Apparently, about 2 weeks

The title being, of course, the answer to the question I posed yesterday. My AWOL Systems Analysis instructor sent an email to the class this afternoon to let us know that he has finally posted our "week 3" assignment, acknowledging that it's really week 4 of the semester so he's running a week behind.

But that's OK, you see, because "most of you have not completed the week two assignment yet". Excuse me? I completed the week two assignment three days after it was posted. Maybe if you set a due date, students would feel a slightly greater since of urgency?

Adding insult to injury, we were then admonished that "it would be a good idea not to get too far behind" (!). Yeah, I'll keep that in mind. Just as soon as I figure out how to stay up-to-date on assignments that haven't been posted yet.

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How long do you wait for the prof to show up?

Remember when you were in college and there were these unofficial "rules" about how long students were expected to wait if the prof didn't show up for a class? At my school, I think it was rumored to be 10 minutes for an instructor or TA, 15 for an assistant prof, and 20 for a full prof (it was never stated just how you were supposed to know the professor's rank). But what do you do when the instructor for an online course seems to be AWOL?

Since I started taking classes at the community college four years ago, I've run the gamut of instructor contact, from on-campus class meetings each week, to hybrid classes (partly online but with classroom sessions every other week), to completely online classes with no classroom sessions at all. But even the online classes had the instructor posting, on a regular weekly timetable, assignments with due dates (usually due a week later), additional material beyond the textbook, and grades for completed assignments (often with comments).

That's why I'm somewhat mystified by my experience so far with the online Systems Analysis & Design course I'm taking this semester. Classes started Thursday, August 20, and the instructor posted the syllabus and the first assignment (read Chapter 1, answer a trivial exercise from the book matching Important Terms from the chapter to their Important Definitions, and post an Introductory Message on the discussion board so we could all Get to Know Each Other). There was no due date listed for this assignment.

I emailed the instructor and asked (a) whether assignments would be posted on Thursday each week, and (b) when the assignments were due? He replied that probably he'd be posting assignments on Mondays. He didn't say when the assignments were due.

OK, so I completed and submitted my assignment and dutifully posted my Introductory Message. The next assignment was posted on Monday August 31. (Astute readers will note this was a full 11 days after the first assignment.) Another chapter, another matching exercise, plus a series of newspaper articles about a school system's woes with a poorly designed and implemented class scheduling system and an assignment to comment on various aspects of that debacle. Again, no due date. Again, I completed and submitted the assignments.

And that, my friends, is the last contact I have had with the instructor. I have checked the online course interface (a system called Blackboard) every day. No new assignments, no announcements that the course has been cancelled, no grades posted for completed work, no emails saying he's running a little behind, or his computer crashed, or he went on vacation and got stranded on the tarmac in some obscure airport. Nada. Now, I wasn't really surprised that nothing was posted on Monday last week, seeing as how it was a holiday, but I did expect a new assignment to show up on Tuesday, at least. I've never heard of an instructor blowing off a whole week just because Monday was a holiday, though I suppose it's possible.

I'll wait and check Blackboard again tomorrow night. If there's still no sign of any new assignment activity, I guess I'm going to have to email this guy and ask what's going on. I'm fine with working on my own – that's why I take online courses, after all – but there's a limit to just how much "on my own" I want to be when I'm paying over $300 in tuition and fees for a class. The college website says:

Online classes offer rich opportunities for individual participation and for collaboration in active learning activities that contribute to long-term learning and understanding.

But I think that presupposes that the instructor is going to participate, too.

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Hitting the books

Well, it's that time of year again. Classes start today at the local community college and, glutton for punishment that I am, I have once again registered to add another entry to my transcript.

I've been taking in-classroom courses (mostly so-called "hybrid" classes that meet every other week and you submit assignments online in the off weeks), like web server administration and ASP.NET, for the past few semesters. But I decided to take a break from that and sign up for a strictly online class this time – something I haven't done for at least a couple of years. It's not even a programming class; I opted for Systems Analysis and Design, partly because I've already been doing some rudimentary analysis and design in my job (which is supposed to be that of a technical writer) and figured I might want to get a bit of formal book-larnin' to back it up.

For the first time since I started my current job, I'll be eligible for tuition reimbursement from my employer (because I'll have been on the payroll for over a year by the time I complete the course). So that'll be nice, to have someone else pick up the tab for a change. Sadly, they won't pay for books; the text for this class was an outrageous $134, even with Amazon's textbook pricing. But at least that will be my only cost, assuming I get an A (a B gets only 50% reimbursement, anything less and they won't pay). Not that I'm worried about that, as I have a straight 4.0 in my community college courses so far.

