So my beautiful wife and I watched a couple of Network+ Certification training videos on Thursday night.
She is accumulating a number of certification letter sets behind her name on LinkedIn, and she’s brushing up on her network skills which she is light on (she’s got lots of process stuff and actually taught a community college section of the A+ Certification preparation). Me, I got an A+ certification around the turn of the century, so old that it’s no longer recognized (the new program has requirements to do the continuing education thing and to recertify periodically, but I got mine in the olden days, before the certification-as-a-service and everything-is-a-rental-or-subscription world took hold. Since I’m between contracts, I’m thinking of maybe getting a couple of these low-level, inexpensive (only $400 for the exam–cheep!) so I can apply for starting cable-puller jobs and not get hired for those because I’m old. Or, mostly because I have the time and I’ve historically been a good test taker. The intro streaming classes we watched were under 10 minutes each and were kind of a review–when I got my A+ certification in 2000, I was taking community college classes of my own, scattered among hardware and networking and different programming languages.
So, to watch the videos: Apparently, we have free access to a Dion Training course hosted on Udemy because our library offers Udemy classes for free. So my wife could watch them on her iPad. And I pointed out we could stream them on the big television using the Roku and the iPad’s sharing (but you cannot do this with football games, gentle reader, as I learned several years ago). So she did a proof of concept a week ago, and on Thursday was a little flustered because she did not remember what nested-app-and-menu-path on the iPad and what nested-app-and-menu-path made this work. After only a few minutes but demonstrating the dread that it was not possible or she would never find it, we watched 40 minutes of intro to how the course (a $300 course on Udemy, I guess) and explanation of the exam (following this course and watching a couple hours of the day, I could be Network+ certified in thirty days–wow!).
Yesterday, on Facebook, I get:
An ad for the training company.
It was my wife’s iPad, my wife’s library account, and her free or subsidized login to Udemy, but the Roku account is in my name/email address. So I think I can know it was the Roku. Either parsing the content of the video or reading the metadata and selling it to Facebook to present me with those relevant ads.
But, ah, how used to it we are getting! How normal it seems!
And: I think I quipped somewhere, probably on Facebook, that it’s nice that Facebook shows us people’s birthdays on their birthdays, but we could really use some advance notice to buy cards or presents. Well! My Facebook feed is full of Chinese catchkes and t-shirts in the weeks leading up to my wife’s birthday. So, good? Although I’m unlikely to click through ads and buy from shops of unknown provenance these days. But they’re good for gift ideas: SHE LIKES CATS. Which is my knowledge which trained Facebook to give me this valuable insight.
Tech. Meh. I should maybe become a shepherd. I saw a house on one of my regular driving routes has new tight fences and baby goats. I wonder if they’re hiring.
