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Back to University. We’re now done with four weeks of training at Lapinjärvi and have eleven months of work to do. I was lucky to get to work at department of computer science at University of Helsinki. When I walked out the building having returned my badge and my key I was fairly sure I wouldn’t be coming back. At this point I’m glad I was wrong.

Jumping from subject to subject, what did we learn at Lapinjärvi? Quite honestly, not much. The single most important thing there without a doubt as training in first aid, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (commonly known as CPR). As mentioned before, we were told the basics of how to deal with oil spills and how to treat birds contaminated by it but obviously it was mostly theoretical. Some of us got to try out the jumpsuit and other stuff they wear, but that’s about it. Technically we have now received basic training to become group leaders for combatting such disasters.

Anyway, I started my work at University yesterday. After “checking in” I met my roommate and attended this .Net course with him. Well, at least the first ninety minutes of it. After that I couldn’t bear it anymore. What did I learn? Here’s what.

• Everyone wants to code for .Net.
• Everyone who codes for .Net gets a well paid job.
• University should teach their students .Net.
• One can code for .Net with pretty much anything, including Python.
• Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition will make attendants famous and rich.
• Everyone owns an XBox and everyone can code their own games for it.
• It is natural to “abandon Linux and start coding for .Net”.
• .Net and Silverlight are platform independent. Both have been implemented for Microsoft Windows. (Both also have an open-source implementation called mono or something, I’m sure you can find more about it if you will.)

After escaping the propaganda machine I helped the staff to install an UPS and a few servers to a rack. I then did my very first installation of Ubuntu! Our department is preparing to replace its version of Red Hat/Fedora with a version of Ubuntu. I decided to act as kind of guinnea pig and give it a try. This is also the first time I set up boot and root partitions on software RAID.

Then what? I’d imagine I should prepare being instructor for this course called database applications. The course is all about designing, documenting and implementing a simple web application such as pizza service. I’ve never been an istructor before so I hope this is going to be an educational experience for all of us.

Oh, I almost forgot. 332 days to go!

Legacy comments

19 November 2008 11:40:16 Reader

So? :) tell us how it whent! reader of your blog.