And of course, with no actual classes to attend, I'll burn no gasoline getting there... and even more important, won't be getting into any expensive fender-benders on my way to class, like I did a year ago.

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Continuing education (cont.)

The PL/SQL course I took in the fall finished up in December, and I did indeed opt to take another course from the same instructor this term. It's not the one I was originally thinking about (which I think was database administration) -- this is another hybrid course that meets only every other week, Server-Side Programming using PHP and MySQL. Of course, if I were clairvoyant I could have registerd for two or three courses this term, as it appears I will have loads of unanticipated free time (i.e., time that I don't get paid for, which is currently all of it). On the other hand, tuition costs money, which is not something I'll have loads of.

One of the nice things about this course is that the textbook for it isn't really a textbook; it's one of the Peachpit Press "Visual QuickPro Guide" series of computer books. That means that it does not cost $75-$100 like a real textbook does. It's a much more manageable $40 list, and Amazon, bless its little heart, had it for 40% off. Astute (and mathematically inclined) readers will have figured out that that's only $24, a real bargain for a "textbook" these days. And the software is all open source and free.

And if that's not enough, I should note that the software even runs on my beloved Mac. No wrestling with Windows this time around. What's not to love? (Well, the videos the instructor posts as supplemental material to the in-class lectures run only in Windows, but I tend to ignore them anyway, as they rarely cover anything I can't get out of the book.)

Maybe, with any luck, all these classes I've been taking will be a plus on my resume. I'm going to need all the pluses I can get.

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SQL: The Sequel

Two years ago, just after I started my current job, I was taking two courses at the local community college. The online course in SQL was pretty decent, but I hadn't gotten around to taking the followup course, PL/SQL, what with skipping a semester, taking the two VB.NET courses, and not wanting more than one course a semester after that first double-header.

So this fall I waffled about taking a course until the very last day to add, and naturally that meant that my first, second, and third choices were all closed. But then there was PL/SQL. It wasn't a strictly online section, rather what they call a hybrid course with some classroom meetings and some online resources. But it was at the VB campus, taught by the same instructor as the SQL course I took, and only met every other week. More important, it was still open. So I clicked my way through registration, ponied up the $300+ in tuition and fees, and the next evening stopped by the bookstore and increased the balance on my long-suffering credit card by another 75 bucks or so before heading to the first class.

It's actually not been too bad with classes only every other week. The instructor is the only one I've had here who seems to actually know what she's doing, and is a real stitch in class, albeit a bit quirky: she tends to refer to the software as "he" (as in, "When you call the procedure, he plugs the parameters into the variables..."), and is apparently convinced that Boolean is pronounced "Bo-leen". But I guess as long as she knows what Boolean means, I don't really care what she calls it.

Got back the first exam last night. Though it was nominally a 100-point exam, it actually added up to 105, so a little bonus was available, plus she threw in a few extra points when someone did a bit more on a problem than she was expecting. I got 3 of those extra points but then managed to blow one problem (brain fart more than anything else) and lost 7 out of 12 on that. Astute readers will deduce that I ended up with 101. Not bad considering that so far I've gotten full points on the first 5 homework assignments, too.

I might even take another course from her in the spring. Unfortunately it will meet every week, but I can probably stand that if it's the only course I'm taking.

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Gut course

Back in late January, I noted that I had just completed the first of ten programming assignments for my VB.NET II course. Monday night, 10 weeks or so later, I finished the last one -- or, to be more precise, the one after the last one; we got an optional Extra Credit problem worth 2 points (the normal assignments are worth 6 each) that I figured I might as well do.

With the ten regular assignments worth a total of 60 points, and the first exam worth 20, I now have a total of 83.7 points out of 80. See, two of the 6-point assignments each had a possible bonus point, which I scored. Sadly, I got docked 0.3 points on one of the early assignments because the instructor claimed that one of the buttons on the form "served no purpose". Which wasn't true; it actually provided a useful feature that made the app work better than the problem (which as written made little sense) called for, which I tried to explain, but evidently I wasn't supposed to innovate: I was supposed to cough up a solution that did exactly what the problem said, no less and certainly no more. Since my rationale fell on deaf ears, I decided 0.3 points wasn't worth getting exercised over (even if it was 5% of the grade on that assignment).

