The current class I’m attending in Philly is one of the more intense and mentally challenging ones I’ve attended in a long time. It assumes a working knowledge of several different aspects of networking. I’ve been able to keep up with all the DNS and DHCP discussions, but I got a little lost yesterday when we got into in depth subnetting and specifically CIDR subnets. I got up a couple of hours early today to read and get caught up.

The first day of class was pretty fun, as our instructor basically covered “the history of IP” and you know I like history and documentaries. Our instructor threw out several trivia-style questions and I got about three of them right in a row — I knew IPX was heavily used by Novell, that the X in XPS stood for Xerox, and that Xerox’s research center was called PARC. My string of luck ran out Monday afternoon during our end-of-day wrap up, during which I got several review questions wrong. Because of this I slightly changed my plan of attack on Tuesday; after answering several questions correctly, I quit answering things. Better to walk away a winner, you know!

When we walked into class on the first day I noticed there were no computers on the tables. The instructor later mentioned, “Oh by the way, you’re going to need a laptop, and it’ll need wireless access to get to the training materials.” If this gives you an idea of the group of people I’m training with, this indeed was not a problem. All fifteen of us pulled out laptops, configured our wireless connections, and proceeded with the training.

I am sad to say that I spent St. Patrick’s Day 2009 eating dinner at Outback and later, reading up on networking-related documents. St. Patty would not approve.