the bits

first night in the new apartment. I’ve got my bvi bed back in action, and it’s sufficient :)

hung out downstairs for a while; nick was over. I got some photos of the place that I’ll post soon as well… I guess now I need to figure out some good ways to build the kind of space I want… no hurry tho :) one thing I definitely want to avoid is accumulating a bunch of Stuff™.

In any case, I’m kicked back in my new bedrom about to crash out for a short day of work tomorrow… nice cool breeze and such… airport signal strength and all that… feel pretty stoked actually ;)

new hard drive :)

/dev/disk1s6 25G 15G 10G 59% /
/dev/disk2s7 67G 67G 895M 99% /Volumes/Icebox
/dev/disk2s10 7.8G 5.3G 2.5G 67% /Volumes/Fridge
/dev/disk1s7 13G 4.9G 8.2G 37% /Volumes/Core
/dev/disk0s2 112G 14M 111G 1% /Volumes/deepfreeze

You may be thinking to yourself: what can he store now that he couldn’t before? Well, just to put this in perspective, here’s a few ideas:

-Roughly 120,259,084,288 digits of pi
-About 4,446,265 backup copies of this image
-14,000 more songs (assuming 8 MB a piece, my current average)

I already had two drives installed, so I moved the 80 up to the spot that the zip drive would be, had my g4 come with one; now there’s three drives total.

hoo ray :)

In other news, I should be moving very soon. Maybe even tomorrow. Fortunately, the process will be very short. After so much excessive moving of stuff in the past year, finally a move that will take about 25 minutes, tops. All I need in the short term is a desk…

Just put down a deposit on an apartment right next to Damon’s apartment (where I currently reside). It’s a spacious 1 bedroom with a pretty decent size kitchen and bath, plus a nice closet and decent storage space – 650 / month, right in the heart of Capitol Hill. I’m sure I’ll use that storage space some day… currently I have hardly any stuff at all (actually that’s kinda how I prefer it, but now I’ll be forced to get at least minimal furniture… currently I own only a chair).

The two guys moving out let me have a whole bunch of dishes and glassware for dirt cheap… probably $150 or so worth of things for $25. Sweet :)

It opens up on the first :) Best part: proximity to Damon’s… meaning that I’ll not have to walk far to hang / watch tv, etc… plus it’s plenty close enough to run ethernet so we can be on the same LAN and share DSL :)

Now I think I shall wind it down for the night… still sorta hopped up on quake3, but tv usually cures that right quickly :)

Finished up with the QuickTime Streaming Server course today. All in all, it was a very enjoyable and educational week. I gave my second teach-back today, which went quite a bit better than yesterday’s.

Yesterday I presented the chapter on Firewalls and NAT, and how they can be problematic for QTSS. I chose that chapter cause I’m a networking geek, and cause I know the related concepts backwards and forwards… well, turns out that was probably a bad idea. I have a tendency to provide a little bit too much information almost all the time when it comes to tech. stuff; considering that this is a QTSS course, the intimate details of NAT and firewalls aren’t that important in this context. As a result, the comments from the class reflected the fact that I was going too far in depth on the networking side, which I could see after the fact… once I get talking about that stuff, though, it’s like a freight train… One of my fellow students made the astute and relevant comment that it was as if I was transmitting content in UDP instead of TCP (machine gun, spray and pray versus ‘here’s a bit of information, did you get that? okay, good; if not, retransmit).

