The XMEN Clan Forums

First day of school! Yaaaay!

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So, I've been poring over my college textbooks for the last few days. The Networking book is a great read, if way dense--I'll definitely be keeping it for reference. Same goes for my other two books, a "liberal arts" math book (more on this later) with all kinds of practical stuff in it, and what amounts to a book on the art of proper debate, also a nice reference piece.

I was a total geek last night. Got everything lined up on the kitchen table, sharpened a whole bunch of pencils, tested out the calculator, all that jazz. Schedule's on top of the pile, the next day's books already in the backpack.

Now, my class (the only one I have today) starts at 11AM. Me, being a good student, I leave home at 10:30, and since it takes me about twenty minutes to get to the campus, that's ten minutes to park and walk in.

I should have known better, really. My tour of the campus two weeks ago showed me that there's lots of parking spread across the place, but at the time, I figured it was for football/baseball games. The multiple roundabouts instead of 4-way stops should have clued me in to the large amount of traffic the campus is built to handle. THe newspaper article I read Saturday about how enrollment was up should have sent up a warning flag.

*whoosh* Right over my head.

I get to the campus, and am not really surprised to see that the front lot is filled up. What does surprise me is that there's campus security out directing traffic. Huh, maybe college students just suck at driving.

Well, not only are the front lots full, but when I take the security man's advice and move around to the back... those lots are full, too. We're talking, oh, 1500 spaces, all full. Yowza. The guy at the back lots suggests I use the overflow parking areas. I take his advice and his directions.

Problem is, he's given me bad directions. Doh. Knew I shoulda brought the map today. I end up off-campus, make a U-turn (legal in Minnesota), get back on campus, and go back to the one overflow lot I know exists. Park, get my stuff, lock the car.

By this time, it's about a quarter after eleven. Crap, late to class on my first day. It takes me fifteen minutes to walk to the class--it's easily three-quarters of a mile from the overflow lot to the building. Thank goodness the classroom is near the front.

I slip into the classroom. "Why are you late?" "Everything was full, ma'am." This happy answer results in a sharp comment about getting here early.

I bite back an urge to tell her to go look at the lots for herself, not to mention that 'early' makes no difference when the place is being stampeded by a herd of four-wheeled wildebeest, find a seat, and get out my materials.

Now, you may recall I mentioned that this math book is a "liberal arts" math book. What this means is that it's not a book that goes into too much depth on any one topic, but has a wide array of information. A little geometry, some statistics, loan and interest calculations... y'know, stuff Everyman can use. That's what the introduction says, anyway. The first chapter, however, is counting systems. Whole numbers, base-10, how base-X systems work, that kind of thing. It even had a nice little section on the Babylonians (smart bunch of people, btw) and their base-60 system. What I didn't expect to find was information (and a set of problems to solve) on the Incan, Mayan, Phoenecian, and other oddball number systems. This is complete with said problems written in those languages, to boot.

I was, as you might expect, a little fearful of the first day of class. Luckily for me, she skipped right over all that and landed us into Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry. OK, fine. THen it gets wierd; she passes playing cards and then has us split into groups based on the value of the card. This wouldn't be so bad save for that we didn't really get a chance to choose locations. So I'm in the back row. This worried me a bit until I learned that this woman can actually project her voice, and even with my good ear plugged up a bit, I could hear her. Yay.

Now she's having us work in these groups of four, first problem being a spatial visualization exercise. Take a cube and randomly unfold its sides so that each face is attached by one of its sides to one or more faces, then laid out flat. Example: your standard unfold for a cube ends up looking like a (Christian) cross. These weren't standard, though. Also, the goal is to write the word 'MATH', one letter to a face, so that when the cube is folded back up, two faces will be blank and four will have those letters, in a readable order.

Mind you, all of this is a diagram on a flat sheet of paper. Had I known this was going to be today's exercise, I would have brought scissors. As a side note, I became an instant hero at this point in class--most people brought pens. I had half a box of ready-sharpened pencils I was only too happy to lend out.

Back to our cubes. Thankfully, I've always been good at this type of thing. One of the girls (Sarah, as I recall) in our group (Julio, Jennifer, Sarah, and myself) also has a good head for this--she might have a career in the Air Force if she ever decides to fly planes for a living. Both of us are laying out solutions lickety-split, which gets the paper filled in, but doesn't help our other two members. Sarah's not having any luck explaining the mental process, so I give it a whirl. After a little Ender-style humour ("The enemy's gate is down!".... which nobody got, sad to say), I show the other two how to pick a nice central face, designate that the 'top' of the cube, then mentally 'lift' the whole diagram off the paper and start folding sides down and around. With a few hand gestures for illustration, our group is up to speed, and we decide that not only will we solve the problem, we'll solve it creatively by putting the letters as far apart on the diagrams as possible. Hey, presto, we're done in a flash after that. Luckily, the teacher didn't require that the letters have the proper orientation to be read, only that they're in the right spots and in the right order.

We also got an extra credit problem, a fiendish 'Pentomino' style puzzle, except with triangles, restrictions on piece placement, size, and number of faces, and requirements for number of rows of triangles encompassed. Nasty. Not due for a couple of weeks, but I think I can knock it out tonight after dinner. Same goes for the reading material.

Class is done, now for a nice 3/4-mile walk back to the car. Thinking ahead this time, I scout out the parking lots available for tomorrow's class. I found a nice back-lot that's easy to get to for this one. And I'm going to leave the house 45 minutes before class-time, just to be safe.

Tomorrow will be fun--it's Networking, so we'll probably end up covering the OSI model for starters.

Your network is down because the connector's loose and the tokens got lost. Better look around on the carpet and find 'em.

