'Til All Are One

Net­work+ is now mine! Mwahahahahaha!

*ahem*

The day after I com­pleted the A+ Hard­ware exam (Fri­day 1 April), I dove into the Net­work+ mater­ial. I’m now glad that I did the A+ mod­ules out of order. Net­work+ builds upon the net­work­ing por­tions of both mod­ules, but derives more from the Hard­ware sec­tion. Mak­ing the trans­ition from A+ Hard­ware to Net­work+ was easy.

By now I was quite accus­tomed to the CompTIA cer­ti­fic­a­tion style, so I planned to fin­ish rel­at­ively quickly. Com­puter Power alloc­ated four weeks to com­plete the cer­ti­fic­a­tion; I thought I should bump it off in two. I spent the first day dili­gently read­ing the first of two books they had given us (con­tain­ing over 600 pages in all). On the second day (the fol­low­ing Monday; I don’t study much on week­ends), a couple of friends gave me some extra mater­ial, includ­ing exam ques­tions and what amoun­ted to be an entire prin­tout of a book. There must have been close to a thou­sand pages in all (think of the trees!). I’m not sure how much of it they got through, but I cer­tainly wasn’t going to read it all. It’d drive me bonkers. I extrac­ted a small sliver (by com­par­ison) from the stack, which amoun­ted to about 360 exam ques­tions and some exam­in­a­tion cram notes. I decided to cast aside my book (which I had barely den­ted) and focus on those.

I spent that week going over that mater­ial: doing prac­tice ques­tions and tak­ing notes on the stuff that I didn’t know. Then dis­aster struck — I got sick over the week­end (I think it was influ­enza). My plans of doing the exam by the middle of the fol­low­ing week had to be thrown out the win­dow. One of the great things about Com­puter Power is that there are no classes and all learn­ing is self-​​paced. I was able to take some days off to reco­oper­ate, while still access­ing all my files (notes, etc.) over the Inter­net. I ended up doing next-​​to-​​nil study, though. I can never con­cen­trate at home.

After tak­ing Monday, Tues­day and Wed­nes­day off, I spent all of Thursday at a Per­sonal Effect­ive­ness work­shop which had been sched­uled for me prior. Although still some­what ill, I learnt a lot. I’m glad I went. Fri­day was the only day that week in which I did any real study.

By that point I had grown bored with the sub­ject mat­ter. I was going over the same ground over and over, and I felt no chal­lenge. Want­ing to get the sub­ject over and done with, I booked the exam for the next morn­ing. I’d gladly give up a Sat­urday if I could start the fol­low­ing week afresh. I was still ill, but by then I was over the worst of it and I didn’t care much any­more. Marks don’t mat­ter in CompTIA exams. They give a prin­tout at the end list­ing your score, but the actual cer­ti­fic­ate doesn’t say any­thing. All I was con­cerned about was the required 72% mark to pass, and the $400 fee I would incur if I failed.

I sat down in the exam­in­a­tion chair the fol­low­ing morn­ing. I felt a little fatigued, bleary-​​eyed and stuffy (sinuses and nose). The drugs didn’t seem to be work­ing effect­ively. At times I lost con­cen­tra­tion and I may have even dozed off a little. The CompTIA exams I’ve done alloc­ate far too much time for the volume and type of ques­tions posed, and Net­work+ is no excep­tion. Des­pite my ail­ments, I had enough time to care­fully com­plete every ques­tion and go over them after­wards. I exited the exam with twenty minutes left.

Less than a minute later I had my mark: 833 out of 900. Phwoar! That’s about 93%! I made some dumb errors which I prob­ably wouldn’t have made had I been fully alert, but I’m very happy with the res­ult non­ethe­less. Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I only put in seven days of proper study (recom­men­ded time is thirty) and that I was ill for almost the entire time (includ­ing dur­ing the exam itself).

I must nom­in­ate Hotel Rwanda as my Movie of the Year. I know that it was offi­cially released last year, but it only came to Aus­tralia this year. I rank it right up there with two of my other favour­ite movies, The Killing Fields and Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fire­flies).

