Weekend Plans Post: The Study Group
The CEO has laid down the law. “You guys *WILL* get this certification”, he told us.
He gave us a deadline and everything. Well, I got the book and read it. The problem was that the book alternated between things I knew by heart and have been doing since the 90’s and chapters written in what appears to be Proto Indo European. I mean, it’s hard to say since we don’t have any direct records of Proto Indo European but do the whole linguistic reconstruction thing. And I go from reading “I KNOW THIS ALREADY!” to this. And I feel like I flip back and forth on the page in the book between the two with no transition.
Well, two co-workers have taken the test already. One passed (big ups) the other came *THIS* close to passing. I, instead, went in and sat down at the CEO’s conference table and asked him how he was and then told him “I’m not quitting and I’m not asking for a raise.” He laughed and said “that’s the only two reasons anybody ever comes in here!”
“I’m not gonna make the deadline.” I explained why and got into detail over some of the various personal life things that, you know, you don’t talk about to people unless you’re explaining why you’re going to miss an important deadline. He nodded and said “I appreciate you being candid with me, Jaybird. Go talk to the Big Manager Guy and figure out a way forward.”
And so now I have been put in charge of The Study Group.
The study group gets together and discusses various problems that the two folks who have taken the test want to talk about. “We should master pvcreate, then vgcreate, then lvmcreate.” And this is all stuff that I’ve done a thousand times… but I’ve always done it with a laptop next to me, or a printout, or a phone, or a guy yelling “first pvcreate, then vgcreate, then lvmcreate” as I typed.
This is about mastering this sort of thing without notes, without google, and without someone yelling. And that’s a lot more difficult.
But, it’s good. Getting the cert will make me more robust and, with luck, I can retire in 19 more years with a nice little nest egg. (I keep hearing that my job will be obsolete any minute now… and, yeah, I guess it might be… but…)
And, so far, the study sessions have alternated between exploring fun concepts that I have down pat because I’ve been doing them a dozen times a month for the last couple of decades and some weird situation where I learn that “stick” and “thistle” have the same root. Wait!, I yell. Is this like that thing that I did when I was building the platform for the seven containers? Yes. This is exactly that thing you did when you built the platform for the seven containers.
And I get an inkling into why “to be” is irregular.
As such, this weekend I will be hunkering down and studying. Ideally, I will be taking the test before… Thanksgiving?
I hate giving myself deadlines like this. Ah, well. It’ll make me worth more. I guess.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Study” by Tim Swinson | http://timswinson.com is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
I hate doing IT/operations work. I started my career at the tail end of a glorious era when software came in a box and developers could just write C code and not bother with containers or networking or hosts in the Singapore data center going down or any nonsense like that, and I want so, so badly to go back.
On the other hand, we get more money now. That’s cool. If I had to choose, I guess I’d take the money. But I’d have to think about it.Report
I kinda enjoy the IT/operations work.
I came up in the glorious days when there were entire teams of people doing jobs that are now two guys and a dozen scripts (and the second guy is only there to answer the phone when the first guy is sick).
The old way was inefficient, I’m told.Report
Thank you for your service.Report
During the last few years of my technical career, one of my “jobs” was making life miserable for the IT network guys. Making their lives miserable wasn’t actually the goal, but some of the things I did were odd enough to break the network. There had originally been a physically separate network where I built small pieces of strange software, and some of the other researchers used that strange software, and occasionally Bad Things happened, but were localized. We were acquired and the new corporate network IT people lobbied to maintain that physically separate network, won the argument, and promptly converted it into a virtually separate network within their corporate network.
Even after a lot of years, I remember standing in the back of a room where they were doing a presentation about a recent network failure and the speaker said, “We think Mike Cain was doing something over the weekend, and we have no idea how his packet storm got through all the firewalls and into the headquarters network.” Everyone in the room turned to look at me. It was a shame I wasn’t wearing my “Fools! I will destroy you all! (Ask me how.)” mad engineer shirt.Report
I was initially resentful (because like Bruce Banner, I’m always angry) about being made to get the cert, but I quickly discovered that I enjoyed building my own ESXi server (as my training platform) and going through all the exercises and practice tests and learning interesting and actually useful Linux things. The training was actual sys admin work, unlike most of the BS I’m required to do at work (DevOps and Agile–as my employer implements it–can suck it).
