Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Day 1 of Red Hat Intro Class
Today I started the Red Hat 033 Course which is an introduction to running and using Linux. Once things got started and everybody introduced themselves, I’ll admit to initially feeling a little bit outclassed, as I was surrounded by sysadmin types who had MCSEs, worked for heavyweights like Oracle or had other industry certifications.

I am glad I am taking this intro course. I had initially thought about just right into doing the RH133 course and going straight for the RHCT certification, as I have been working with Linux systems for several years. But now I know how much more there is to learn in this field. There were plenty of occasions today when the instructor talked at length about a command that I thought I already knew, and found out that there was much more to it. Even better was the fact that he was able to connect the dots for me, giving me “the big picture” as to how all of these inter-related bits and pieces I already knew something about actually worked.

Here’s what we covered: the history of Unix/Linux, the basics of using the command line interface, plus various common file and shell commands, like cp, mv, rm and so on. It might not sound like a lot but they go into things with more depth than I initially expected.

Going in and doing this course is a calculated risk now that I have been laid-off from Digital View. I had given some serious though as to whether I should continue with my original plans since the firm let me go, and the price for the course is not inconsiderable. But as I was checking out various job postings on the Web I realized that in addition to hard-core programming, having a background in some sysadmin-related things makes a lot of sense to someone like me who wants to stay in the business of doing Web development. It will allow me not only to do things like run and access programs like Apache and MySQL/PHP (which I can already do), but also to install them and configure them as well. I can’t help thinking that it will make me stand out a bit more in a crowd of possible employment candidates in the field. The ironic thing of course is that I would now be much more valuable to my now ex-colleagues at Digital View if I were still working for them. Still, best to think of it as their loss, and the “time off” as an opportunity for me to take this course.

I also saw something today which would definitely have struck fear for my future employment at Digital View were I still there – Captivate Network has dynamic displays in each of the elevators in 4 King, running what appears to be a looped TV feed as well as a dynamic banner area. Far more sophisticated – at least graphically, which is arguably what counts – than much of the products I saw at DV. I can’t speak for their back-end – which may be their Achilles heel from a maintenance point of view for all I know, but what I saw in the elevator will definitely capture that all-important “mind share”. In addition to that there was a similar stand-along ad display I saw running in a small newstand store. It also looked pretty slick.