Thursday, May 31, 2012

I told him to his Facebook

Happy Thursday!  Are you guys having the best summer weather?  Some of you are having hurricanes, though, I'm aware.  Win some lose some.

Have you played League of Legends yet?  I've won 7 pvp games, but lost 8.  Working on it.

Supa tired today, stayed up way too late.  School's going fine etc.  Caught up with the current Doctor Who and now I don't know what I'm going to do with myself.  Still got a last several seasons of the old stuff, though, but between you and me it's probably not worth it.  But who knows?  That's why I keep going.

Helped Steven swap out Carolyn's motherboard over the weekend.  Helped my dad diagnose a dead computer, too.  Getting my government $$$s so maybe I'll build that Minecraft server machine after all. 

Memorial day was chill.  We walked a whole beach and back in Oxnard, took forever.  Should do that more often.

My Doctor Who shirt was supposed to come today, but it didn't.  I found some cool 80s songs last week.

I hope you like my blog.

-Steph

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Networking

Happy Thursday!  How about this summery weather we've been having?  Too bad I'm spending 8 hours inside everyday (and then another 4 inside at home haha)!  School is still going on.  I don't know if or when it will set in that I'm literally spending my life there.

Weekends are so nice!  This last one I had an adventure followed by a day of internet.  Both were rather exhausting.

In school now I've moved on to the Networking section, and once I'm done with that (10 weeks) it'll be study study time to pass the exams.  Networking is a little bit tougher because it's a greater percentage brand-new information, not like software and hardware which was mostly intuitive.  But I think I'm proving myself right, in that I always thought that I had enough interest + enough dedication I could do it.  And I still think that's true.

Reading the first three chapters, though, that was slow going.  But!  I'm consistently impressed by my torturous study methods of awareness-read + copy down summary & glossary + in-depth-note-taking-read for each chapter.  Because the first time through I'm always ugggghhh what does any of this mean it doesn't make any sense I'm never going to learn this cry cry cry.  And then I copy down the summary and the definitions and it's like I'm not even paying attention to what I'm writing and my hand hurrrrrts so bad.  And then I have to go and read the chapter allll over againnnn........... but by that time, suddenly everything seems to have a context it didn't have before, and a logical progression, and I'm copying stuff down that, hey, doesn't that sound familiar?  And by the end of the chapter I feel like I actually took a step forward.

I still have to look up three or four answers on the homework out of the book... but that's 25 other questions that I just know the answer to.  I'm sort of looking forward to re-reading all these books and just scooping up all the things I missed before.  And then I'll be fully armed.

Other than that it's all Doctor Who and League of Legends all the way!!!  Nerd+ is me.

-Steph

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I was about to go to sleep and everything

Happy Thursday!  Hello folks.  I was nanoseconds away from shutting down my computer and becoming unconscious.  What a disaster that would have been!  But now you're just standing in the way between me and that dream of mine, so shove over.

This weekend was the MSi Battlegrounds tournament hosted at Green Forest.  I went to help Jacqi out, and I signed people in and handed out raffle tickets and shirked my duties to watch LoL matches and got free drinks and played Pokemon Pinball on my rad berry pink Gameboy Color.

This week at school things started coming along because I didn't have to read that stupid book anymore and was mainly installing and configuring stuff.  Yesterday and today I researched components for a theoretical computer--but I was looking for stuff to build a rig to host my Minecraft server, so if I find some 300 bucks I can totally construct it.

So it was a fun week!  I made friends and progress.  And watched most of season 6 of Doctor Who in one day, WHICH IS AMAZING.

In other words:  sleep time.

-Steph

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Tech Talk

Happy Thursday!  I feel like maybe I didn't explain my school well enough... ever.  Lemme tell you about it.

So it's an adult education type place that's a part of the county public school system, actually.  The program I'm in is called Network Support Techn..ician, which is what I'm evidently training to be.  Everyone in the class is doing something different, what NST does is it trains you to pass the A+ and N+ certification exams.  A+ is like for entry level PC repair; software, hardware, use, maintenance etc.  N+ is for networking.

