AI Certification in the Thermionic Age

The Test Centre Experience

Adjusting the camera, he surmised that I was a much taller candidate than others who had been there recently. I had just signed on the signature pad, and many unsuccessful attempts were made to capture a picture of my face before I stepped forward a bit, took off my glasses, and he was satisfied with the essential security checks.

Yet he had erroneously added my details to another candidate's profile; we had to do it all over again. I only realised his error when he signed me onto the testing computer. Clicking on the scheduling for the other candidate, I saw a better picture of my visage than the one eventually used for my profile.

How Pearson VUE happens upon these test centres with kit that seems to have been acquired from an antiques shop, in a throwback to a time when computers were powered by thermionic valves, does amaze one. I have been to some dire places, and this tanks the rankings.

A Journey to Altrincham

I was in Altrincham yesterday, some 8 miles (13 kilometres) to the southwest of Manchester, attending the nearest test centre to acquire a new Microsoft certification on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Whilst I had determined to do this for months, I struggled to get through the material. The German instructor on one of the Udemy courses had a good grasp of the subject, but I could not engage with the accent, the grammar or the delivery. It felt like extreme drudgery, and I abandoned all study with a sense of dissatisfaction and lethargy.

Finding New Momentum

Then, whilst having a long break in December after my birthday and Christmas (I tend to use my holidays for study and tests), I gained some enthusiasm for just completing the cycle and closing the books on this test before the end of the year.

I completed the original Udemy course and took another, gaining the view that I had mastered the material. I then got Google's Gemini 3 Pro AI bot to produce interactive flashcards, along with the code to make them portable and playable as standard HTML files.

However, when I tried the free practice tests on Whizlabs, the gaps in my knowledge were laid bare. I went back to the Microsoft Learn study material, which now included video rather than just text-based training. Where certain concepts were still not as clear, I got AI to provide a layman's explanation with examples and use cases. I use the Poe.com interface to access AI bots, which gives me access to the broadest complement of publicly available AI bots.

Discovering NotebookLM

I discovered Google's NotebookLM in August, but never really exploited it beyond the novelty it provided then. It is a virtual research assistant that takes input from sources you provide on documents and references to turn complexity into clarity.

As a note-taking and study tool, it has amazing benefits of transforming your sources into audio and video overviews, mind maps, reports, flashcards, quizzes, infographics or slide decks.

Curating 50 sources of material, including that which its Deep Research feature was able to gather, I produced an extended last-minute audio overview of about 37 minutes in length that covered every critical idea that might be covered in the test. I listened to it twice before I arrived at the test centre. That was my last bit of revision: listening rather than reading. The leveraging of AI to the maximum to ace an AI test.

I had 45 minutes to answer 46 questions; there were not just straight multiple-choice selection answers either. I got caught out in July 2022 when, having not played in the testing sandbox provided by Microsoft, I wasted valuable time understanding how to navigate the interface, though thankfully, I passed the test. On this occasion, I was done in just over 23 minutes. I rarely ever do a review; I ended the test and got a good passing score.

Looking Ahead

Obviously, there is probably a need for a piece on how I use AI for day-to-day activities at work, for study and other aspects of life, including the grammatical reviews of my blogs.

With the AI-900: Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals certificate under my belt, that makes three certifications this year. I can only wonder what next year has in store.

Caught in the act of keyboard bashing again

The incurable itch

There are times when I delude myself into thinking I am a writer, but the reality might suggest that all these years of blogging are pretensions to an ability I barely possess. "An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts." The Roman poet Juvenal's Satires X.

However, the translation from Latin suffers from so many kinds of paraphrasing and interpretation that it has become the more popular variation: "Writing is an incurable itch that affects many." Whilst I might have that occasional itch, it has become quite benign. I cannot be bothered to scratch it, nor is it so serious that I need a salve for it.

It is like learning to live with an infirmity; the inadequacy rings loud in your head, urging you to stop and pursue something else that belies a modicum of talent. On the other side, perhaps persistence counts for something. You do it long enough, it becomes practised, and you grow better at it. You gain the confidence that the little you manage to express can pass muster.

When I woke up just 25 minutes ago to think of something to write before the day's end, I felt it might be a jumble of incoherent words landing in an order that might suggest lucidity, but is clearly a malady bordering on insanity. Who really cares? Just bash the keyboard with your thoughts and see how itchy you really can get.