But overall…I’m glad I got it, and I’m glad it’s over.Report
Grading, and then probably hiding out in a figurative blanket fort (especially now I learned I can watch Community on Amazon Prime, including the epic blanket fort episode). This weekend is THE anniversary. I tried to read a bit of coverage of it and had to nope out because it’s too much. Most of my adult life (I was what, 32, in September 2001) has been a blur of Big Events That Are Unprecedented and also an increasing polarization and balkanization to the point where I wonder how I navigate this brave new world with whatever time I may have left.
There are things I would LIKE to do, but the intersection of things I HAVE to do and the fact that the pandemic’s still raging here and the hospital’s half closed down (lack of staff) meaning if you’re in a car wreck you’re probably dead – so I won’t be doing the things I would LIKE, not for a while.Report
Through most of covid, I’ve been watching more tv than movies. An adequate show will take up at least 22 hours; even a great movie only eats up 2. But I’ve been hitting movies harder the past few weeks.
The trick is to mix up genres. If I watch a couple of action movies in a row, they blur, but drop a romantic comedy or a documentary between them and I’m good. Ditto sub-genres. I need about two months between martial arts movies, but I can digest two general action movies a week. What’s really striking me is that different eras a practically different genres. Something terrible happened to documentaries around the turn of the century; I suspect it has something to do with reality tv. Cinematography changed about 20 years ago as well. There are still some lush movies, but for the most part there’s a YouTube style that’s dominant today.
It really seems like there’s a bigger difference between 1995 and today than between the earliest talkies and 1995. And hardly ever in a good way. Am I imagining this?Report
I want to say that the changes you’ve seen can be blamed on a single book: Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.
Granted, it came out in 2005 and not 1995, but check out the reviews.
This book hammered out The Perfect Formula and, gosh darn it, it feels like every single movie script writer since 2006 or 2007 has read it too.Report
That’s a lot of it.
It’s all about the hero’s journey, man. See, Joseph Campbell analyzed all the legends in human history and discovered the hidden formula. There’s a hero, and bad stuff happens to him, and he reacts to it, and then even worse stuff happens and he has to overcome it. Oh, and travel somewhere bad.
What’s odd to me is that I see a decline in really cheap horror movies, documentaries, and other genres that you wouldn’t expect to be affected.Report
Without delving into religion, I want to say that some of the problems are a disjoint in culture.
The movie Don’t Breathe, for example, was fairly well-received by test audiences but they overwhelmingly sided with the Unstoppable Force instead of the teenagers who had broken into his home. They had to do some reshoots to make the Unstoppable Force less sympathetic… when, a decade or two earlier, there would have been enough people in the office to have known “we’re going to have to put our thumb on the scale” without having to hear it from the test audience first.Report
New Zealand (apart from Auckland) is back to Level 2, so I’ll be going back into the office part-time from next week. Also my gaming group can start meeting again (except for one of us, who is still working weekends right now due to COVID stuff), so we’ll be getting together to play board games tomorrow.Report
Certifications in areas you already work in can be a real b-i-t-c-h. I got my CIPP/US back in the spring. Now I’ve been in-house healthcare for about 11 years, and have all kinds of practical experience dealing with privacy, and not just HIPAA/HITECH, and approaching 7 in the information technology side of it. Other than company death level breaches, I’ve dealt with it.
The problem is I have no formal training in the area other than my trusty JD and on the job experience. I also practice in jurisdictions with no CLEs, which is fine because these things are mostly BS anyway, so I don’t bother with classes.
When I was studying and doing the classes for the cert it was either stuff so easy and obvious I couldn’t believe it was being tested (though even then I often knew where to find the answer, just didn’t memorize it), or a bunch of theory on the subject I’d never heard of and struck me as contrary to how things actually work. Thankfully I passed in 1 try but I was incredibly nervous that I wouldn’t. The shame of going back and telling my colleagues I needed to do it a second time would have killed me.Report
Last weekend I broke the shear pin on the pto shaft to the Bush Hog… it has a slip clutch, so I didn’t really know you could do that.
So this weekend I replaced the drive pin. Took the machine into the woods for the pre-fall path mowing. And promptly broke the shear pin again. Which I thought would be impossible to do twice.
That means next weekend I have to do the slip clutch maintenance that no one ever does because if you break two shear pins in two weeks, you’re doin’ something wrong (like not doing the maintenance no one ever does).
Fortunately the shear pins are about $3. Taking the slip clutch apart is about two hours and 31 f***ks and probably one wrench toss.Report