Today, however, I presented a chapter that I’m less intimately familiar with (like all the rest of the chapters), dealing with the various ways to present content to the user (video on demand, playlist, live encoded) and the various ways that it can be transmitted across the network to the end user (unicast, multicast, broadcast). I tried to slow the pace and not seem *quite* so excited about the material, and also involve the students a bit more (asking questions, etc). The comments from the other students and the instructors conveyed that my improvements worked; they thought it was a better presentation than yesterday. That’s a good thing :)

See, just taking this week-long session doesn’t automatically mean that I’m certified to teach; in fact there are three possible outcomes. The student can be certified to teach the course, or be required to co-teach the course if the instructors feel that the student isn’t quite ready to fly solo (or the student can get neither option). After the co-teach, if there is improvement, then the student can be certified. The problem with the co-teach situation, at least for this course, is that you’d have to co-teach with another instructor that’s also certified to teach QTSS. Right now that list includes exactly one person: the instructor we had this week. Based on my feedback yesterday, I was a bit worried that I might be marked for co-teach, but since today I got better feedback, I think I’ll get certified. It’s not a question of knowing the material – I’m a quick study, and a geek by trade, so that’s never the problem… it’s a question of presenting it properly.

It’s been several years since I’ve done professional instruction, and I’ve always had the tendency to go on the fast side. On the other hand, I always make sure the students know they can stop me whenever they want, and I be sure to ask for feedback to make sure they get key concepts. During the sessions this week, each student got to present in half-hour chunks, which isn’t enough time to really find a natural pace, especially since I genuinely was excited to present the material, and tended to over-do some of my explanations. I think the other problem is that by the time I got a chance to present, we’d all gone over the material at least a few times, so I think I was subconsciously trying to give the other students the chance to actually get some valuable content out of my presentation, instead of hearing exactly the same stuff as before. The real point is to practice our teaching skills, however…. In any case, I hope I get certified… it would really suck ass if I didn’t, cause that would probably mean that it would be *at least* several months before I get a chance to actually teach this stuff. Being one of only 10 Apple certified instructors in the world, however, provides a significant supply and demand advantage on my part. In any case, I learned a bunch of cool stuff… (tho goddamnit, I better get certified.)

We had a pretty fly group of students, several of which have very polished presentation styles. Let’s face it, if you’re one of only two Apple employees in China, for example, you’re probably a badass ;) There was a fairly decent representation of various areas of expertise between the 9 of us, which kept things interesting as far as discussions and such.

On the way from the training center to the Airport, I booked myself another Coast Shuttle (can’t beat $14 from Santa Monica to LAX). This time I got a 50-something Pakistani guy who kept having what seemed like very frustrating phone conversations. After a particularly bickerish call, he looked back at me and was all “You know they say the drug is bad? This is why. This guy…. he messed up in the head. Even if you do the drug one time, and 40 years later you are messed up. That is a saying in my country.” I just sorta nodded, not really having any desire to ask him which drug he might be referring to. Then he asked me where I’m from, and he told me that my beard makes me look like I’m from the Middle East. heh. I mentioned something about beards seeming common in the Middle East, and asked if there was any religious significance. He went on to tell me that in each text of the three major religions, there isn’t any mention of whether it’s ‘good or bad’ to have a beard, yet there are plenty of people that have a beard in the name of religion. About that time I felt like I’d opened a can of worms, and sure enough, he continued talking about how people do all kinds of crazy things in the name of religion, even though none of the religions preach hate or intolerance. I did manage to glean an interesting little tidbit when he was talking about the fact that there are people fighting way too much… He said something about the fact that in the days of yore, that there were some perpetratin’ false prophet kinda dudes that got people to do all sorts of unsavory things, but that god didn’t punish the false prophets, he punished the people. “Leaders do not become leaders if no one follows them”, which makes pretty good sense to me.

Some other random things running through my mind:

-Not exactly looking forward to going back on the sales floor, especially after another week of geeking. In my situation, being in sales is a conduit to not being in sales. Considering that I’ve only been with the company for three weeks and they’ve already paid a lot of money to get my Apple Certified, I’m thinking that they see me as being more valuable in the training room

