A Race to the OCP Finish Line (Part 7: Attending the Class)

Turns out I am getting be a better deal than I previously thought.

I arrived at Oracle Philippines Office located along Makati Avenue Corner Buendia at Pacific Star Building and up to the 19th Floor on the first day, armed with the determination to get through the 5 day, 8 hour "work" week. (The class is from 9-5, including lunch)

The day went by without any problems, but I have a few things I'd like to comment on for my first day in class:


(1) The "snack" time previously mentioned to me by the Oracle University contact, Marianne Decena, seemed to be an understatement. There was one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, and suffice to say, the "snacks" seemed more like meals: For the first day, morning, we had a huge clubhouse sandwich, and for the afternoon, it was a take out of McDonald's speghetti. Both "snacks" were coupled with either complimentary water, iced tea, or orange juice. Seemed like a good deal.

(2) There was a nice Nescafe dispenser right before entering the classrooms which offered selections between cappucino, cafe latte and hot chocolate (there were other selections but I didn't take note of them as they didn't interest me all that much). I had as much fun time looking at the dispensing machine making my hot chocolate as drinking it, as it was really tasted wonderful. (Ok, it had a lot of sugar, but it still tasted like hot chocolate as comparable to a Starbucks ordered one. And this one is freebie, and in unlimited quantities, too!)

(3) Surprisingly, our instructor was from Oracle Hong Kong! This was a big plus on my part, as mentioned previously, I was considering taking up the classes in Oracle Hong Kong, but being put off by the price tag, selected the one in Oracle Philippines instead. So in reality, I'm just about getting the same stuff and instruction quality as if I've attended the Hong Kong based class!

(4) It seemed that there is a slight difference in the classroom time between Philippines and Hong Kong, as mentioned by the Hong Kong instructor, Wilson Yeung. Turns out, Hong Kong only had 6 hours worth of classroom time per day, as compared to the Philippine version, which was 7 hours. So I'm actually getting more out of my buck! (Ok more doesnt necessarily mean better, but its still a plus. I get to spend more of my money on firing questions at the instructor, as well as using up Oracle company resources. You can tell from my reasoning that I absolutely like bargain deals, don't you?)

(5) Contrary to what I expected, all the Oracle databases were running on Red Hat Linux Enterprise. This made me quite much at home with the environment, as opposed to a Windows based version (I absolutely hate the MS-DOS commandline) as I live off command lines more than GUI interfaces. Additionally, I also get to tinker with Red Hat Linux Enterprise, as most of my environments are based on UNIX. They are almost the same, but still also different in many ways. This was a good opportunity to see what differences abound between them, as well as other Linux distributions like Fedora, Slackware and Debian, since I've been trying to install and tinker with Linux distributions for the past few months.

(6) Also, luckily, I was glad that Oracle delivered a Hong Kong based instructor, as say, opposed to aSingaporean or Indian based instructor. This is in light of the fact that at the very first day of the class, all my other workshop colleagues where abosolutely complaining on the difficulty of understanding the Hong Kong english accent, and barely understanding a word of what he was saying. I, on the other hand, having lived in Hong Kong for quite sometime, was perfectly at home with his accent, and pace (Hong Kongers lived and strive to be fast, fast and FAST at everything they do, including talking)

(7) I seemed to also have picked up on naturally occuring cantonese words while I talk, and it was a great thing to have to be able to talk unconsciously and naturally to someone without them actually wondering or guessing what you are actually saying between snippets of english and cantonese.


Having said all that, it would seem that this is going to be a very entertaining and enlightening workshop after all, despite the fact that I'd be sitting on my ass for the next five days for 8 hours straight and being flooded with all the technical details that refer to Oracle. Hey, even a DBA girl needs a break once in a while. :)