School isn’t the only thing keeping me busy. I’ll be a daddy come June, which has been eating into my time. Trip after trip after trip to Farrah’s OB and Babies “R” Us. This poor kid is going to be sooo spoiled. 
You can see a couple of ultrasound pix on my Posterous page ( http://d3bruts1d.posterous.com/ ).
I’m a terrible blogger. Not because most of my post are boring, but because I simply haven’t really had time to do any posting. Good thing it doesn’t need food, cause I’d have killed it already.
Here is an update on school. In an effort to get everything over with early, I had doubled up on a few classes. Last month it was C# and US History I and now I’m in VB.Net and Math. The math class and programming classes have been pretty easy, but the history class was a beast. The instructor insisted on writing a ton of essays. I hate writing about something I’m not passionate about. Thankfully, that is over for now. History II will be coming up next semester; I hope I get a different instructor.
Just a few more weeks of VB.Net and I’ll have my first degree.
In what feels like forever ago, my 2nd semester ended on Dec. 16. The semester consisted of ASP.net I & II, XML Web Services, and SQL. The XML class was interesting as it was the first time that I had actually played with XSLT. The rest I had done before, so it was another easy semester which ended with a 4.0 GPA.
In November I successfully completed the two required exams to earn the Oracle Certified Professional, MySQL 5.0 Developer. And continuing along, I’m in the process of studying for the companion, Oracle Certified Professional, MySQL 5.0 Database Administrator exams. I have already passed one, and hope to take the next exam in the coming week. After that, I will most likely move on to the Oracle 10g Database certifications.
On Monday, Jan. 3rd, I began my third and final semester for the Associate’s Degree program. The next four months will consist of Java, Visual C#, and Visual Basic .NET. If those 15 credit hours weren’t enough, I’m taking 8 additional hours (23 credit hours total) of general education. Yup, it’s going to be a busy, busy semester.
Why the extra hours? The 8 hours that I am taking will allow me to skip a complete semester in the Bachelor’s program. By the time I earn my Bachelor’s degree, I will have skipped two entire semesters… that’s eight months of less school, or to put it another way I will have my 4 year degree in 2 years.
On Monday I passed what should be my final CompTIA certification test for a long time. If you’ve been following any of my previous posts, you can probably guess that it was the Server+ certification this time around. It’s a fairly easy test, assuming you have any of the other relevant CompTIA certifcations (A+, Security+, Network+). The test I took was the 2009 version, the 2005 version is also still available. This provided a bit of a challenge, as the only study material I could find for the Server+ test was related to the 2005 version. Not sure why there was no material available. Oh well…
I wanted to make a separate post today to talk a moment about the CompTIA Linux+ certification. I found out this morning that successfully passing the Linux+ certification qualifies for not one, not two, but THREE certifications.
Of course, by passing the two tests you earn the Linux+ certification. As I mentioned last month, the new test was developed in a partnership with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI), which therefore grants you the Junior Level Linux Professional (LPIC-1) Certification.
What I did not know, until this morning was, LPI has in turn partnered with Novell. With the LPIC-1 certification, you can fill out a form on Novell’s website and earn the Novell Certified Linux Administrator (CLA).
You and your employer may have never heard of the Linux Professional Institute, but everyone knows Novell and CompTIA. Having those two on your resume is a nice touch and a third certification makes it look even better. The fact that you only have to pay for 2 exams simply kicks ass.
For more information, read the info at the LPI website.