In which I haven’t washed my hair since last weekend, and that’s because I’m a full-time student who takes all her classes online. From her room. Which she never leaves.

I’m taking three last classes in this, my back-to-school year. I’m sick of it. I am having a hard time dredging up any enthusiasm at all, and I actually do care about the material.

Work is better. Waaaay better. At work, something breaks and you fix it! Sometimes you have to learn stuff before you can fix it, and that’s okay. At the end of the year, you’ve learned a bunch of stuff, but you did so organically. School is a weird, artificial way of getting information from one place to another. It’s pissing me off. I want it to be over.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server Administration

This class is pretty fun, actually. Mostly the text simply gives step-by-step instructions for actually doing tasks on the server; functions and definitions are addressed in what I find to be a pretty logical and comfortable manner as needed.

I couldn’t find everything I needed to build an actual server, though, so I installed the operating system into a VM on my laptop. There are a few things it won’t do, but so far I’ve been able to work around them.

I need to learn more about sticky bits, learn default locations of various files and folders, and memorize a huge list of commands, but I think I’ll do okay in this class. Well, as long as I keep to my schedule and get everything done before finals week.

Configuring Server 2008 Network Infrastructure

This is a LabSim course, which means it’s half video lectures and half tests. It’s also on-demand, so I can study at three in the morning if I want to. Which I often do.

So far, this particular course has been review for me – cabling, topologies, subnetting – but the finals always end up being so much harder than the source material would lead me to believe that I end up taking them two or three times before I can pass them. It’s tedious and I’ve already done it so many times that the thought of doing it again makes me want to uninstall the entire program.

CCNA 4 (English) – Accessing the WAN

I hate the writing in my CCNA class so much! It’s all I can do to slog through a chapter every week. (I periodically copy a sentence or paragraph and re-write it until it actually makes sense; it’s the only way I can keep from screaming at my laptop.)

Here’s an example:

When carriers use Frame Relay to interconnect LANs, a router on each LAN is the DTE. A serial connection, such as a T1/E1 leased line, connects the router to the Frame Relay switch of the carrier at the nearest point-of-presence (POP) for the carrier. The Frame Relay switch is a DCE device. Network switches move frames from one DTE across the network and deliver frames to other DTEs by way of DCEs. Computing equipment that is not on a LAN may also send data across a Frame Relay network. The computing equipment uses a Frame Relay access device (FRAD) as the DTE. The FRAD is sometimes referred to as a Frame Relay assembler/dissembler and is a dedicated appliance or a router configured to support Frame Relay. It is located on the customer’s premises and connects to a switch port on the service provider’s network. In turn, the service provider interconnects the Frame Relay switches.

Pages and pages and pages of that crap! It’s unreadable. I have to struggle to pay attention, and I love reading. I’ll read anything. I read fucking shampoo bottles. News flash, Cisco! Inaccessibility does not equal intelligence, you elitist engineering geeks! You make a lot of routers, sure, but it’s not like you invented the fucking Internet! Good writing is transparent!

Anyway, the course is online-only, and was built entirely in Adobe fucking Flash. There are so many things wrong with the UI that I hardly know where to begin, but my personal pet peeves are the lack of font sizing (WTF, I can’t make the font bigger? are you kidding me?!) and the fact that every single goddamned window opens maximized. I HAVE A 1920 x 1200 PANEL; I DO NOT WANT MY SHIT MAXIMIZED, EVER, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

My GPA is currently 3.67 (I got two Bs last term). I will probably not go sit for my actual CCNA, because I just don’t think I care enough to cram as much as I’d need to in order to pass the stupid test. (The Cisco stuff is deliberately opaque, and if the practice tests are anything to go by I do not and will never grok the test writers’ style. Sometimes I get items wrong, not because I don’t know the material but because of their hideous, tortured syntax.)

Ah, hell. I’m freaked about June. School ends, and my unemployment ends. I have to get a job or else. I just want a nice job, that’s all. I want to do fairly interesting stuff with nice people and get money for it. I do not want office politics, or a corporate firewall, or shitty hours. I do not want minimum wage. I emailed the school district last week but didn’t get a reply, and I have no idea if that clinic gig from last year will even exist next month when I check in with them again. There’s basically no other work around; I suppose I could do consulting, but I don’t want to do virus removal and Windows installs, really, and I certainly don’t want to file a schedule C next year. What a pain in the arse.

I have the sinking feeling that, just like the last time I tried to live here, Walla Walla doesn’t have any work for me and I’m going to have to move to Portland or Seattle. Which would be cool, I guess, but lemmie tell ya: there’s no place that can beat the rent I’m paying right now!