Nerdy, geeky post...

Today, I am going to stray away from my normal posts and turn into the happy nerdy, geek that I am.  So - you have been warned.  :-)

I decided to take a distance learning course from Collin County Community College.  Right now, I take the continuing education courses because there is really not much stress with studying and trying to make good grades.  It is about learning something new.  Learning something to help you.  I have taken the classes where you actually go to the college to be taught by an instructor.  I like those as well.  Also, the courses, in my opinion, are reasonably priced.  My mind has been wandering away from the normal "computer" courses to over to creative writing, but that is another story.

This short semester, I am taking "Introduction to Oracle."  I took a similar course back in 1999 at Tarrant County College.  I learned a lot about PL*SQL, but a lot of that I knew from when I had my first database course from UNT.  The course helped me with doing various projects at work. 

Now, I am trying to sort out exactly where do I want to go with my career.  Perhaps, make a new direction and become a database administrator or become a better programmer with SQL skills.  I take this course as a way to enhance my current skills.  Also, I want to learn more about installing, configurating, and administering a database.

For years, I have off and on set up a Linux operating system and installed Oracle DB.  Each time, there was always something a little funky off and the whole thing did not work.  This time, I worked on setting a similar configuration up for the class.

In 2006, I purchased my first Toshiba laptop for a class I was taking at UTD.  Over the years, I had used it and really considered the laptop very reliable.  With Dell machines, not sure why, but they have a tendency to "freeze" up on me, even with a large amount of memory.  However, the Toshiba has been unbelievable.

Long story short, somehow, a virus got onto the laptop.  My father worked on it to remove the virus, but it had done some serious damage to the files on the hard drive.  Best way to resolve that was for me to replace the hard drive.  I still have the other hard drive and I need to use my Linux system to pull the data off of it.  Luckily, there are tools within Linux that will allow me to do that without the virus spreading to the system.

I was not really using the system, so I got another hard drive.  I installed it, then loaded Fedora Core 14 on the laptop.  Once I did that, I downloaded the Oracle 11g database software.  I found installation instructions on the web, then worked on following them, but making changes to do what I wanted.  Found that really screwed up stuff.  So, I cratered the entire system and reloaded everything.  At this point, I followed the instructions strictly and did not set up a hostname.  This time, the database and the environment manager would start with no issues.

Now, the next thing was getting the system to automatically start and stop the database whenever I stopped and started the system.  Again, found great instructions for this on the web.  I need to pull all of this data together and save it somewhere.  Now, I can create a multitude of databases and they will all get started and stopped.  I was pretty happy over this.

At this point, I want to set up my "black box" system with the latest version of CentOS, 64-bit Linux operating system and get Oracle installed there.  However, I want to do this with using VMWare.  The reason for using VMWare is to allow me to test making departures to customize my installation of the software and get it to work.  VMWare will allow me to create a "saving" place - sort of like in today's video games - you save a place, so that if your character dies, you can go back to the place you were before the character was killed.  It prevents you from doing everything all over again.  Also, it gives me a chance to work with VM Ware for Linux.  I have played around with it using Windows, but this would be new.

In other nerdy news, a friend of mine from the dfw.singles days tweeted that she was going to take a free pre-calc course over the web.  I think that is pretty cool, especially if you want to just exercise the grey cells.  I was thinking of looking further into that.  This summer, I downloaded some iTunesU statistics course, but have not had a chance to go over that. 

As for the pre-calc course, I might do that as well.  It is interesting to see what I have forgotten and what I remember over the years.  When taking Linear Algebra in 2008, it was amazing how much stuff from Algebra II and College Algebra started rushing back.  It was pretty weird, but great at the same time.

I admit, I am a sick puppy when it comes to going to school.  I love going back to college.  It is just one of those things - learning new things, seeing a different point of view, and hanging out with the "kids."  It is a huge dream for me to be able to quit working and go back to school full-time to complete my degree.  Of course, I would need to have won the lottery.  LOL  However, it would be fun to go back and be able to do the things I wished I had been able to do 25 years ago.

Today's Message from God:

Today, we believe God wants you to know that ...

she who kneels before God can stand before anyone.

Take refuge in God and you will be able to handle anything life throws your way.

I think that says it all.