So now there's just one 20-point, 40-question test to go before school's out. With my extra credit points, I could get 7 questions wrong and still have a total of 100.2 points for a 100-point course. Or even get 27 of 40 questions wrong and still get an A!

Still, I'm hoping to end up with a final score of 103.7 out of 100. Even though the school doesn't give A+ grades, maybe it will make the instructor feel just a bit petty over nicking me for three tenths of a point for being creative.

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For whom the ball rolls

So, last night my employer hosted a bowling party for us at the local lanes. And unlike the last time I was invited to a company-sponsored bowling party (i.e., what proved to be the last corporate shindig at The Company), this time my carpal tunnel wasn't encased in a brace. So I actually put on a pair of those funny-looking shoes and spent a couple of hours heaving an 8-pound ball in the general direction of a set of pins that were not nearly as cooperative as those pictured here. (I'd have gone for an even lighter ball if there had been one with holes big enough not to threaten to get stuck on my fingers and drag me down the lane too. Though I might've had a better chance of knocking the pins down if it had.)

I can't remember how long it's been since I last went bowling -- has to be at least 20 years -- but I'm pretty darned sure we were still keeping score on paper. (Live pinboys had, however, been replaced by automatic pinsetters.) Good job that it's all computerized now, because my aging brain cells have long since purged the memory of how to score spares and strikes. Not that scoring strikes would have been an issue for me, you understand; I'm not sure that I've ever gotten one in my excessively sporadic bowling experience, and I sure as heck didn't get one last night. To the astonishment of all (especially me), I did, however, manage three spares, with which I was quite content. In fact, the last spare would have been a strike had it only been my first ball of the frame instead of the followup to a resounding gutter ball. Timing is everything.

Speaking of gutter balls, I have to say that -- as welcome as automated scoring may be -- the concomitant cartoon displays to celebrate STRIKE!s and SPARE!s and, yes, GUTTER BALL!s get a bit tiresome after the fourth or fifth or thirtieth time they play. Especially the GUTTER BALL! announcements. I mean, c'mon, I know I just rolled a gutter ball. OK, two gutter balls in one frame. I don't need to have it advertised in technicolor for the entire clientele of the lanes to see. And as for the helpful little "sparefinder" displays after each first-ball-of-the-frame, pointing out where you should throw the ball to pick up that spare... well, shoot, even as rotten a bowler as I can deduce that I should aim at the single remaining pin rather than throwing it down the gutter. Duh. Of course, if I was actually capable of deliberately aiming the ball (instead of heaving it in the general direction), I'd be getting strikes instead gutter balls.

But all kidding aside, I had a blast. For some reason, bowling is the only physical activity that I actually enjoy despite my utterly wretched performance at the game. This goes all the way back to my freshman year in college (contrary to popular belief, bowling was not done with small round boulders even that long ago), when I managed to snag a spot in a bowling/badminton section (you got seven weeks of each) for one of my two semesters of mandatory physical education. The university couldn't boast ten-pin lanes, but they did have a nice set of candlepin lanes in the student union. If you're not familiar with candlepins (they seem to be peculiar to New England and the Canadian maritimes), they use these more or less cylindrical pins and a quite small ball (no finger holes -- you just hold it in your hand), with three balls per frame. I had a great time even though I ended up at the bottom of the class in terms of my cumulative score. And inexplicably, I got an A in bowling (the instructor said it was because I improved more than anyone else), which was a good thing because I flunked badminton, so I still got a C for the term and didn't have to suffer through another semester of PE.

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Basic training

So, school's in session. My Blackboard account became available on Wednesday, not long after my community college email was reactivated. I blew the dust off my Visual Basic textbook from the first course -- they use the same text for both VB.NET I and II -- only to discover that the book is now in its 3rd edition, making my 2nd edition technically obsolete.

But... the instructor says I can probably get by with the older edition, though I'm going to need to go to a class session and compare my text to his to note page number changes and any other potential problems. Considering that he posts PowerPoint presentations online that appear to be part of the auxiliary instructor's materials for the textbook, I think I can manage. It's certainly worth the extra trouble if I can avoid buying another $90+ textbook. They're using Visual Studio 2005 now instead of 2003, but I already got the upgrade last year, so no problem there.

And tonight I sat down and did the first programming problem without even reading the chapter assignment. Only nine more assignments and two multiple-guess tests to go...

