Getting An Education

 

Java Enterprise Developer

That's what they call my new certificate program. Takes 6 courses. I'm taking 4 at once and challenging the other two. Plan to finish the whole thing up by end of December. Registering two days after registration closed was just the start of the fun...

I looked around for textbooks based on last years course information. I made several command decisions to purchase newer iterations of the recommended texts. As it turns out, the courses are using the newer texts, but the bookstore isn't stocking some of them (apparently they don't think one of the courses has a text....). I also got 4 texts in eBook form. Unfortunately, two of them I can't get onto my Android Phone & Tablet because they are in a Secure PDF format. I could get the Secure ePubs, but not these others and I've so far had 3 unsatisfying interactions with Kobo tech support to try to find a solution.

Then there is the matter of getting computers set up. My newest one is out on loan and has been for a time. It should come back next week. I'm using a little Linux box (Atom, 4 Gb RAM, 60 Gb solid state drive, 1 working USB port) as my computer. My main desktop is down with some sort of hardware issue, but whether the crashes are memory, motherboard/cpu, gpu, or hard disk is hard to know. Could even be the power supply. My netbook died last fall and was not repairable. My older laptop lost its network port last fall. My spare (older) development box is now old enough that loading modern web pages causes it to hang up. Somewhere, I need a couple of computers with appropriate software setups.

Being online courses, there is a whole new package of fancy eLearning stufff to absorb. They use a large enterprise web app called blackboard and this integrates forum, real-time chat, email, statis web presentation of lab/course materials, contact info, calendars, homework submission, etc. And then there's all the course material and textbooks for 4 courses.

By sometime next week, hopefully most of the environment needed to get on with things will be present.

I am really looking forward to these courses.