Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Visiting Mom in Hospital
The weather was bad, so I didn't arrive in Newmarket until mid-afternoon. I found Mom in the hallway, propped up in a combination wheelchair/bed. She had obviously just woken up, and seemed pleased to see me. She looked very rough. About as rough as I've ever seen her. Disheveled, crumpled, blue. I couldn't help but think she looked like my Father in his final days. Thankfully the doctors had decided that she did not belong in the ICU, which gave me some comfort about her condition. She coughs were very phlegmmy, though thankfully there weren't too many of them.

I did most of the talking. Mostly about what the family is doing, and how the girls are. I brought some pictures along, mainly of the girls. I read a letter aloud to her from a friend of hers who lives in Alberta. Talked about impending trips, Xmas, and tried to cheer her up with the idea of traveling to the flower show she enjoys come the Spring. By the end of the visit she was clearly tired and about to go to sleep, so I left her to rest. My plan is to return on Sunday, with fresh pictures of the family and maybe some flowers to cheer her.

I got home and found a message waiting for me on the answering machine. I thought it was going to be Erika calling from Cleveland (she's visiting her Grandparents there). Instead it was a call from my Uncle Cec, saying that my Uncle John was in a very poor state, and like Mom, has pneumonia and is in hospital. Unlike Mom, he is in ICU. Unconscious.

I hope he manages to pull out of it. Cec didn't sound very hopeful over the phone.

Final Day of Class
I had thought that the final day of class was going to be strictly review, applying what we already knew, but instead it ended up being an amalgam of things already learned and a few new things in an applied application. From scratch we built an online membership login application which could do basic checking for duplicate entries, and allowed new members to join. Cool.

While I could have taken a course with more depth than this, I fully understood everything being taught, and will be able to apply it to practical use immediately. I figure I got my money's worth, though I wish a more advanced course was available.

The instructor, Saki, is apparently Oracle certified, and at one point during the lesson he digressed and talked about the relative values of certification and taking IT courses. He didn't think much of most of them, saying that you can get most of what you want out of a book instead of having to do the coursework. I asked him about Red Hat certification though, and he thought it was a good thing: "there will always been a need for Unix and Linux administrators". A further spur for my pursing Red Hat Certification of some form...