Yeah, I know. I imagine if I tell the instructor about the 'bit bucket' he'll crucify me on the spot.

So yeah, umm... that palomino puzzle is EASY! Da Carte comes before da Horse! So you tell em that, and say Rav sentcha... easy "A"



*chants* GO BUG! GO GO, GO BUG!

I bet those guys never heard of Ender, or even of Orson Card, which is a cryin' shame.

Now I think I'm scared to go back to school.

Report The Second: The First Week, or, I have a crazy networking teacher.

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My other two classes are taught by the same guy. I'm in luck here, because I hit it off with him right awesome.

Networking Concepts: For you geek types, this is the book-version of the Network+ exam preparation, made into a semester-long class.

I've since found an easy way to simplify the OSI Network Model:

Application: "I know this guy, name of Presentation. He handles my mail."

Bang, done.

Aaaanyway, this class is cool Way back in my career, I took a couple of MCSE classes and tests which covered the OSI model a bit. Given my spectacular run of luck at the time, I took and got these certs right as 'Paper MCSE' started cropping up, big time.

Thankfully, a lot of that knowledge is coming back to me as we plow through the book.

The teacher is pretty cool. Kind of a grown-up geek, he's very loose in the classroom. Outbursts are somewhat encouraged. So is discussion, and this is where it gets interesting.

See, we have a good mix of students. So far as I can tell, I'm the only 'shade-tree' computer guy in there. There's a couple of guys right out of high school, an assortment of Star-Wars class nerds, a couple of Mac heads, a pair of True Geeks (complete with 24-port programmable switches in the home), an ex-Air Force NG guy, and then there's Ed. Aside from myself and the teacher, Ed is the oldest fellow in the room, having retired from IBM a few years ago. He was a mainframe AS/400 guy who never really dealt with the small-end computer systems.

This is quite interesting, because Ed has a very different worldview of computers in general. I really hope to get paired up with him in lab sessions, as I'd seriously like to pick his brain. I've seen him get tripped up by logical vs. physical addressing, and then turn right around and nail the class to the wall while we're discussing WANs.

Today we had a funny moment between the two of us and the teach, when the topic of ISO 9001 certification came up. The rest of the class is looking mystified, the teach is rolling his eyes, Ed is recounting the sheer amount of crap that had to be done, and I'm pointing out how DxR's office staff acted like the Huns were invading.

Homework's been interesting, too. Your average multiple choice questions, followed by some severely out of date 'hands-on' at Monster.com, followed by a couple of nice stimulating case study problems I had a fine old time dissecting into bits. I expect the hands-on and case study stuff to get much more difficult//interesting as we get more material under our belts.

As an interesting side-note, the teach has offered to let anyone skip the final if they take the Network+ test (the real one) and pass it before the end of the semester. I think this is crazy-talk. Why pass up an opportunity to get a practice test in without additional cost and with teacher feedback?

Customer Service in the Computing Industry

I'm still a bit unsure of what to make of this one. Same teacher, much more subdued class. I asked him about the class' purpose, and the general reply was that it's a class to help our problem-solving skills. I can sorta see that, when combined with the debate-class book we were issued. It's been kinda fuzzy so far, so I can't really describe it that well.

The only concrete thing so far has been our requirement of writing two 'discussion articles' per week, with a focus on customer service.

Pretty nebulous, but I think I've got enough stuff in the junk-bin that is my head to have enough material for the semester.

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Anyway, parking has settled down a bit. A bit, not that much. Back lots are still full at times, mostly in the morning. I have no trouble with my computer classes, as they're all the way across campus. It's the math class that's hard to park for. Bleah.

Oh yeah, last in-class math assigment: given protractor and compass, draw X-sided polygons. Yaaaay. At least I'm getting a decent refresher in algebra, and a requirement out of the way ASAP.

You know, AB, it sounds like your Customer Service in the Computing Industry class (or something similar) should be taught to engineers as well. There's so much crap that goes on because of "character" or "type-A personality" that it's rediculous. There are a lot of people here that could use some customer service classes.

Basically, if some of the squadron's testers didn't make the customer feel dumb, we'd probably have a lot less crap to deal with as a whole. But it's not just government either.



I've got one question for you though: are you suprised at how well you seem to be doing with all of this? Before it sounded like you had some trepidation about going back to school. But from your posts it sounds like you're almost having a blast.

Try dealing with a building full of PhD scientists that insist you call them DOCTOR because they have egos the size of Rhode Island. Then more than half of them are non-citizens that have problems with English = recipe for stomach problems and headaches.

Luckily I don't deal with our R&D groups anymore and support the Production lines.

Yeah, Asha, I am kinda surprised. My work ethic seems to have resurfaced, and along with the various junk I remember on a day-to-day basis, it makes things easier than I expected.

Regarding engineers and dctors...

Yes, your average engineer providing instruction to the 'unwashed' is going to result in hurt feelings. Heck, when I first started my support career, I too was in the 'All customers are idiots' camp. I learned better.

Now, supporting Ph.D's (be they scientists or actual doctors of medicine) is a right challenge. First thing I learned--use the title. No matter how much of an asshole they are, they did earn the title. It's a minor balm you can apply to their egos.

And yes, most of them have egos roughly the size of Mt. Everest. Play to it. The 'everyone has a specialty' line of inquiry works wonders. "You fix people, I fix machines. Likewise, you wouldn't want me to attempt open-heart surgery, and I am here to guide you through the workings of this device." Note the second half--though you wouldn't want this Ph.D to touch a computer with a ten-foot pole, you can't actually say that. Present it as a difficult but not-life threatening problem--do not attempt to make computer problems equivalent to their own profession, only make them 'tricky'.