Saturday 6th November 2004 Last night we went out to a "pasta night" at the
Marche Club in Campbelltown. It's an Italian Club, and it has a large hall where
they had laid out a dance floor and a live band (playing Italian music, of course).
It was a fundraiser for Marie's school, as they are taking a few students to
Italy for 3 weeks, and as it is very expensive, they are raising funds to subsidise
the trip, specifically for the museums and other places that they will visit.
We had a table with Marie's family, and we were joined by Cathy and Julia (Ann's
Italian schoolfriend and her daughter). Thomas had a highchair, and even though
it was well past his bedtime, he really enjoyed the activity.
Thomas particularly enjoyed the disco ball, and when the music and singing was
happening, he was bouncing up and down and really enjoying it. When there were
speeches, and the audience was applauding, Thomas joined in - he thought that
it was great fun.
They brought out "all we could eat" pasta, which was some extremely
tasty mushroom ravioli, some great meat tagliatelle, and a tomato penne. They
even catered for Marie's current penchant for vegetarian food with a pesto pasta.
We all ate until we nearly burst - Thomas had a taste of a few things too.
Ann and I don't dance at the best of times, but neither of us were in the mood
for dancing. We left early to put Thomas to bed, and hoped that if he was going
down 3 hours later than usual, that he might lie in for three more hours on
Saturday morning.
We were woken at 7am by Thomas this morning. Unfortunately, his lack of sleep meant that he was grouchy all day.
After my experiences in job hunting, we decided that I should
formalise my skills and complete some of the exams that would give me industry-respected
qualifications. We had the option to pay the $8,000 ish cost for formal course
materials, or to progress as far as I can with self study materials that I already
have, and only pay the $270 for each exam attempt.
I have to pass at least 7 exams to get the MCSE qualification, but if I take
the exam and fail then I have to pay for another exam. With the expensive formal
course materials, I have a higher chance of passing, but I still have to pay
for the exams. Using the books that I already have, then I can learn the skills
and only pay for the exams when I think that I am ready to pass.
So, today I started reading one of the 1700 page manuals that I have, to fill
in the gaps with 'best practice' information. I have 13 books to read, on 4
different technologies. Once I have read all the books, I will purchase practice
test books and then do the exams.
It may seem a big step for me to read 10,000+ pages of technical manuals, but
it's not really that hard - most of the books that I have are designed for easy
reference, and almost 70% of the pages are information that I already know.
But, I have to read every page, just in case there is one sentence of information
in there that I didn't previously know...
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on this entryRain and more rain. Thunder and wind, and nothing to cheer us up. Ann and I are in surprisingly good mood considering our situation and the weather. Yesterday we bought a film on cable, and watched it a couple of times. Ann said (after we had paid the $5.75 for the film) that she had never once liked a film with Jack Nicholson in, so "Something's Gotta Give" had to be good. When we started watching, Thomas woke up from his afternoon nap, and so sat and played between the lounge and the TV. Typically, he wanted to play with all his noisy toys during the quietest and most emotional parts of the film. Luckily, the system that we have with Foxtel is that once you pay for a film, you can watch it as many times as you want between 6am and 5am (all day) - and because this film is a new release, there were 2 start times per hour, so it was easy for us to start watching the film again later.
I finished my first self-study book today. It was divided
into 30 sessions that are meant to last 30 minutes, and the book is set out
so that you can complete it in a weekend, with Friday evening to Sunday afternoon
sessions. I learnt some new stuff from the book, and noticed a few errors (things
like, "IIS web server is installed by default on a new installation of
Windows Server 2003", which it is not) - but I feel that I need to complete
this, no matter what my next career step is.
I have started on the next manual and self-study books. I am doing two at once,
because the self-study guide is advising me to start processes that take some
time to complete, and whilst I am waiting I am reading another manual.
Australian Pop Idol this evening is down to the last 3. Ann is glued to the TV at the moment, cheering at each singer like a teenage girl. I am staying well away from her at this time.
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Last night my mother called from England, just for a chat.
Unfortunately, whilst I was on the phone, I noticed a large White-Tail
spider under the dining room table, which had obviously come into the house
to shelter from the thunderstorm. Whitetails
are particularly worrying to have around Thomas, as their bites are linked with
necrotising
arachnidism - where your skin around the bite starts to 'dissolve' into
ulcers and necrosis lesions and can require skin grafts to repair the tissue
damage.
Anyway, I was on the phone when I saw it, and called over Ann to try and keep
an eye on it whilst I get something to get rid of it with. My poor mother on
the end of the line heard all the discussion and panic as the spider chased
us around the table legs, not exactly a good introduction to her visit in just
over one month.
Today the weather has been easing up, but it's still raining. The farmers are complaining that there is now too much rain, and there have been floods over the east coast. There are still some places in Australia which are officially in a drought (even with the flooding), because the water table is so depleted and it could take years of rain to replace the water taken in the average summer. The government has given the go ahead for a desalination plant (somewhere in Australia, can't remember where), at a huge cost, more than the cost of reservoirs and repairing existing water plants. Water is a major issue in Australia.
