I'm applying to any location that will take me (from what I understand, that's either Ann Arbor or Mountain View). I'm about a 45 min drive from Mountain View, but if it means getting the chance to start my career at an organization like Google I'd move anywhere.

I ended up getting sick a few days before my interview, so I had to reschedule for next Thursday. On the bright side, that means another week of studying and practicing troubleshooting.

I'm about halfway through the Unix and Linux Administration Handbook, and I think that's going to help a lot. I also installed Arch linux to get a better low-level understanding of the installation process and boot loaders.

Also, as advice for anyone who is also applying (or really for anyone doing troubleshooting), [b]I got a really great piece of advice from a friend of mine who works in IT support : [/b]

[b]Rather than approaching problems with the mindset that you're fixing something that should be working correctly, approach it with the mindset of setting it up from scratch.[/b]

When you're getting information about the problem from a user I think it's pretty well known that you shouldn't assume that the customer's information is accurate, but it's hard to be totally conscious of all the things that you're assuming. I've been doing practice scenarios with my aforementioned friend, and he gave me some examples he's dealt with. On a few of them, I ended up assuming too much about what the user told me, and once I made that mistaken assumption I was lost, doomed to spin my wheels, getting more and more technical and further away from the painfully obvious (for example, a user being unable to login, with the cause being that they were trying to login to the wrong account).