School daze sure don't seem like the old daze

It's hard to think about school starting soon, when temperatures have hit 100°+ more than 30 times this summer. So far this August, only one day has failed to reach 100°, and it hit 104° yesterday. That's 40°C to you furriners.

So what has that got to do with anything? Well, in the middle of all this non-fall, non-school-like weather, I received a catalog from the local community college. I don't know about other two year colleges, but Dallas's has more than 80,000 students on eight campuses and the tele-college. The catalog reflects the diversity of student needs. One set of courses caught my eye.

LAMP. Yep, "Open Source Technology/LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)".

The group consists of four courses taken in concentrated doses. Each compresses the three semester-hour course work into eight weeks. Each section of two courses meets four nights a week, Mon–Thurs, for two hours lecture and two hours lab, plus an additional two hours of lab on Fri.

The first section consists of "Linux install/config" and "Databases using MySQL". After that eight week section, we'll move on to "Apache install/config" and "Programming using PHP" for another eight weeks.

You may have noticed the use of the first person pronoun in the previous paragraph. Yes, that does mean I matriculated at Northlake College of the Dallas County Community College District. See, I'm using bigger words—I must be getting smarter already. The tuition isn't too bad, at $36 per semester hour, but I gave the lady at the bookstore $150 for three used textbooks and got very little change back!

This should be interesting. I've been away from formal learning for nearly forty years now. The best thing I've noticed about being an older student (read Dirty Old Man) is that the girls on campus look a lot cuter from this vantage point.

cheers,

gary