A really funny thing happened with Thomas a few days ago.
He loves the remote controls that we use for the TV, video, Foxtel, DVD, stereo.
I'm sure that all of you suffer the same problem with lots of remotes. Thomas
has a great ability for finding them, no matter where we hide them.
One afternoon, Ann and I were in the kitchen and Thomas was sitting and playing
in front of the TV. Somehow he managed to get hold of the remote that we use
the most often - the Foxtel digital cable remote. It looks the same as a UK
Sky digital remote, and I'm sure that if you have seen one, you know that it
has buttons to enter the setup screen for the digital box.
When we looked over to check on Thomas, the sound had been turned down, and
Thomas was pointing the remote at the TV and pressing buttons. When we looked
at the screen, we could see that he was in the menu for setup, and that he was
very quickly pressing buttons and going through the menus. Then, to our horror,
we saw him go to the page for changing our PIN, and then the screen showed 4
stars appear, then a message saying "your PIN has been successfully changed".
Can you imagine trying to explain to the Foxtel people that we had no idea of
what our PIN was because our 1 year old baby had changed it? There was no way
to ask Thomas what number he had entered, or to try and work out what PIN he
had given us. We use our PIN frequently to purchase Box Office pay-per-view
movies (same cost as renting a video), so we were not too happy, but still laughing
over how Thomas had managed to do this.
It was then that we realised that Thomas had changed the channel to the "help
and tutorial" channel, which was simply showing us how to change the PIN
- Thomas had not done anything.
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on this entryThe weather has let up a bit, so Ann has been hurriedly doing all the washing so that it can dry outside. We don't have a tumble drier, but there is a mounting on the wall in the laundry where we could put one. It seems very common in Australia for driers to be wall mounted above the washing machine in the laundry room - a very good idea.
<rant> A very bad idea in Australia is the number of sockets that they put in houses. One thing that really annoys me when we look around houses (either those for sale, or show homes that you can buy off plans), is that they rarely have enough electrical sockets. For example, in our lounge room, we have a socket for the cable TV on one wall, but no power sockets within 7 metres of it - there are even doors and corridors in the way of the closest socket. So, either we have to run a power cable across the door, or the cable TV cable across the corridor - either way it's dangerous. In Thomas' room, there is a phone socket and a TV point, but only a single power socket, and in the laundry, there is a double socket for the whole room - right next to the sink! How can we plug a washer, drier, freezer and iron in? When we were shipping our stuff from the UK, I calculated that we had 47 power plugs that needed to be replaced with Australian plugs, but in this house (and it's a typical house), there are only 17 sockets (including one in each bathroom).</rant>
Thomas has been a bit miserable today, moaning and whining whilst crawling around. We think that it is some more teeth coming through, because he has red cheeks, dribbles a lot and often puts his fingers in his mouth when moaning - normally a sign of teething. I brushed his teeth with the strawberry flavoured toothpaste (why can't I get strawberry toothpaste for me?), and that seemed to pacify him a bit. He is also crawling around with his teething ring in his mouth, which seems to help.
I haven't had much time to read my self-study and manuals
today, as I spent most of the morning filling in complex and long applications
for some new jobs. Government and University jobs often have more complex application
processes, where they want me to post them 3 copies of my CV, along with forms
from their website and documents that address their selection criteria and person
descriptions - often with nearly 20 comments such as "Demonstrated track
record of an advanced ability to work in complex and challenging environments
with cross functional project teams with multiple external and internal project
stakeholders", so I have to write a paragraph why I meet that selection
criteria. It takes time and I have to be careful about every word.
I managed to do another 250 pages of my Exchange 2003 Advanced Administration
manual this afternoon, the permissions topology has really confused me - I had
to build a test system to see what they were on about in the manual.
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on this entryAnn dropped into the pool with Thomas again today. Thomas loves the swimming, but this time he was a little better about getting out - he did not cry and scream. There were 5 other mums in the class, but the class just before us had only 3 mums in it - it's just the luck of the draw.
Last night I was looking at someone's website, and saw their
web counter which displayed that they had had 2000 visits since 1997. So, I
decided to add a web counter to the bottom of this homepage. Web counters have
been around ever since web sites started appearing, and I have often seen them
on 'personal' websites - commercial sites often avoid telling people how few
people have been to their site.
I started by looking around for free
web counters, but most of them insist that you have a link back to the provider
(often with a very large image), and some even have advertising in them. I then
looked around to find a way that I could write the code that makes them - again
this proved to be not very fruitful. Then I remembered that when I wanted to
put the messageboard up, I had spent a few hours downloading the software and
then sending it up to my web site, then configuring it for a while before it
worked - then I found that on the web page that allows me to administer my website,
there was a link to a tool that would automatically install and set up the exact
same 
messageboard.
So, I looked through the many options
that I have on the website, and found a link that would allow me to have a free
web counter, and what's more - it is calculated back from my original statistics
and so the display is an accurate value.
