[aklug] Re: IT certifications

* Damien Hull <dhull@section9.us> [160907 15:02]:
> Dan,
>
> Well put. Totally agree that a college education is a good thing to have.
> You still need to learn how to use things like Cisco or NetApp. Unless your
> college degree included training in these areas. That's where the vendor
> certs come in. I don't like the fact that they only last 3 years. I also
> don't like the fact that they are expensive. Unfortunately it's all we have
> at the moment.

  Amen. I'll second that and suggest that a general "classical"
  education can't hurt too much.

  Case in point:

  In 1989, I had started my third year of going back to college to
  major in computer science and I was burned out and jaded. I had to
  take a music appreciation class - which I really resented and a
  class in C (see "burned out and jaded").

  As a result of the music appreciation class, I found out that the
  'A' note that an orchestra tunes too has a frequency of 440 herz.
  I had access to a C function that could set the speaker to any
  frequency within human hearing range for increments of one
  micro(1/1000)second. I also realized that an "A" one octave higher
  would have a frequency of 880 and an "A" an octave lower would
  have a frequency of 220 ... and so on.

  From that I could work up an algorithm for the logarithms that
  could be applied to half-steps, whole steps, and the entire
  musical scale. I could even play chords by repeating the notes of
  said chord every microsecond. I ended up writing my first C
  program (and my first truly original program in any language) that
  played a variation of Pictures At an Exhibition (Mussorgsky, also
  done by Emerson, Lake and Palmer).

  All on the speaker. No sound cards were available to me at that
  time. I "played" it for my Music Appreciation teacher (principle
  percussionist at the Anchorage Symphony at that time) and she
  howled with laughter and called it a work of art.

  I'm sure she was being too kind, but as a result, my "fire in the
  belly was restored".

  Just sayin' ...

-- 
Tim 
http://www.akwebsoft.com, http://www.tj49.com
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