Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Been busy with the program and life in general has been pretty hectic lately. I have a job interview, part-time IT work – really hoping I get it – and that’s coming up in a few days so I’ve been preparing. But I thought I’d do a three-part series over three days (today, tomorrow, and Thursday) giving everybody an idea of a typical day in the program.
This morning, for whatever reason, I woke up at 4AM. I typically wake up closer to 6AM. So I worked on reading over notes and converting them to StudyBlue cards for a few hours. Had breakfast at 7 and then hopped on the SkyTrain, then bus #125 to get to the campus. Arrived there at about 8:00…
Due to a corrupted Office 365 install (long story) I had to reinstall the entire OS (even longer story) on my laptop. So I figured it’d be a good excuse to upgrade to Windows 8.1, taking advantage of the wonderful Microsoft DreamSpark subscription that the program gives to its students. Began to reinstall Windows when I got to school, while enjoying a PB&J sandwich. (too much detail? ;-] )
Class started at 8:30 sharp – Hardware class. First off, we take the online quiz for the chapter we’re currently working on – basically, how to be an IT professional and be customer-focused. Then, we take the written quiz which is almost always considerably harder than the online quiz… however, today it was pretty straightforward, probably because the chapter was pretty straightforward too. After the quizzes are done, we take a short break, and the lecture on the next chapter starts. This chapter is mainly about in-depth troubleshooting. There’s a coffee break at 10, more lecture, and class gets out about 20 minutes early at 11:10.
Next class, Linux Fundamentals, starts at 12. By now, I’ve fully finished my Windows 8.1 installation, have all drivers and updates installed, most of my software is back on and I’m happy with it. The teacher lectures on the new workbook we’re starting – most of this time is spent learning the grep command, which allows us to search through output for a string. Also, we learn about RegEx – or Regular Expressions … which is basically grep’s equivalent of file globbing.
After about an hour of lecture (oh, and he also went over the tests we did last class, on which I got 3/4 on the written test, 5/5 on the practical test, and 95% on the online test) we were left to our own devices to work on the chapter’s online exercises and questions. I always enjoy this time as it’s pretty relaxed and gives us a chance to work on whatever we need to do to catch up. We also had a minor assignment done in-class, basically we had to come up with grep search patterns to fit certain criteria.
Class ended at around 3, and I was home studying by 4! Now I’m just writing this article, then heading out with a few friends – then hopefully sleeping pretty early. Two tests tomorrow. I’ll follow up tomorrow afternoon with day 2 :-)
Cheers
Seth