As an added bonus, there was also the ability to create a
search
facility for this site - so that you can search for content that is on the
Wickham website. All I had to do was write a small page to display the results.
Well, that kept me occupied and my mind active for a few hours.
I finished the Exchange 2003 manual today, and started on another Exchange 2003 manual. Most of the stuff is tediously over-worded, for example, there are 12 pages on how to change the limit on someone's email mailbox, when it's only 4 clicks and it's pretty easy to work out. But then there can be sections where there is a paragraph about something really complex, and it advises you to press F1 and use the help function that's in the product - but you can't get there unless you have a server with multiple network cards and IPSec policies! Grrr....
Sorry for loosing some of you there - got to have a rant occasionally.
This afternoon I got a call from an agency saying that EDS want to interview me for a contract position tomorrow morning. It's up to six months and will keep me going over Christmas. It's not the best paying contract, but I will have to ask more about it tomorrow, as not even the agency knows much about it.
Comment
on this entryI had an interview at EDS today, and it went very well. But - I have had 8 interviews recently that have gone very well, and so I don't know what is going to happen with this one. It's paying less than average, and it's a technical rather than management job, but on the upside it's a great opportunity to get more skills and experiences, and to show my abilities and aptitude to EDS, the South Australian Government and other related companies. During the interview, the EDS guys said that they had lots of roles and that they would look at my best skills and abilities and fit me in to the most applicable job.
Today's armistace rememberance was a wash out in Adelaide. There has been 60mm of rain so far in November, double the monthly average in just 10 days. Today the rain was so hard that it was difficult to see and drive. I have never seen rain so hard, but the setup in Adelaide seems to be able to cope with all the rain. All the drivers slow down and put on their lights, the drains are all large enough to cope with the rain, and life goes on as normal - unlike England where if the weather changes even slightly from the normal grey/white sky, people panic and the country grinds to a halt (leaves on the line, flooded in with 2 inches of rain, and snow).
Thomas' teething is getting a bit better today. No new teeth are visible yet, but the painful bit must have stopped for this set of teeth. Ann took him to the physiotherapist group today, where they worked on his walking skills - but now that Thomas is crawling and interested in everything, it was hard for Ann to catch his attention to teach him how to 'cruise' (where the baby holds on to furniture for support, and moves around the room).
I started another book today, to focus on a skill area that I need to develop, instead of reading manuals about stuff I already know, where I'm just filling the gaps. I still have the other books open, and dip into them occasionally, but this book is proving to be hard work;
"The attibute syntax (see RFC 2252) defines the type of an attribute (e.g., a Unicode string, a number, an octet string, etc.), byte ordering, and the matching rules for comparisons of object types. The syntax of LDAP attributes is represented by the object identifier (OID)."
It makes sense, but it takes a while for it all to sink in...
I bottled my latest batch of homebrew today. I had to go and buy some more bottles, because I always find that I end up throwing away the last litre or three of beer. Added to that, when I bottle my beer, I have to have finished my last batch, so that means that there is at least a week where I can't drink any! So, I invested $30 in 30 more pint bottles, and filled 36.
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Busy, busy, busy on the website today.
I have been having a lot of people register on the
messageboard
recently, with Hotmail email addresses and a website (normally porn or selling
viagra), but these people never actually post a message, or even come back to
the site. So, I have had to look for a way to stop these unwanted registrations
on the phpBB messageboard. When I was looking in to it, I found that it is very
common,
and that there are methods
to stop these spammers - so I made the changes and we will have to see if it
works. Now if anyone wants to register to post a message on the messageboard,
they will have to type the letters (in capitals!) that they see on the screen
as a security measure. I hope that this does not bother too many people.
I have recently put up some pictures of our
local
area, and some of the
best pictures
of
Thomas over the past year. So, I decided to go through
some of the pictures that we have taken recently and not put up on the website.
Have a look at the
slideshows of Thomas
Swimming
and some miscellaneous
pictures.
Thomas woke at 5:30am today, he was complaining because he
had dropped his dummy.
There are times that we put him to bed without a dummy, and he is fine and won't
complain, but with his teething, he just wants to have it in all the time at
the moment.
Thomas needs a haircut at the moment (look at his hair
early
in the morning...), but we are not lookng forward to holding him down whilst
it is done - he is stronger than before, and now he is mobile, I'm sure he will
just get off and crawl away.
Whilst I was out in the 'garden' of the house, dead-heading
our roses, I was shocked to have a large lizard crawl just centimeters from
my toes. I didn't notice it until it was crawling away. Ann didn't believe me
when I said that it was 50cm long (thats 20 inches in old money), and thought
that I was being over dramatic. So, when it came out from under it's rock again,
I managed to get a
photo
of it, and Ann and I watched him from inside the house. I hope that he stays
around - to eat our insects and spiders before they come into the house.
Still no news on the permanent job that I had an interview for 3 weeks ago, nor the EDS job that I had an interview for yesterday. I am still carrying on the self-study, and will persue the qualifications if I can.
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