Sunday, March 21, 2004

Ambilogic III: ISA of the Tiger

I feel like the famed Mr. Balboa hinted in today's title, as he inevitably appears at the end of each of the movies - battered, bloody, exhausted, but ultimately victorious. MCS-Aaay-dreee-aaaaaan!! MCS-Aay-dreee-aaaaaan!!

The ISA server test is 62 questions, and you are given 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete it.

Mark, one of the other students, finally hit on the problem we had this afternoon, "ISA server is a $6,000 program that does the same thing you could get in a $400 router from BestBuy. Only everything is more confusing and convoluted. It's not that we don't get what ISA server is, it's that we DO get it, it's a stupid program that nobody would want to use."

While the same two guys who were crazy enough to go first on test 291 went again this morning (everyone else planned to go around 6:00pm) , we didn't get as much information from them. "If you know the material in the Ambilogic book, you will be fine".

Ultimately, they were right. But it didn't feel fine.

A friend of mine, who fluently speaks English, French, Spanish and German went to visit Hungary once. As he walked down the street he passed building after building that looked exactly alike. Signs hung over the doorways, but he had no frame of reference to read them since the alphabet was completely different. The language was so far from those he knew that he couldn't even figure out what was in the building by listening to what people said as they left. Each doorway could have led to a grocery or a garage, a post office or a pool hall.

I felt just like that during the test. Each question opened up and there were words there, but I felt like a stranger in a strange land, having to latch onto the tiniest clues just to make heads and tales of the context of the question, let alone the details.

For all of that, it couldn't have been that bad. Everyone who took the test passed, with scores over 800. So either the test was very forgiving or I'm a very good guesser.

If this doesn't work out, maybe I'll become a tour guide in Hungary.

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