-Need money. It’s not that I’m out; in fact, I’ve still got a decent chunk of my savings from islandless. On the other hand, getting an apartment and buying the bare bones furniture required is not cheap (currently the only piece of furniture I own is my chair – and a fine chair it is :). This problem is exasperated by the fact that my company pays sales reps monthly (I’ve yet to receive any compensation from them). There is also the problem surrounding the commission structure; there’s no way I’ll ever make the sales quotas necessary for making commission, since I’ve been out two full weeks this month (once for ccna, and once for this training). I’m not even sure I’m being paid for my time I spent in CA for the QTSS training. So, without making the commission, I’m basically left with the hourly base, which isn’t really that great. I don’t mind thinking about money, but worrying about money is stupid and I fucking hate it. There is also the not insignificant fact that I’ve been at Damon’s for a while now. While this has happened in the past, it was just the two of us back then…. I’m doing my absolute best to respect everybody’s space, but I’m still taking up couch.

-Looking forward to seeing Stephen Wright tomorrow night at the Paramount :) I dig both his content and his hilariously deadpan delivery.

-Want to play some damn Quake

-Want to mess around with QTSS/DSS in the bml lab. I wanna find out how far I can push it before it breaks. According to the QTSS courseware, the limit is around 4000 connections (consuming low-bitrate movies). I assume this is on the most absolutely badass server configs with a super-sweet LAN, so I’m interested to see how much my linux box running DSS can do, or a g3/500 running os x server and QTSS.

-I should be more mindful of the good things in my life. I got all philosophical and introspective last night about this… I was in my room at the comfort inn, trying to get DSS to work on my linux box. It built okay once I installed the c++ extensions for gcc, but I was having trouble getting it configured correctly (due to problems with the installer scripts – I found at least one mistake in one of the default config files). Anyway, I was thinking that if I were just a bit more badass, I might not have to fight it so much to get it working. Then I got frustrated cause I only had about 30 minutes to work on it before I had to get some food and then wind down for the night. Feeling a bit pissy that I couldn’t get it working in half an hour after having taken a QTSS course (which, incidentally, spends *no* time at all on working with other Unixes), I walked next door and ordered a burger and some fries from some positively downtrodden individuals working at the Carl’s Burger. The depression was palpable. Sometimes I lose perspective.

-Garbage 2.0 is one of the very few “pop/rock” albums that I really enjoy.

-Is this actual content, or am I just filling time until this plane lands? hmm… I think I’ll read the draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt and learn about how Apple’s implementation of the ZeroConf stuff works.

Went through a few more chapters today. Learned about the QuickTime Streaming Proxy, and did some other hands-on lab type stuff, coupled with plenty of theory. The curriculum is laid out in a pretty logical fashion, and incorporates quite a few related concepts, such as basic firewall / NAT implementation, ip protocols, quicktime media authoring, and much, much more ;)

I’m getting kinda pissed at bish for being all jacked up concerning airport. Since upgrading to 10.1.4, I’ve had a problem where I can’t switch between airport networks without rebooting (more accurately, I can switch, and even exist on the wireless lan, but nothing works at the network layer until I reboot). It’s a real pain. There’s even a wireless net in the training center, but I can’t join it *at all* with my laptop, even after a reboot… I simply cannot get a dhcp lease. Blah! I guess when I get back to Seattle, I’ll re-install OS X and hope that it goes away… and if not, I’m still under warranty. I get the feeling that there’s possibly a larger problem because I have pretty serious airport signal strength problems at times.

We had a good time lusting over apple’s newly announced rackmount server. It’s pretty much totally badass… but I do have a few lingering questions, such as: can a user install his/her own drives, or is the “Apple Drive Module” something that one has to acquire from apple? In reality, it won’t ever affect me personally since I’m starting to think I might be poor for the rest of my life… my first priority is making it off my old-ass g4 400 and into something a bit more reasonable for desktop use. It’s a bit saddening to see almost everybody else at the apple training with tiBooks, meanwhile I’m klunking along on my slow-ass iBook… It doesn’t look like I’ll be making much more than what I need to survive at my current job; at least not in my current position. I hear that some of the service techs are well paid… maybe I’ll do that. I hate to bitch, but it sucks being a first-rate geek with second-rate hardware. Blah.

