Today was day three of RHCE training, and was absolutely grueling from start to finish. I couldn't even get out of bed until 07:30 and I was still having a rough time keeping focused on anything. For some reason my hands hurt way more than usual, perhaps from being seated in a different position or a strange keyboard. It may even be that I'm taking most of my notes in longhand. Whatever it is, it's unpleasant.

I would write these blogposts from the class, but the guy sitting next to me is what we at the office call a "tweaker." Any conversation he has an undertone something like, "you and me, we know how shit works, backward and forward, yo." Yet he's always one of the last to finish the labs, even when it seems like he's concentrating on each step. He just seems to get hung up on stuff without knowing how to reason his way through the exercise. His explanation today was that he just gets new servers out the door so quickly he doesn't have time to fool in any of this stuff.

So why don't I blog during the breaks? Because he is constantly looking over at my screen. I'm half tempted to start what looks like an e-mail and just write HEY DUDE STOP LOOKING AT MY SCREEN OKAY DUDE THANKS and leave it there, but I'm sure he'd start acting all weird after I did that.

The one saving grace is that the gal next to him that he would get all chatty with left today at 10:00. She came in late, flustered, and then answered a call to find that her system installations from the evening prior had failed and she had to go back and redo what sounded like a bunch of failed Sun Blade servers at NSA.

The instructor asked her as she was leaving if she was coming back and she said she wasn't. He seemed surprised and told her that she would be able to reschedule the RHCE exam from Friday if she wanted to, to which she replied that she wasn't really all that interested since she'd be in the Navy for the next six years and a certification wouldn't be all that important. He insisted that "you paid for it" and she could just come in Friday or schedule for another day if she wanted.

She left and I said to the guy behind me, "She didn't pay for it, I paid for it out of every paycheck last year in my payroll taxes." He laughed. Nice to see that the Navy is just forking money out to Red Hat for training and certifications that they won't even use. I know government inefficiency exists as a concept, but it still burns me up when I see it up close.

The last lab started at 16:50 and was four pages of working with DNS, so I set up a reverse tunnel back to the house to SSH into the box later tonight and left at 17:00. Instead of going straight home we shopped around for a hammock for the backyard and by the time I opened up the laptop around 21:30 the tunnel had disappeared for one reason or another. I guess I'll just go in early tomorrow and finish it before class. It's remedial stuff, but I don't mind testing my knowledge against their written exercises since they're likely to be quite similar to the exam on Friday. Practice makes certified.

Suzy and I enjoyed listening to Wil Wheaton's podcast set in the car on the way to and from UMBC today, I'll probably post a link later this week to it and the other podcasts that have kept me sane during the labs and extra-long commute the last few days.

No Comments | #5544

Unless noted, all content on epistolary.org is © Copyright 1999-2008 to Rob Carlson with all rights reserved. All information is verified when possible, cited as appropriate and applied in the real world at your own risk. Send all feedback to rob@vees.net.