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