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First time I’ve got to see Sunderland in person this season (though watched a couple of matches on TV), and other than being a division lower and having had an influx of players, not much difference Weird seeing Roy Keane in the dugout and Dwight Yorke on the pitch in a Sunderland shirt, but they still seem to have a basic lack of control and common sense. There were some excellent moves in the first half, but just didn’t lead anywhere or broke down. Some excellent passing combinations would be ruined by stupid errors – either players being over-confident and trying things beyond their skill, or simply loosing concentration.

Thankfully, and no disrespect meant, Sheffield Wednesday were poor. Against better opposition, especially in the second half, Sunderland would have conceeded at least two goals. Poor linesman decisions didn’t help, with some Sunderland players clearly becoming paranoid and not running through when on the ball. Ironic that Leadbitter’s goal came from a pretty poor couple of minutes play!

But, as we had passes for the Black Cats bar, turned out to be a good afternoon. Much nicer standing having a couple of drinks in a warm, comfortable, carpeted bar rather than surrounded by concrete pillars, burger stalls and toilets! Seats were pretty good too, just off to the side of the goal, but up in the Black Cats club seating area meaning padded seats. Makes such a difference, really does!

Nice to get to another match with dad too – it’s his 60th birthday tomorrow and my birthday on Tuesday, so was kind of an early celebration maybes, but also good to spend some more time together. Think all the matches towards the end of last season were part of a realisation I wasn’t going to be there much longer. Didn’t expect to still be here *this* season, but good to make the most of it!

Looks like my Apple Certification profile has been updated – shows which exams you have passed along with the score (which is cool – the Microsoft certification center didn’t do this IIRC), and automatically displays relevant exams where your current certifications are core requirements to aid planning out your next steps.

So, with the OS X Server Essentials exam being next (which I started the studying for today), it’s already showing what I need to do in order to be classed as an Apple Certified Technical Co-ordinator (pass the server exam basically…). It’s also showing that since I’ve done the OS X Support Essentials exam, I now have a core requirement for the portables + desktop hardware certifications. I like it, as the Microsoft certification centre had a planner, but it was quite clunky and didn’t display things anywhere as cleanly – that said, I haven’t logged in to that for a couple of years!

All good fun, and I’m pretty proud of it

With the current hosting plan with Lycos due to expire at the end of October, have been looking around at other webhosts. There’s quite a few sites I run elsewhere, and seems silly to pay for various different hosting plans, but most are fairly limited in terms of number of domains which can be managed from them. UK hosting companies suck. Plus, with moving to the US sometime soon (God I’ll be happy when I don’t have to keep saying ‘sometime soon’…), I wanted to run things from a US-based server.

So, I opened up a hosting plan with GoDaddy which although some people have had problems with, most of my domains are managed by them without issues and it’s always the case that you only hear the negatives. I’ve never talked about webhosts when they’ve ‘just worked’. The new server lets me manage multiple domains as separate sites which is nice, but it meant any domains already handled with GoDaddy automatically had their DNS entries changed to tie in with the new hosting plan. Normally, I wouldn’t argue – one less thing for me to. But, effectively it took 3 of my sites offline and displayed a nice ‘website under construction’ page

Just about getting the Unsigned Rock Podcast back up + running, but rather than being able to plan a slow migration, it’s a bit more frantic now! Have got holding pages up on the other sites now, so fingers crossed it will all be sorted in the next couple of hours. I won’t move fouldsy.com justyet, thankfully both domain + hosting is managed by Lycos so this carries on and lets me move everything across, bring it all online, and test before making the switch! Also means e-mail runs as normal, so bear with me – I’ve already refers in from other sits wondering what’s happening

Needing 62% to pass, thought it would be best to make sure and get 86%

Pretty pleased with myself, and was all fairly straightforward from using it on a daily basis and going through the Apple Training guide. As with all the IT certification exams I’ve done, some tricky questions designed to catch you out, but nothing too serious. Found these much better + rewarding than the Microsoft exams, as whereas the Microsoft exams delivered questions that were asking for the ‘Microsoft answer’ or straightforward ‘pick the only answer that looks vaguely relevant’, the OS X Support Essential exam was regularly prompting for 2 or 3 responses for each question.

For any else looking at sitting this exam, make sure you prepare well, and go over the skills assement guide from Apple – I wasn’t expecting quite as many questions in some areas such as command line interface, but the skills assesment guide did hint at this. So long as you’re comfortable in day-to-day usage, should be fine.

Big title, but it now means I’m an Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist. Onto the OS X Server Essentials exam now to make it Apple Certified Technical Co-ordinator!