On a less self-pitiful note, I think I’ll get a chance to see QuickTime Broadcaster (for os x server!) in action. I learned today that it’s included with the jaguar server installation that was distributed at wwdc (along with the rest of QuickTime 6). One of my classmates (who is staying upstairs, in fact) happens to have the aforementioned jaguar server installed on his tiBook… he also has a firewire cam, a hub, and an extra piece of ethernet cable… So, tonight we should be able to do a live quicktime video / audio stream all the way across the vast, uncharted chasm of his double occupancy room @ the Comfort Inn :) We were joking about just brining the whole rig with us and setting it up tomorrow before class, but our instructor is bound as an apple employee to be very careful about what he says / does with QuickTime 6… besides, the jaguar stuff is under NDA as well. It’s kinda lame that badass broadcasting software for OS X is done and ready to ship, but is being held back by politics. At least us geeks can get at it ;)

Also, to add to the leetness of the entire operation, I found out that we’ll be the first batch of apple certified quicktime streaming server instructors in the world :) woop!

I think I’ll do some fewd shortly, then tinker with qtss upstairs, then review my qtss courseware to prepare for possibly having to present it tomorrow :)

We went through the first 4 chapters pretty fast…. since this is a class of soon-to-be trainers, everybody’s pretty swift, so it’s going a bit faster than a normal class which might consist of a mixture of clewbies and non-clewbies. The training center setup is sweet… each desk has a dp800 mac os x server and an ibook (for client access). We started the day by netbooting the g4s and using this neat-o applescript to restore an os x server image prepared for the class… and now I know one of the reasons why gig e exists :)

The class is small – only about 8 or 9 of us. Since this class is so new (the final courseware isn’t even printed yet), we’ve got students from all over the place who will return to their respective locations to spread the knowledge…. one from Singapore, one from Australia, one from NYC, Chicago… etc. I’m proud to represent seattle :)

We knocked off around 5, then I caught a ride back to my room, chilled for a couple hours, then hooked up with this dude Jason from class. Grabbed some grub at Swingers, then bopped around the 3rd street promenade for a while… soaked up the scenery and such.

I’m currently typing on a CoolMac keyboard that’s pretty easy to roll up, completely water/coke/coffee proof, and extremely silent. Jason’s company makes them, and you should see them on the market before long. My typing error rate is a bit higher than normal… it does take some getting used to, I reckon… since there is no hard key action, I need to press keys a bit more directly than I do on my apple pro kbd… but all in all, not a bad piece of hardware for the price.

I think I shall get some tv lovin’, then crash out :)

On de plane…

So, finally found my first wireless network out in the wild. Well, okay… it was at the SeaTac airport. It gave me a DHCP lease containing an IP on the 63.125.5 network. I counted about 11 or 12 cisco IOS based devices on that subnet (judging from the telnet responce) which I presume are the wireless access points. I could port scan stuff on the ‘net, but not establish any TCP connections, so I’m not sure exactly how they were filtering the traffic (presumably for the purpose of charging for access ;), They didn’t bother to filter or block ICMP at all, though…. Whatever uplink they are using is pretty phatty, too… I managed to push about 650 KB/s of icmp to the ‘net :->

Supposed to arrive at LAX a bit before 8…

On the ground…

We got in almost an hour early (how does that happen, exactly?). Caught a shuttle to the Santa Monica Comfort Inn. QTSS sessions start tomorrow at 9 :)

For now, a spot of TV, then sleepages.

About to head back to CA for a week in santa monica. Never been in or around LA, so it should be interesting…

First I’ll take a two day class of QuickTime Streaming Server, then a three day session where we practice teaching that class; the goal is to become an Apple Certified Trainer for quicktime streaming server.

This is the first in what hopefully will be a long succession of trainings that I undertake in order to become certified. For each course that I become certified, I can teach either for Apple or for an Apple reseller (in this case, my place of employment).

