My professor asked for a so-called "learning log" for my DNETCOM class and, as the old saying goes, "ask and ye shall receive." So I fired up Photoshop, got a few fonts, and made the post image. This "learning log" will be listed as a series in my blog, by the way, so you'll see it in the lower part of the sidebar. So, without any further ado, here's my log for the first week of DNETCOM.

The first week of DNETCOM started out fairly.. simple, I suppose. Starting off in a not-so-familiar room on the fifth floor with little to no internet connection, I started playing a game of Microsoft Solitaire before my professor arrived. My other blockmates saw this and this whole frenzy of playing Microsoft Solitaire started, and this would continue throughout the week—in different subjects with different professors.

After my professor entered, we all quickly closed our game of Solitaire and started listening to him once he got his PowerPoint presentation up and running. Our professor was new to us, Sir Justin Pineda. In the first day, he told us about mostly house rules, the course syllabus, and the usual things you'd hear on the first day. Not much happened on this day, as far as I can recall, mostly introductory things and some stuff about taking a certification exam.

For the next meeting, we've moved to a different room—permanently. Somehow, we've ended up at room 302 (if I remember correctly), just right next to my Thursday QUAMET class. I don't really have any complaints about moving to different rooms, BUT THAT ROOM DIDN'T HAVE INTERNET AS WELL. I actually find it funny and quite ironic that the room beside us has a working Internet connection and yet we are a networking fundamentals class with no working network connection.

Internet woes aside, I kind of felt a little uncomfortable about the new room. I can't really put my finger to it, but it's just that the room triggers my claustrophobia. But anyway, the class soon started and our professor soon got to work explaining some basic networking terms and things of the sort.

He first started off with networking topologies and some basic stuff about networks. The first part of the lesson was fairly easy to understand, but I soon started having difficulty in the Network Architecture Components slide. I'm not sure if it's just me or it's the same for everyone else, but I didn't quite get the slides in that part of the lesson.

First and foremost, what are the network architecture components for? It's for the network, sure, but what purpose do they serve and why are they fault tolerance, scalability, quality of service, security? Usually, when using the word "components," it usually means a part of something. For computers, the usual components are the RAM, storage drive, graphics card, motherboard, and so on. As for programming languages, it's syntax, variables, statements, conditions, etc. When I think of "network architecture components," I usually think of servers, clients, the cloud, RAID, server-centric operating systems (Windows Server, MacOS Server, Ubuntu Server), and so on—not fault tolerance. I just want to know how and why the network architecture components came to be.

Second, the last part of the lesson: network topology types. If there's one thing I want to say right off the bat, it's the obvious fact that I have (almost) never heard of the word "topology" before in my life. I don't know what a topology is and what it's used for. Although I have to admit I have heard of the word "network topology" in a Microsoft Virtual Academy class introduction I watched the day before, but what's frustrating is that they didn't properly explain what a topology is either. So I'd like to know what a topology is in layman's terms. Is a topology a web? A type of connection? A position of linking computers? I don't know, that's why I failed to understand the last part of the lesson.

Finally, the exercise itself. I don't even know how to design a network architecture, let alone design one in a span of 30 minutes or so, and then defend it. I failed to understand how a network architecture is designed because I failed to grasp even the fundamental building blocks of it. Maybe I'll try to read some resources online to clear up some things. Hopefully I can keep up with the pace my professor is going because I don't want this situation to happen again:

Replace "math teacher" with "DNETCOM teacher" :P

But regardless of my queries and concerns above, I personally have high hopes for this subject because it's a major subject and I want to persevere to become a server administrator in the far future. Passing this class and getting high grades is at the top of my priority so I'll take every measure necessary to keep up and (hopefully) stay at the front of the pack.

That's all for now, stay tuned for the next learning log!