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Jumping back into the .net

Last April, after completing a course in Visual Basic.NET, I speculated here whether I should take VB.NET II in the fall. Well, as it happened, it wasn't offered in the fall, relieving me of the necessity of deciding.

It was, however, on the course roster for spring 2007. In an online version. And so, after waffling for the last two weeks, tonight -- the last day to add a course -- I bit the proverbial bullet and enrolled.

I must be mad. I'm already a week behind and I can't get to the course documents online because it takes time for the "Blackboard" software to recognize the registration. Guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend: hittin' the books again.

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School's out for summer!

I just took the second and last exam for the online VisualBasic.NET course I've been taking this semester. So that's finished. Done. Finis.

I'll be getting an A, because I have a total of 98 out of the 100 possible points for the entire course. Not that it was a great feat; the assignments for this course were pretty pathetic. Oh, I did drop 1 point on an assignment (most of them were worth 6 points) mid-course; a minor feature in the program wasn't working quite right and I said to hell with it and submitted it anyway because it was due and I didn't have any more time to screw around with it. The other point I lost on today's test by getting two out of 40 multiple-choice and T/F questions wrong. (I could have gotten 18 of them wrong and still gotten an A.) **Shrug** One of them was worded ambiguously and I knew it was a crapshoot whether I got it right or not. The other one, IMNSHO, was scored incorrectly. My answer was correct, dammit. But it's hardly worth bitching about to get a 98.5 instead of a 98.

Will I take VB.NET II next fall? Dunno. On the one hand, this course only got mildly interesting in the very last chapter it covered. Arguably, that means the next course might actually be worthwhile now that the (very) basics are out of the way. On the other hand, I could just go ahead and work through the rest of the book (it's used for both courses) myself and learn anything there is to be learned there, and save the $300 tuition. On the gripping hand (5 points if you got that reference), self-study doesn't confer any visible credentials, which is why I started taking courses in the first place.

Thankfully, however, the bloody course isn't offered this summer, so I don't have to feel guilty for not furthering my education just yet.

School's ... out ... forever!

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It's official: I'm certifiable.

...but you knew that already, didn't you?

To be more precise, last week I passed my CIW v5 Foundations Certification test, and can now list on my resume that I am a CIW Associate. God forbid I should require an updated resume any time soon. Or any time later, for that matter.

You may ask: What is CIW v5 Foundations Certification? I'll tell you (in CIW's own words, emphasis added):

The CIW Foundations series of courses prepares students to take the high-stakes CIW Foundations certification exam. Those who pass the CIW Foundations exam earn the highly respected CIW Associate certification, which has been designed to bridge the gap between the subjects taught in schools and the skills required by industry for entry-level IT jobs. The CIW Associate certification proves that an individual has evolved from being an Internet consumer to an Internet producer. A CIW Associate can use common Internet-ready applications, can create properly formed HTML/XHTML documents, knows CGI and database essentials, and can troubleshoot networks.

So there you have it. Apparently, I have evolved. Who knew? For some reason this reminds me disconcertingly of the Star Trek: Voyager episode where Tom Paris and Capt. Janeway mutate into amphibians. Or maybe the Next Gen episode where the crew devolved into spiders, iguanas, and other primitive critters.

I can hardly wait for my CIW Associate certificate to arrive in the mail, so I can frame it and put it on the wall next to my Hazardous Waste Management Training certificate.

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Shaky Foundations

Thank God the semester is almost over. The introductory SQL class I'm taking online has been OK (fortunately the due dates of the homework assignments are mostly flexible), but the classroom based course is driving me up a wall. Nominally titled "Introduction to Telecommunications", it encompasses two of the three modules for the CIW Foundations certification test. Supposedly meets from 6:30 to 10 PM on Thursday nights. Except that until the last couple weeks, we never ran even close to 10 PM. Not that that's a bad thing.

First part of the course was Internet Business Foundations. I have seldom been so bored in my life, and that's saying a lot. We're talking about an extremely shallow overview here, with the instructor basically going over the textbook hitting the high points (which aren't very high) and adding essentially nothing. Lesson 2, for example, was about Web browsers. We carried out several "lab" exercises, meaning we downloaded and installed Netscape, Firefox, and Opera on our classroom computers and navigated to assorted web pages. Lesson 4 was an overview of databases and search engines. Learn how to use Google! Woo-hoo! All eight lessons in the first book were about on that level. One week we signed up for Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts.