These movies deal with incred­ibly dis­turb­ing sub­ject mat­ter: the effects of war on a civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Each movie took its own approach to the topic, but they all mas­ter­fully cap­tured the des­pair and suf­fer­ing that people go through. What I also like about these films is that they have dealt with incid­ents which were either ignored or for­got­ten by people in other coun­tries. Hotel Rwanda cov­ers the Rwandan gen­o­cide of 1994, The Killing Fields is set in the Khmer Rouge dom­in­ated Cam­bodia of the 1970s, and Grave of the Fire­flies is about Japan dur­ing World War II.

Hotel Rwanda and The Killing Fields both deal with civil war. Who cares about that? After all, it’s not in my back­yard. Most of the coun­tries in Africa are in some sort of war, yet the West cur­rently seems more con­cerned with Pope John Paul II’s funeral or Prince Charles’s wed­ding. In the case of Cam­bodia, Viet­nam (with dip­lo­matic sup­port from the USSR) turned out to be the Good Guys (fun­nily enough), invad­ing the coun­try and depos­ing the Khmer Rouge with pop­u­lar sup­port (des­pite their mis­giv­ings about the Viet­namese). The USA, Thai­l­and and China act­ively worked to sup­port the Khmer Rouge. Did we hear about any of this on tele­vi­sion? Is it in any school his­tory books? Nope, it’s as (self) cen­sored as the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion of Korea is in Japan.

The Rwandan gen­o­cide was yet another shame­ful event in world his­tory. The United Nations and eco­nom­ic­ally developed coun­tries had the power to inter­vene and halt the blood­shed, yet they didn’t. The US had been in Somalia only a couple of years prior, but I guess Rwanda wasn’t import­ant since it it didn’t lie on any major ship­ping lanes. The UN itself, France and other coun­tries also deserve much of the blame.

Grave of the Fire­flies is some­what dif­fer­ent, yet the same. Firstly, it is anim­ated. This is no children’s movie, how­ever, even if the two prot­ag­on­ists are chil­dren. I don’t think more impact could have been achieved if it were a live action film. Grave of the Fire­flies cov­ers yet another ignored event in world his­tory: the effects of World War II on the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion. It is nat­ural to ignore the aggressors (or even applaud their suf­fer­ing), par­tic­u­larly ones as bru­tal as the Japan­ese in WWII, but it is import­ant to remem­ber that they are just as human as every­one else. Many Ger­mans con­sider the Allied fire­bomb­ing of Dresden as a war crime, but did you know that the fire­bomb­ing of Tokyo caused more dam­age and loss of life than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Naga­saki (which BTW were dropped on non-​​industrial res­id­en­tial areas)? I won’t get into the debate over whether such attacks were truly neces­sary (it was a war, after all), but we shouldn’t for­get the human suf­fer­ing which took place as a res­ult, regard­less of whom it is.

I am now CompTIA A+ cer­ti­fied! Not that this is much to brag about. It is mostly rote-​​learning and is heav­ily Windows-​​focused. In fact, a major part of it is know­ing how to per­form tasks like set up a modem or printer in Win­dows, right down to mem­or­ising exactly what you need to click on and how the pro­ced­ures dif­fer across Win­dows versions.

There are two com­pon­ents, each with its own exam: Core Hard­ware and Oper­at­ing Sys­tem Tech­no­lo­gies. You are sup­posed to do them in that order, but I decided to do it the other way round (fight­ing with DOS/​Windows prob­lems over many years made me feel more con­fid­ent with the OS mod­ule). They cover a lot of leg­acy mater­ial, like daisy-​​wheel print­ers, EISA and MCA buses and Token Ring net­works. Hav­ing been involved with PCs since the IBM PC XT, I could relate to much of it. Over­all I would say that it was quite easy.

I did my A+ Core Hard­ware exam on Thursday March 31 (10 days ago) and since then I’ve been work­ing towards the CompTIA Net­work+ certification.