Jack Scott's Blog

Today, seeing that I haven’t done so for a while now, comes an update on my life.

I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.

This week I finally received in the mail my Certificate II in I.T. While it’s not a huge qualification in and of itself, I’m still fairly proud of it. I studied for it as part of my work on a traineeship, so having completed that, my wages go up! Which is never a bad thing.

Here’s a list of the things I’m now qualified to do:

• Turn a computer on.
• Follow ‘organisational procedures’ to create documents in MS Word.
• Diagnose networking problems (which as an on-site technician, is actually what I’m paid to do).
• Run ‘standard diagnostic tests’.
• And a few other things I can’t remember.