Should be lots of fun… hopefully I’ll also be able to hook up with natan… yet another long time IRC friend that I’ve never physically met before :)

I kept my earthlink account from two weeks ago, so I should be online during the evenings from the hotel.

woop!

The following report shows your performance in each section of the exam:

Bridging & Switching:       80%
OSI Model:                  100%
Routed Protocols            70%
Routing Protocols           88%
WAN Services                66%
Network Management          100%
LAN Technologies            100%
Cisco & Networking Basics   85%

Passing Score:              849 / 1000
Your Score:                 898 / 1000

Yay! No more studying!

I don’t think I’ll be attempting anything beyond this CCNA cert for a while… it’s at once draining and satisfying… totally glad it’s over :)

… back to seattle :)

It’s day three just before 9 a.m., and muhamed ali is back! He left before noon yesterday to hit up the doctor’s… he was feeling ill and such. They didn’t have a replacement trainer for us, so we ended up getting a field engineer who, while quite knowledgeable, is not an instructor at all. Consequently, we didn’t cover nearly as much material as we would have otherwise, and the stuff we did cover wasn’t done in any sort of logical / progressive fashion. We spent most of the day with the sub going over switching… some of the other students are complaining that they didn’t get anything out of it. I don’t think it was a complete waste of a day… I did learn some stuff yesterday, but the material wasn’t in the format the other students were expecting so they probably didn’t retain it so well. Anyway, Ali says he’ll take us through switching again today to make sure we get the important bits. Being a trainer, he knows exactly the stuff we need to pass the exam, where as the field engineer knows a lot of stuff, but doesn’t know the exams very well.

Got tons of sleep last night, so I’m full of energy and ready to kick ass.

—

Back at the hotel… another long day. We went until 7 today; previously we usually knocked off around 6 or so…

—

End of day 4 now. Good lordy. I like networking and all, but this is pushing even my limits. Seriously. It’s a whole lot of information to try to juggle / sort out. Fortunately, the stuff I really care about is the conceptual stuff, and I’ve got all that solid, as is usually the case whenever I learn anything. When I screw up it’s either cause of details or math. Certainly, both are important… tho not as important to me as theory / concepts. The point is, if I understand the concepts behind a problem, it’s always easy to work out the details with the use of modern conveniences such as calculators or subnet calculators or the intarnets. All the math in the world won’t mean crap if one doesn’t know how or where to apply it.

Tomorrow is the exam. Since Ali was out for almost an entire day on Tuesday, they’ve given us the option of taking the exam on saturday or even next week… but since my flight leaves tomorrow night, I’ve decided to go ahead and give it my best shot tomorrow afternoon. I’m not actually sure I’ll pass; I think it’s gonna be really really close. Passing percentage is now 85%, which means I can miss 7 questions at most out of 50. It’ll be close. The problem with having this much material is that it’s not possible to study it all from every angle; exams are notorious for turning problems inside out to trick the poor student…. however, I shall do my best :) I’m not trying to pre-rationalize failure, but I’ve already got what I came out here for… the certification would be a nice bonus, though :) If I really cared that much about pieces of paper, I’d probably still be slaving away in college somewhere (not to poop on college or anything).

Went over my entire legal pad of notes tonight, and also reviewed the ‘brain dump’ that ali provided us from the ccna exam he took just before the start of our session (he took it for the sake of knowing what’s on it). We almost finished the ccna material today… we just have a bit more frame relay stuff to go over tomorrow, then I’ll have several hours to cram before I take the test. There’s a few things I know I need to bone up on, and I think I’ll also rebuilt my router about 5 times and do a bunch of vlan stuff on a switch, just to try to memorize all those various commands.

Gotta check out of my room tomorrow morning before I leave for class… I’ll get a ride back here after the exam; then the hotel will provide me with “shuttle service” to the san jose airport… then back to seattle, and MY COMPUTERS! (woo :)

Think I’ll watch a program on the television set and then call it a night. Wish me luck on the exam!