Embrace the mistakes and learn

 Breaking out of perfect

Attending an interview that became the impetus for an almost 13-year sojourn in The Netherlands, I was asked a question about a scenario I had never encountered in all the environments I had ever worked in before. I had no answer to what the interviewer must have thought would be the dealbreaker of suitability to fill in the role.

Having answered all other questions, I was asked if I had any comments, and I took the opportunity to seek an answer to the question that stomped me before returning home to research what it was all about. I concluded to myself that the reason I had never encountered that issue was that the environments in which I had worked were almost too perfect and where no problems arose, there was no challenge to normalcy or quest for any resolution.

Problems and practice are necessary

In my professional life, there is a lot of documentation about how to design, setup, and implement features and products, but what do you do when things do not work as required or expected? That is where knowledge and experience are created, the art of troubleshooting is honed in the hard craft of practice and research, seeking out where things might have deviated from the norm and reviewing experiences of others in the field to augment, enhance, and improve your knowledge and expertise towards becoming a subject matter expert.

That aspect of practice and discovery is all too necessary along with the inevitable mistakes that dot a life of determination, adventure, application, daring, and accomplishment. We all know we are not perfect, but we are always getting better, the more time and effort we put into understanding how things work and consequently why they fail to work as intended.

Face the fear of failure

Yet, this does not just apply to the narrow area of the use of technology but any useful endeavour. As a conversation with Brian, the other way gave birth to some conceptual thinking about the fear of making mistakes. The strains of what I said turned into what might be a saying, a note to myself and to anyone else with whom it might resonate.

“If you don't make mistakes, you can't correct them, you don't learn from them and you have no practice necessary to perfect your craft. The fear of making mistakes ultimately robs you however close or remote, of the possibility of genius. Mistakes help you become the best.” Now, go and do that thing you were afraid to do because of your fear of failure or embarrassment.

Thought Picnic: Laying bricks of course

As the hours count

The day ebbs and flows with the feeling that I am watching the waves by the seashore. Every moment is a state of meditative contemplation of how each passing minute that mounts into hours might have been usefully lived.

Then there are times when the quiet, the idle and the void of nothingness feels cavernous enough to swallow you in dispirited awakening, you ask whether a better day is possible, even as you arrest yourself from despair.

Slowly getting there

Methodically and sometimes painfully so, I direct my concentration to things I need knowledge of. Things of which practice is needed to gain expertise and dexterity with good recall towards informed comment and I am surprised that slow but steady progress made.

Between reading, striving through curiosity and discovery, and watching courses played back on my television, the building blocks of knowledge with insight are being laid. Just something said and many other things begin to make sense. Handwritten notes and typed out comments on OneNote become the compendium the art and science of my profession.

I guess the most important thing on my mind is not work, it is life, love, and Brian.

By unexpected determination

Willing and unable

For weeks, I was concerned for my lack of productivity, self-development somewhat moribund and the firefighting activities going on at work not advancing any knowledge or insight. Things appeared to be stagnant as motivation faded into lethargy.

At other times, I would have tried to gird myself into focusing on achieving something, but there isn’t enough going on for that kind of realignment. However, just after watching the church service on television on Sunday, I decided to read through some documentation I downloaded during the last week to see if there was some information to guide me through linking my home environment to the cloud.

Learning by doing

Pieces of work left unfinished in snatches of time had begun to come together. After finding the chapter that could help me through, I began the process of sorting out the hybrid cloud setup, encountering issues that needed resolution, and learning as each issue got solved. A few missteps, a near catastrophe deftly recovered.

Soon, the basics were done with the essential synchronisation between my home test environment and my personal company cloud environment. The next day, I started on fixing the management components on systems I did not cater that well for as a unit. Having completed that, I continued with the cloud integration process, gaining more insight.

Knowledge all ways

Back at work also, some seemingly intractable problems revealed much more about the root cause in the myriad logs we need to pore through to find a resolution. The breakthrough there was quite good. Just as at home, each day, I was trying something new out for a couple of hours and recording my findings on OneNote.

It would appear that much has been accomplished this week with a good crossover of knowledge elements between work and home. I feel quite happy with this and it means I can move on to the next tranche of experiments and testing. I guess that is how confidence built and expertise is acquired.

Keeping up to excel at it

It is the challenge you rise to

“Let me ask is it hard for you to be up to date?” That was a question from an ex-colleague with whom I have maintained contact on a professional and social level for the last couple of years. Our conversations weave in and out of life and work issues. I never tire of addressing any of the things that come up for discussion.

