I just passed NS163 and now officially have my NCDA! It will take a couple of weeks for them to ship out my certificate but the system has been updated with my passing score so I am officially certified. Not just me though, everyone in the class passed both exams, so there are now 8 new NCDA’s in the field. Congratulations to all the other guys and to Jon Presti for being a great instructor and making sure we all had the knowledge needed to pass the exams and get certified. Now to figure out what to do with the rest of my day, because my flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow. Had I known we would be done by 2pm today, I would have scheduled for an early evening flight. Oh well, looks like I get to go explore Las Colinas a little.

Had the first of two exams today, NS153, and I am happy to say that I passed! I am now half way to my NCDA. After the exam we began covering the material that will be on Saturday’s NS163 exam. After class I was talking with Jon and found out that he wasn’t going to be having dinner tonight because he was short on cash (due to forgetting to process a lot of expense reports, oops.) and so I told him he should come over to my hotel which is literally next door to his because we have free dinner in the lobby. We had some good conversation at dinner about the class, the material, and NetApp in general. Apparently this is the first time Jon has hung out with any of his students outside of class as well, which I thought was odd because he is by far one of the most straight forward, down to earth, and straight up cool techs I have ever met. Well, time to study some more!

So my first test is tomorrow and in preparation we filled out the necessary forms for Prometric, and as soon as I got my form I had to laugh. According to the paper Prometric still thinks they are a Thomson company. I then had to explain to the class why I was laughing: 1) Thomson doesn’t exist anymore, we are now Thomson Reuters, and 2) when we were Thomson, we sold Prometric in 2007. Jon said he was going to send an email to his contact to see about getting updated forms. 🙂 The second day of the class went smooth and as I predicted some of the conversations have been very interesting. Also like I predicted Jon is really awesome, he knows the material very well and has no problem admitting if he dosen’t have the answer to a question, but he gets the answer typically while we are doing the labs either by doing some quick research or calling one of his contacts. I can see Jon being a great contact through out my career.

Made it in to class this morning, bright and early at 8am…and went into the wrong building. I wasn’t the only one though, the entire class including the instructor did. It had to do with the way we were given the address and how the buildings are actually set up inside with the suites. Long complicated explanation short, I found the class. Interesting enough the instructor was one of the last people to arrive (on time I want to add, as I was just really early), and he (Jon Presti) seems really damn cool and I think he is going to be a great instructor. We have decided collectively to begin class at 8:30 instead of 8:00, which for me means another half hour to study before class because, lets face it, I will be up well in advanced. Anyway, the first day was really good. There are 8 guys in the class counting me and according to Jon, this is the first time he has had a class completely comprised of guys from enterprise level storage environments. Based on some of the conversations we had today in class I am thinking the conversations about storage are going to be very interesting and informative. I found out today that of the two exams I need to take to get my NCDA certification, one will be on Wednesday morning and the other will be on Saturday morning. The one on Saturday is supposed to be the more difficult of the two, so I am certain I will be spending all of my “free time” studying. Well, one day down, time to hit the books!

Flew in to Texas this afternoon (plane landed about 2:30pm Central / 3:30pm EST) and after finding may way out of the terminal I made my way to the bus for the rental car where I ended up getting a Dodge Caliber with a GPS system as my rental. First impression is that it is a decent car but not something I would want to own as I feel very cramped in it. I found my way to the hotel, TownePlace Suites, without to much of an issue. I say without much of an issue because it took me a little while to understand what the GPS (a Garmin Nuvi) was saying, mainly because every time I had to use an on or off ramp from a major highway (by the way Dallas and Las Colinas seems to be nothing but concrete and asphalt!) it sounded like it was saying to take the “sledge road” and that confused me, but luckily I could tell by the map what it wanted. After finding the hotel and getting checked in I decided I had better find my way to the class location so I would at least have an idea of how to get there in the morning. Turns out it’s not very difficult to get there but the main road is closed due to construction, of course, so I have to take a detour that puts me back out on the main road (Walnut Hill) about 15 yards from the driveway to the class location. Thankfully I have the GPS though because it was able to re-route and find a way back to the class location, and seeing as it is pretty straight forward I won’t need to use the GPS in the morning. After finding the class I then decided to go have dinner at a Sushi restaurant that Chuck recommended from when he was down here called The Blue Fish (this location), and I have to say it was very good! After dinner I came back to the hotel to relax and prepare for class, I have a feeling this is going to be a long week.