It's set up as a at-your-own-pace come-in-and-study thing.  I've got a computer and some books and some exercise sheets and basically I just have at it.  The first segment was Windows Fundamentals, which was DOS and the A+ exam Software book.  Now I'm in repair, which is the Hardware book and a set of installation tasks.  After that it's like five sections of networking, which seems to be what everyone else is stuck in the middle of doing.

I made great time in the Software book, even through reading it twice and taking notes that are just for my own sake.  Windows is intuitive, and when you've spent as much time as I have using it, learning it isn't so far out of reach.

Hardware book, though, man.  The RAM chapter was sloooooow going, RIMMs and SIMMS and DDR2 DIMMS and SRAM and DRAM and SDRAM which is not a combination of the two.  I'm definitely going to have to read that whole thing again cover to cover in a few month's time.  For now I'm just slogging through to get the homework done so I can move on to the installations.

Because the books are great, they're very informative and laid out in an easy to understand way, and there's troubleshooting guides and tips and all sorts of INFORMATION that's going to be on the exams.  I don't learn too well in the abstract, though, so I'm reading more for awareness than full understanding at the moment.  Did I know what DDR stood for before?  No.  Could I tell you if you asked?  Maybe.  If I studied it again, would I remember?  Yes. 

At this point, for this half-baked information, I'm setting it aside in a half-baked pile.  In practice, when I research RAM or install RAM or have a conversation about RAM, it might come up, and in discussing it, the concept might very well become a little more baked.  And that's real learning.  The complete absorption of information.  Something you just know.  For me, it takes a lot of passes to get there.  And I do feel I have the time, and the general practice of dealing with computers is going to help it solidify a lot faster than just trying to read the same chapter fourteen times in a row.

Like muscle memory.  Only real memory.

Only like, not random access memory, like in my brain memory.

Yep.  So I've basically finished the Hardware book, too, only I spent all today and yesterday reading it, and I'm super burned out.  Like reading the same sentence for fifteen minutes without seeing a single word.  So I'm going to do something else tomorrow!  And that's the nice thing about at-your-own-pace, is you know what you need to achieve, and you have the tools to achieve it, but you can chose your method that suits you best.  And do it in your own time, and satisfy your own standards.

In conclusion, I have about two books worth of computer info in my head that I didn't have a month ago.  I've got a cute tool set and I know how to use 'em.  Onwards and upwards.

-Steph

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Week 3

Happy Thursday!  Wish I was asleep right now.  Getting up at 6:30 is perfectly doable, I know you know, but for me the trick is getting to sleep early enough to survive it.  Not a morning person, this one.  After the first semester of college I smartened up and never again had to be anywhere before 9:30.  I like some sleep.

The other day I dreamed about a scorpion, but it wasn't a scorpion at all, it was a little red crab with a scorpion tail.

And LAST NIGHT.  Beth got me a Justin Bieber singing toothbrush for Christmas, right?  So that's fine.  Then all of a sudden, and quite hauntedly, he breaks out into song at like 3:45 AM.  And I'm like, I don't know what it is; there's two songs on it, Baby and something else I've never heard of, so it was super surreal.  Some grainy yet impossibly loud nine year old squawking about in the bathroom... I had to go execute him.  Twice, because the first time didn't take.

So that was an adventure.

Finished the first section of my schooling this week, a week and a half ahead of schedule.  Moving on from software to hardware, and I'm back at chapter one all over again.  Yesterday I was dead tired and nothing made any sense, but today I went over it again and now I feel alright about it.  Book reading is just slow going.

But seriously guys, all I want to do at any time is watch Doctor Who.  We just started season 5 with the new guy, and now we've only got four left.  Sweet baby James I love him.  This new season is like a mini reboot, but the new Doctor is hands down the best part about it.  What a fun time.

Yep.  Time for the sleep time.  Catch ya later.

-Steph