Going Back to School

Last year I worked with my manager and created some lofty goals for the fiscal year which ends in March. One of those goals included getting a specific certification for a product I use on a daily basis. I figured it would be a slam-dunk to take a test and pass it. Then I put off doing anything about the certification until the last quarter of the year (January through March). Now it is time to get serious about accomplishing this goal.

I have never put much stock in professional certifications for myself. Often times it is a matter of someone being able to study for a bit and then having good test-taking skills. I don't know why I felt the need to add a certification at this point in my career. Perhaps it is something new that I haven't tried before. In any event I have spent my own money to get access to a study guide for the test.

The process for my professional certification seems very familiar to when I studied to get my amateur radio or ham license. I purchased a study guide, read through it, practiced with some sample tests, and paid money to take an exam. Today I purchased the study guide for a whopping $20. While my ham license study materials came in a physical book, the professional certification guide is 100% online. That is fine for me as I plan to study during work hours and will be in front of my computer.

I did a bit of studying today and then jumped into a sample test of 60 questions. The real one will contain 100 questions but this one gave me a good sampling of what to expect. I found that my day-to-day knowledge ensured I got 60% of the questions correct. The questions that caused the most problems are the ones with multiple answers. Instead of having a single correct answer you have to select all options that answer the question. On my first run through the test, I managed a 90%. I only need a 75% to achieve my certification but there are 17 more example tests to try.

Part of the problem with learning new things is quickly becoming bored. I am always posting about how we learn by doing things. What I need to do is take the new information and try to apply it in my day-to-day work. That will cement the knowledge and help make the test that much easier to pass when I sign up for it in the next month or so. We'll see how I do. 

Pulling Music from Compact Discs (CDs)

My youngest son and his wife gave my granddaughters a music player for Christmas. It is interesting in that it comes with paper cards with QR codes on them. When you want to play specific songs, you insert the card into the music player and it will play the songs. You can buy cards for popular artists or you can make your own with music you have purchased. My son knows I have a large number of Disney CDs and asked if I could help him bring the music over to the music player. I'm not listening to the CDs so I figured I would help him out.

Now I work for Sony which owns Sony Music and pirating music is a terminable offense. I like my job and so I would not make copies of music unless it is legal to do so. With CDs you are allowed to make a limited number of copies for your personal use. Effectively you can add them to your library, which is what I am technically doing. I'm not sharing the music with a large number of friends nor am I stealing it. I purchased the CDs and simply wish to share the songs with my family.

My son lives in Ohio and I could have shipped all of the Disney CDs to him through the mail. Unfortunately that would cost money and take time. We wanted to do a quick experiment to make sure the process works and so I converted the music to MP3 files. The point of this post is to share how I did that.

Step 1 - Make sure you have a CD player connected to your computer. While every computer used to come with a CD player, none of my current generation of laptops includes one. Fortunately I have a USB CD drive and I can connect it to any computer with a USB port.

Step 2 - Convert the songs from CDDA format to MP3. It has been over a decade since I have pulled songs off a CD and turned them into MP3 files. I had to look up how to do this on my Mac. While there are a number of software programs out there I could have downloaded to help with this process, I just put the CD into the drive and it pulled up Apple's music player. I then had the option to copy the files into my computer's music library. I then had 4 options for different music formats and I selected MP3. The music program stores the files in a sub-directory under the "music" folder for my computer account. It didn't take too much work to find the MP3 files.

Step 3 - Transfer the files to my son. All of the music files appear in a folder or directory. I just had to send my son the directory for each CD I added to my library. The easiest way to do this is with the help of Google drive (drive.google.com). I created a directory there and gave my son access and then just copied the music to it. I have a gigabit Internet connection and so it only took about 20 seconds to copy an entire CD.

Step 4 - Delete all unneeded copies of the music. As I am loaning the music to my granddaughters, it wouldn't be honest to keep the music on my computer and so I deleted it from the music app. I also deleted it from Google drive after my son downloaded the files.

It is nice to see that Apple recognizes that people want to create music libraries and they have not hindered the ability to do so. While I enjoy listening to streaming music, I actually own a lot of CDs and may add a lot of my favorite songs directly to my phone and computer. Then I can get away from those pesky ads on Spotify and listen to the music I already own.