Catching Up
It's been a bit of a hectic week at my place. I went south to my parents for the long weekend, where I played golf on Saturday and shot sporting clays on Sunday (both mediocre). Still, a bad day on either course beats a good day at work.
Then, when I got back in town, I started a class at College of DuPage, our local community college. It's a Cisco Network Academy class, the first of four designed to teach people how to be a Cisco Certified Network Associate, or CCNA. I've been in networking for almost 10 years, but for all of that time, the router has been a black box to me. I know at a high level what a router does, of course, but don't ask me to configure one. At any rate, I've decided it's time to learn.
So my class runs from 6:30 to 10:20 PM Tuesday and Thursday. I showed up and my first problem was navigating though the maze at COD. For some reason, modern community colleges are built as all one (huge) building. I guess we couldn't ask the students to get wet. There are 20+ students in the class, and to my great relief, I am about average in age for the group. Lucent is sending a bunch of their engineers through this course, and we've got a 34-year veteran of Illinois Bell. There are a couple of kids, but not too bad. Should be interesting.
On the book front, I sent off a review copy of The Mars Run to Midwest Book Review. Also, Ron Miller, an award-winning technical artist, has some books (including new translations of some of Jule's Verne's stuff) on Lulu. He read a posting in the Lulu forums, and offered to review the book. Yeah!