My professional Information Technology career started in October 1988, but things have changed so radically over the last 32 years. My niche area of expertise that I was first co-opted into began in 1996 and there have been so many iterations of the product that though the fundamentals are the same, the scope of its influence is humongous.

The answer is simple and it is likely anyone else will answer in the same vein. “It is not easier, it requires more discipline, practice, and reading. Experience helps, but new things are new things, you have to learn them properly.” I spend a lot of my free time learning to be better at what I do, because change is constant, not keeping up leads to irrelevance.

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” General Eric Shinseki

Thought Picnic: Looking in the mirror of cruel self-assessment

Answer like a fool

I have mentally played back some interview scenarios I had previously in the light of recently acquired knowledge, I feel like I have been a fool.

The interviews were not face-to-face but audio conversations over the phone. Where two interviewers might have sat together, I can only imagine the look of incredulity with possible utter surprise at what I was saying.

I probably had a good idea of what I needed to say, but giving an answer that was much broader beyond the stated function of an application would have left me looking like an idiot, even if my thinking was right.

Dig in

For all the knowledge I have, the intricacy of the systems and the complicated planning that goes into deployments requires practice.

It is an employer’s market out there; they can be as fussy as they like to be, because of the saturated pool of job seeking and hungry experts looking for an opportunity.

Much as I need favour, I also need to continue to work on improving on the areas where I am weak. I cannot afford to replay another interview scenario back in my mind and just realise that as I gnawed with my toothless jaw and bruised gums at the bone of the question, I am presenting myself in the theatre of the macabrely stupid.

Gosh! What work I make of myself, I need a tonic of life.

Thought Picnic: My Interview Weaknesses

Interviews are not the same

We all interview in very different ways depending on the situation, the circumstance and the opportunity. In my case, interviews have straddled the spectrum of a grilling interrogation to a friendly discussion sometimes without a definitive inkling as to whether I will be considered suitable for the role or not.

It is not easy to determine what to expect at an interview and when it is not face-to-face, it is more difficult to project oneself as well especially where a question presents a difficulty in coming up with clear answers.

My lacking in ability

Whilst I am fine with telephone interviews, I will only attend a Skype interview without the video element, though I can remember about 14 years ago where I attended an interview at a recruitment agent’s office, it was recorded on video and sent to panel working for the employers where current employees voted on who they liked and that determined eligibility.

Recently, I have noticed that I am not that good at core technical narratives, much as I have been doing what I do for over a decade, I fully understand the workings and the innards but the hypothetical scenarios I get given at interview leave me wanting for expression and jargon, I am almost tongue-tied.

Planning ahead of typical troubles

Another disadvantage I seem to have had comes from not experiencing some of the issues that come up in questions I have to answer, it was interesting when the interviewer said on reflection that I probably take time to plan out and capture as much as I can of the situation before I design and implement solutions – I end up with fewer management and critical issues and by reason of that, I am probably not as tested as those who have to fight fires daily because of unforeseen issues and much else.

Where one is engaged to design from scratch, one is at an advantage but in situations where one is to maintain an existing but flawed deployment solution change might be difficult to instigate and implement for more political than technical reasons.

Swotting to swat the quiz

I find I still have to learn to exude to the level that I know to do in a practical setting; reading gives words to the actions I have literally learnt to perfect, creating scenarios and painstakingly working through each to some working conclusion creates consistent workflow processes that I hope I will find words to express when asked at interview.

Most pertinently, I rarely attempt to reinvent the wheel, so many have travelled the roads I travel and have documented hard-won lessons that come in handy every time, I am grateful to them because it usually means, if I know what to look for, I will find a clue, a pointer, a thinking, a process, an implementation or a solution that I can adapt and use to perfect the imperfect situation I am facing.

Books still matter

Sometimes, that is simply what an expert is, not the person who can give a good talk but the person who understands the general problem and knows how to seek out solutions that work.

Meanwhile, back to the books, there is much theory to refresh until it becomes the Shibboleth of interview success.

Thought Picnic: Home is far from that home

An answer 40 years on

One of those incidental conversations with the patriarch brought some insight into why he did not go into practice but remained a corporation man.

As a community person with dependant relations he felt he did not outlay to branch out on his own when he had to consider the responsibilities he had and the way demands were made on the resources he had.

One had always wondered why as an accountant and a brilliant one at that, why, and the answer came in a conversation that has become the mainstay of the discussions for the past year.

