till the following Friday). Wrong, we walked into class tonight and it was the last lecture. I am really going to have to think deeply about my report to Workforce on the structure of the lessons. We had a quick in house exam which counted for nothing, but I did get 84% on it. That is 16% less than I was expecting.
This is also the first journal entry in the new super computer. The computer that is being modified to eventually (and hopefully) edit digital video. Part of the reason is that all the other computers I was working on crapped out. The old Aptiva won’t take the 1.18 GB hard drive for no good reason, the other Aptiva is stuck on low resolution monitor mode, and the Compaq won’t allow access to the other 8 GB hard drive. I was lucky not to catch myself without a computer in the process. That is precisely my main point about the lessons – why am I still unable to fix very basic computer problems. I’ve now installed Windows 98 SE some twenty times, and only once or twice did it go as well as the ‘simulations’ in the classroom.
Between Monday and now, I’ve spent a number of hours trying to repair computers in mass and setting up a system for Thom over at ABC Thrift. He has a line on 35 computers and 70 monitors which I’ll likely cover in much more detail as it gets underway. Beyond that, thinking I had to cram for next week, I’ve been studying and reading related texts for up to 9 hours per day. In class, we played an interesting game arranged like the game show where you can answer or pass, but if you answer wrong you lose a point. The idea, which was an excellent learning experience, was to give the meanings of acronyms. To anyone in the class (and there were a few) that suggested I was a slow learner because I could not yet troubleshoot, the results of this little game told a different story. The reason I can’t troubleshoot is because it was not really taught properly. Final score was me 22, them 6.
In fact, you give it a try. ASCII, COBOL, BASIC, NLQ, NIC, UNC, DLL, SVGA, EP, POTS, URL, UPS, CSMA/CD, DHCP, and the final WYSIWYG. No points for closeness, in fact you lose a point for saying ‘committee’ instead of ‘code’ in ASCII. I’ll give you a few of the obvious answers. Near Letter Quality, Dynamic Link Library, Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect and What You See Is What You Get. There were two I was hoping for, byte and EBCDIC (‘Ebb-see-Dick’) that were not on the list. What? You didn’t know byte was not just many bits. It comes from Binary Digit Eight, which must have made sense to some early geeks. The other is Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange, but you knew that.
There is still the credential exam I have to pass, and this can be taken any time. That probably means any time within reason. I’ll wait a while in case I get a spate of experience in the next week or two. On the basis of what I was expecting, this course was 24 of the worst lectures I’ve ever attended, yet nobody could be accused of doing anything wrong. They did not do anything wrong, it was what they were teaching in the first place that was the problem. I can identify all kinds of network cables, but I’ve never touched or used a single one of them. We’ll see how much good all that ‘learning’ does me tomorrow when we go to pick up the computers in Coral Gables. I cannot fix computers yet. (And if I can in the future, it will be too indirect to claim the class was my starting point. If I knew I’d have to do it all on my own, I doubt I would have gone to school. Yes, I did learn things there, but it was not reinforced by immediate practical exercises.) It would have been 27 lectures if I had not missed the first week.
It looks like the job market again for me. I have to work another few quarters to get my minimum Social Security points, and I might as well do that learning to repair computers. I’ll target Ft. Lauderdale and area, as long as it is not a long haul into school for the Monday and Wednesday course starting on May 9, 2005. That’s another evening class, networking I believe. This time, I will be prepared for it to be all talk and no action.
Otherwise, let’s take a look at what’s on the agenda. Well, The Hippie wants to go visit his parents again. They are taking off back north for the summer to escape the Florida heat. He wants to see them before they leave, but also wants me there as an excuse to go do things rather than just sit there and talk. I can ‘relate’ to that. I’m home and making a loaf of apple-walnut cake to celebrate the end of semester one. I last did a tally four or five years ago that except for a few year long episodes that I intentionally took off, I have been in school for some part of the year ever since I started kindergarten. Thus, I have roughly 44 years of education, most of it fairly technical material. The Hippie calls it practical knowledge, his degree is in some ‘ology’ where he thinks it is very important that Hitler believed in fortune-telling or something like that. Ha, he kicked our butts big time and came within an ace of solving all the problems with Cuban drivers in Miami.
John has still not called about getting lost last Saturday. I need to talk to him about the furniture store. I really don’t know about hanging around Florida all that much longer unless I get into something that really pays the big bucks. Even then, a lot of those bucks would be used to set myself up elsewhere. Even walking into a shopping center in Boca Raton is a reminder that things are really different in other areas of the country.
Out of school gives me considerably more time to poke around at finding part time work. If I could make an extra $300 per week for now, I probably would not go back to a job until after the summertime, and that job might just be in Seattle. There is nothing to stop me from leaving except school and the possibility of making some fast dollars in the used computer industry. I’ve got coffee and cake in the oven to let me mull this over until the wee hours. Believe me, I am really considering just packing up. The timing is just bad, that’s all. June takes me into the hottest part of the year and it would be dumb to leave just as the nice season is starting. So I might as well stay here another year.
I told Thom about the Lock and Key event. He knows a ton of single women, but so do a lot of married men from what it looks like on the outside. He says he told them about it and they were unaware of even how it works. Proof, friends, that dating now takes place on the internet, where everybody is a movie star. We are working on convincing the women that if my key fits their lock, they have thirty seconds to get naked with me. You may have noticed no pictures recently. I did have a passel of them, but the Argus camera has a slide off battery case lid that can (and did) come loose in my pack. Too bad, I had an excellent shot of the boot the city puts on cars for just parking overnight after the meters are off for the evening.
Which reminds me of another scene for my movie about the real Florida. Think back to Jurassic Park, the glass of water on the table. It ripples slightly and you are tipped off it is the footstep of Tyrannosaurus Rex. I’ve noticed that same ripple in my toilet bowl when the carpenter is working next door, and I’ve been wondering what to do with all the footage I have of fat women in this town.
ast, I finally have a good version of Access, and I’m still thinking of keying in all the information on those hundreds of printer cartridges. I’ve still got a bunch of it on a spreadsheet somewhere. I’ll find it later, it must be on the master backups from the Compaq I was using last summer. Oh, the school gave me a nicely printed completion certificate with their seal. I put it on the pile in my upper bookshelf case. It will be good to get back to my old passion of organizing data. OfficeMax says they have a website for all their supplies, but not everybody has internet and you know how hard it is to navigate through all the bull dunk advertising. I want, for instance, a summary of which printers are the best and worst deal for cartridges. So, let me think. There are many companies, who make many cartridges that fit many printers. Oh my God! Did I get that backwards? Shouldn’t the printers come before the cartridges? No. One cartridge can fit many printers, but not the other way around. Some logic you just leave to the experts, like I would if I ever meet one.
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