Been a big fan of RC cars for years, and raced them quite succesfully for a couple of years in my mid-late teens, but I was mainly doing off-road 2wd + 4wd buggies than on-road touring + drift. Still, this is a pretty cool video, if only for the some of the camera shots taken from other RC cars!

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I had to go have breakfast and come back to check on this one to make sure I’d read it right. After 8/9 months of words such as ‘unfortunately’ or ‘request for more information’ or ‘please send additional…’, the status of the US visa application was updated yesterday:

‘This case has been approved. On September 21, 2006, an approval notice was mailed.‘

Holy smokes Batman! Still a while off actually getting the visa in my hand and plane tickets booked as the application gets refered back to a central office to be processed off to the relevant embassy, and I then have to return some futher forms before going to London for an interview. But, at least they haven’t put things back even further or rejected it outright!

I was looking over some of the events taking place at LinuxWorld UK Expo at the end of October, and some of the workshops and seminars looked pretty cool. Don’t think I’ll head down as can’t exactly fob it off as work-related anymore, and don’t really have money floating round to jump on a plane or train down to London for a couple of days. Went down just for one day a couple of years back, and it was a long, but rewarding day – would recommend it to anyone already around the London area.

But, one of the sessions is being hosted by ‘Chris Lewis MCSE‘. Nothing against the guy, don’t know him from Adam, and never met him, but why on earth would you want to brag about being an MCSE when speaking at Linux convention? I’ll wager there are speakers that are RHCE or LPI certified that aren’t detailing it on the programme. I’m not judging him, but can give a ton of people I know in the Linux community that will instantly turn-on off to someone holding Microsoft certifications, even if they’re promoting migration from Windows to Linux-based networks in the enterprise.

Wish him the best of luck with his presentation though – he might need it!

Didn’t take long I suppose, only started 4 days ago. Have gone right through the OS X Support Essentials training book from Apple, and it all seems very straightforward. A few new things such as the startup sequence, but most of the networking, peripherals, printing, troubleshooting, account management, command line interface, etc. isn’t anything new from my Linux + Windows background. If you were just jumping in with this training, then it probably would be quite a bit to take in, and I’m sure the server essentials will be a bit more challenging having not worked with OS X Server, so I don’t feel that I’ve just skipped through and think I know it all, honest!

So, booked in for the exam on Monday afternoon – may as well give it a go since it’s all so fresh. None of the self-test questions in the training book have caused problems, and the dozen or so example questions from the Apple site didn’t either. I definately feel prepared, so we’ll see how it goes

I picked up on this a few weeks ago, but since it’s getting closer to the date and I got e-mailed about it within the last couple of days, thought I’d post it up.

The Free Software Foundation, who I’ve been a supporter of for quite a while now, have been pushing for protests against DRM including clauses within the GPL v3 which has been causing plenty of debates for months now. But, they’ve picked my birthday (hint hint!) as a major focus point for protesting against DRM. Check out their announcement on “Day Against DRM” to find out more, including how to sign their petition and anything you can do help out.

No wise comments about how I own a MacBook and an iPod – you’ll find no iTunes-purchased music on the iPod as I abhor it, it’s all podsafe music on there or music I’ve imported from my own CD’s. I support the FSF on this one, especially since it’s clear the kind of problems DRM causes when you look at what will happen when Microsoft’s Zune played gets released – that doesn’t look it will even play it’s own Windows Media encrypted formats!

I’ve been looking at studying for some further certifications since I have plenty of free time now, as before I wasn’t that motivated or energetic enough after doing a full day working with computers then having to go home and get the books out for a couple of hours.

The Microsoft Certified Professional exams I did a couple of years back were nice at the time since it was relevant to work, but then I didn’t see the point in studying additional areas I wasn’t working with. The same with the Cisco Certified Networking Associated academy course + exams I did through college. Most people know my feeling towards certifications – if they’re relevant, fine, but a long list of bits of paper needs to be backed up with hands-on skills + experience!

With moving up to Alaska and the school district exclusively running Apple systems, I’d looked at Apple training a few months back, and with the MacBook really impressing me, I’ve been keen to learn more.

So, I’m starting out with Mac OS X Support Essentials exam which gives Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist (ACHDS) status once completed (sounds fancy!) and then adding on Mac OS X Server Essentials exam to bring it up to Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) once completed (which sounds even fancier!).

The Support Essentials looks fairly straight-forward from using the MacBook on a daily basis or just basic common sense on networking + peripheral questions, with the Server Essentials exam adding on further networking and server topics (funnily enough!). The two of them together work quite nicely and should hopefully give a very rounded grounding in being able to look after desktop + server support.

The only sumbling block is lack of experience on OS X Server and now real availability for playing around with one, but so long as I can keep myself motivated I’m planning on having both the exams completed within a couple of months – feel free to keep e-mailing me, bugging me to get back some studying!