Each week we had a 5-question multiple-guess quiz on the previous week's lesson. Dead easy questions, except for the occasional "date" questions. (Like which year all mainstream browsers got frames capabilities. Who gives a crap?) And the sporadic "homework" assignments were mostly trivial, irrelevant busywork. One of the assignments was to outline the last book chapter, which was an overview of project management. Another was to download four images of trees from Google Images and email them to the instructor. (Thus demonstrating we knew how to use those email accounts we established.)

Over the course of ten weeks, we had two classes cancelled, and eventually got through the eight chapters. Now, those of you who are familiar with college schedules will immediately realize that's well over half the semester spent on the "easy" module; at that point, there were four classes left. The second module is Network Technology Foundations, and while the book has only five chapters, it has about the same page count as the first one. Lesson 1 is a blockbuster on Introduction to Networking, with more acronyms than you can shake a cable modem at, like NOC, OSI/RM, CRC, NFS, UDP, NetBEUI, CSMA/CD, NICs, LANs, WANs, WAPs, WEP... and I know bloody well the tests are going to be littered with them.

I'm sitting in class right now, listening with less than half an ear (with rare exceptions, it's all in the book), and halfway through tonight's class, we have finally started Lesson 2 (TCP/IP) -- after spending two and a half weeks on Lesson 1!

Did I mention that the instructor's specialty is networking? That he teaches a whole friggin' course on networking? Mm-hmm.

Astute readers may by now have calculated that we have one and a half classes left to cover Lessons 2 through 5. Houston, we have a problem. So of course, now the instructor is keeping us till 10 because he's so far behind. There's a slide on the screen labelled "Demultiplexing." My eyes are glazing over.

I had forgotten just how much I hate sitting in a classroom. And the hell of it is, the spring semester course schedules list an online section of this same course. This fall, there were no online sections; if there had been, I'd have been in it. Would that I had waited. **sigh**

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School days, school days...

Well, OK, school evenings. And what do you call online-at-any-time classes? Classes began last Thursday (the 18th) at the community college, and with my one on-campus course meeting Thursday evenings, that means I have now attended two sessions. The course is called Introduction to Telecommunications in the catalog, but the instructor says that's wrong because the course has been totally restructured. The course info sheet says that it is two parts of a "three-course series" called CIW Foundations (it's supposed to prepare you to take the CIW certification exams), part 1 being Internet Business Foundations and part 2 being Network Technology Foundations. Interestingly enough (OK, it's actually fairly uninteresting, but bear with me), those titles also happen to be the exact titles of the textbooks.

Although ostensibly running from 6:30 to 10:00 pm, the first class lasted only an hour (with the instructor basically reading the course information sheet to us), and last night's was just a bit over two hours. Thank God. Our assignment had been to read the first chapter in the book, which I dutifully did; mind-numbingly boring, it damned near put me to sleep when I read it, and it didn't get any better when Mr. Instructor went over it in class. I can't quite imagine how one could spend three and a half hours on this material. According to the book, by the end of lesson 1 I should be able to:

• Define IT job roles. (Broken down into such job titles as web designer, web application developer, web architect, web site analyst, web site manager, and more. Of course, at most companies one person probably wears half or more of these hats.)
  
• Define networks.
• Define the Internet. (This is important. The book devotes almost a whole page to "How the Internet works.")
  
• Identify Internet connection methods. (Yep, according to my field guide, that there's a cat 5 cable...)
  
• Define Internet protocols.
• Define the Domain Name System.

Just listing these almost puts me to sleep. This boils down largely to a ton of acronyms. I think Mr. Instructor really gets a kick out of reeling off the words that each acronym stands for, and somehow I expect that the quiz he promised us next week is going to lean heavily on said acronyms. Personally, I feel that it's fairly irrelevant exactly what ISDN or WAN or TCP/IP or ICANN stands for; what's important is knowing whether, for example, ISDN is a network, a connection method, or a protocol, and what its distinguishing characteristics are. I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my time memorizing acronyms for the sake of memorizing acronyms. But that's just me.

I can hardly wait till we get to try some of the "lab" exercises. Why, in lesson 1 alone, you get to insert an image in a web page, "conduct a basic web site analysis" (translation: look at a spreadsheet of statistics from a fictional website, note the large number of 404 page not found errors, and deduce that someone needs to fix some links), and connect to servers and web pages using domain names, IP addresses, and the ftp protocol. What fun! Did I mention that I was a webmaster for almost four years?