Being too good for company

Here, one is, a single man who has not been in a serious relationship for 11 years after 7 years of wonderful partnership, one sometimes wonders if the residual effects of that break-up has left indelible scars that any new prospect has not had the commitment desired.

Having lived alone for 15 years, it is quite a big ask to expect that the comforts of individuality would be jettisoned for the prospect of some tenancy based of whatever relationship that could be conjured in the minds of those that will it.

Indeed, the need for help in very vulnerable times is essential but that need should not as others desire become the impetus for partnership, but that view does not gel with him.

At least this time, he half conceded that he could only give advice the choices were left to the principals affected and the conversation developed further.

Pretensions to a weakening link

Over half of one’s life has been spent in Europe and most especially the last 20 years, whilst there is an affinity for things Nigerian, one must not pretend to greater integration with Nigeria than one really is.

The continuing fight has been the struggle to be accepted there even if one does not imbibe most of the nuances, the idea that the final years would be best spent in Nigeria is wishful at best – there exists no such inclination and Nigeria does not need to subscribe to some Saviour-complex where the Moses from abroad has come to lead the people out of slavery.

Whilst one can comment extensively on a whole range of issues as to be so affected and concerned about them, there has to be the resignation to the fact that sometimes some Nigerian norms and mores would just never be fully understood and appreciated.

Can change be instigated from afar? Maybe not. Is the society ready for change commandeered from within but spearheaded from returnees? Only if it would not breed animosity, resentment and unrelenting opposition.

In grave doubt

We can only share what we have and hope that in the end common-sense would prevail – there are no life goals detailed for Nigeria and besides for all sorts of reasons and most especially that of health and the maintenance of what one has by the help of good medical services – visits are opportunities but residence is completely out of the question.

In some ways, one is not convinced that a visit would not breed an ulterior motive of keeping one there, a foreboding and anticipation which belies that feeling of not trusting fully the goodwill of interested parties leaves one considering a neutral meeting place where no one has undue influence to marshal an agenda detrimental to the other.

FGM banned in Eritrea

Too prevalent for comfort

This is topic I think experts would celebrate better than I could in this write up. I was quite shocked to find out how prevalent it was in Africa, Middle-East and Indonesia, no more so when I also heard that the practices does still thrive in Nigeria.

Learning that Eritrea has banned the practice of Female Genital Mutilation or Circumcision (FGM or FGC) is definitely great news and to be celebrated.

It marks a beginning of what should be a wave of the civilising of customs, traditions and religious practices that cause undue physical harm without any particular health benefit apart from a modicum of social acceptance.

With this law, the practitioners of these acts of mutilation who are usually female too and matriarchs of those communities when caught could face fines and possible imprisonments.

Enforcing the law

However, the issue at hand would be how to break down the ranks after this illegal act has been committed; people can be sworn to silence, risk ostracism within their communities or even suffer worse fates like "honour killing" - basically, one wonders about the enforceability of this law.

Beyond this is the need to health and material support for the victims of this heinous mutilation which at times to other health complications.

Now, we also have the aspect of Male Genital Mutilation known as circumcision which seemingly has a religious progeny has been found to provide health benefits in arresting the spread of HIV/AIDS, this is no way comparable to the mutilation that females suffer as a rite of passage into womanhood.

Conserving the good bits

In all, there is no way that the 4 listed types of mutilation which are just too revolting and despicable to list here but covers excision of critical parts of female sexual organs and in some cases the application of corrosive substances can be justified in the 21^st Century, in fact, it is violent abuse and now considered a violation of human rights by the UN. The other types are no less atrocious in trying to understand what they are trying to achieve.

It is time to ensure that these archaic and barbaric customs are rolled back and consigned to history; we should not condone or countenance anymore the sacrifice of human beings to customs, traditions, culture or religious practices just for the sake of keeping uncivilised practices alive.

We can conserve the positive parts of our heritage whilst losing the negative parts without necessarily losing our identity, acts of separation and differentiation through mutilation have no place in what is now a global village of interacting peoples.

Finally, it is a welcome development that even Muslim scholars have called for an end to this practice, with bans and sanctions; it might require religious leaders sounding the word from the pulpit about how unnecessary these acts are without rubbing up too hard on long held but out-dated customs - the abuse must be stopped forthwith.

References

FGM on the rise in the UK - 2004

Images of FGC - cautionary viewing advised