Stay tuned for lesson 2: it's an in-depth look at... web browsing! Gads, I wish there was a challenge test for this class.

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Not so much of a challenge

About a month ago I mentioned that I would be going back to school this fall to pick up some web development skills, the lack of which appeared to be contibuting to my difficulty in finding a job. Well, wouldn't you just know it, no sooner had I enrolled in the web development program at the local community college, that I got, and accepted, my first job offer. Obviously, I should have applied to the college months ago -- say, for the summer session -- in order to have triggered a job offer that much earlier.

No matter. Once I accepted the job, the question became whether to go ahead with the three courses I had registered for, or forget the whole thing. In the end, I compromised, cancelling one of the courses but keeping the other two on my schedule. One (SQL) is an online course, leaving me with one evening a week that I actually have to show up on campus for the other course (Intro to Telecommunications, or something like that). My tuition is paid, though I don't have my books yet; when I last was able to check the bookstore, only one of three or four required texts was in stock. Now that I've started working, it'll probably be easier to buy them online anyway.

The last task to check off my list before classes begin was taking "challenge" tests. TCC requires all students to pass Basic Computer Literacy, plus there are four so-called "core courses" in the IST department that I have to pass. (That's assuming I ever actually take enough courses to get a certificate.) Fortunately, there are "challenge" tests offered for all of these, i.e., if you can pass the test with 70% or better, you get pass/fail credit. And as I said before, if I can't test out of Basic Computer Literacy, I'd better find a different career. So I signed up for two challenge tests (you only get two hours no matter how many you sign up for, meaning in practical terms that two is the most you can do in one session because they actually take about 40-45 minutes if you know what you're doing), and took them this morning. Each consisted of 100 multiple choice questions.

I shall not keep you in suspense any longer: I passed both of them (as you might have divined from the title of this entry), thus earning 8 credits without paying $612 tuition, plus books.

The first was Basic Computer Literacy, where I scored 95 out of 100. I don't know specifically which 5 questions I missed, but most likely they were in the section on databases (for example, I haven't a clue what a dynaset might be). There were also a couple of questions that IMHO were poorly written and ambiguous, so I may have guessed wrong at what they were driving at, and one that was beyond ambiguous -- it had no correct answer listed (and there was no "none of the above" choice). It was all heavily Windows-centric, so I guess it was fortunate I started my new job, where they use Windows machines, this week; I got in five days of practice in navigating around Windows Explorer.

The second test was Introduction to Network Services. Only got 88 on that one, but that's well more than enough to pass. My major problem was not knowing what some of the acronyms mean (like TLD and NAT). Certainly the bulk of the questions were fairly trivial (e.g., what punctuation mark separates the user name from the host name in an email address).

I believe I was the only one there who took two challenge tests, and there were still a couple of people left when I finished. I hope they were taking one of the other tests, because if Basic Computer Literacy was taking them almost two hours, they've got a real problem.

Now I just have to sign up for the next testing session so I can knock off Intro Software Design and Intro Windows XP. The final core course is PC Hardware and Troubleshooting, which includes a "hands-on" component. I'll probably want to investigate the scope of that course before attempting the test.

Classes start August 18th! Now to go shopping for my new box of Crayolas.

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Not just a bad dream

Recently several bloggers have described their versions of the ubiquitous recurrent "school" dreams -- you know, the ones where you're late for a class and can't find the classroom, or you're taking an exam that you didn't study for, or worse, haven't even been attending the class. The ones that keep coming back to haunt you years after you graduated.

Well, it appears that I'm going to be hitting the books again, some 32 years after my last full-time enrollment. After fruitlessly applying for numerous web jobs (and not applying for many more, because too many of the requirements were conspicuously absent from my resume), it has become painfully obvious that my web skills need some updating. OK, a lot of updating. And since prospective employers don't seem to buy the premise that I can pick up on the fly whatever apps or programming skills I need for their job, I'm resorting to so-called formal education, at the local community college.

I've just submitted my application online. Next step is to figure out a course schedule, with as many online and evening/weekend courses as possible; knowing how these things go, it'll be my luck that I'll actually find a job the day after it's too late to withdraw from classes and get a tuition refund, and I can't afford to turn down a job because it conflicts with my classes. I also have to see about taking "challenge" exams to get credit for some of the basic courses. I mean, really, if I can't test out of Basic Computer Literacy, I'd better forget the whole thing.

If this doesn't trigger some of those didn't-study-for-the-exam dreams, I'll be damned surprised.

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