I have added a new stylesheet called “red ‘n’ grey (no transparency)”. If you find that your browser chugs when scrolling, try that.

If it still chugs after that, your PC is probably crap, the browser is probably crap, or I’ve missed something.

Well, I’ve just gotten home (pretty much literally), and am I tired! Three very long days (the training only went from 9-5) but there was an awful lot of knowledge rammed into my skull during that time. The course itself was quite “dry”, in that it’s all very management-y and best practice sort of stuff. A bit hard to explain, since the whole thing was so broad.

Although we’d done two practice exams, I was still worried going into the real exam, and I suppose I should have been. Still, the pass requirement is 26/40 questions correct. This means that you can pretty much miss every one in four questions (25%!) and pass! Hopefully that will give me some comfort (for the record, my practice exam scores were 30/40 and 32/40). I (and all the other course attendees) will not know the results for a couple of weeks, since they have to be sent to the UK for grading. Hopefully (if the new blog hasn’t been run out of town) I will post the results here as soon as I know (well, if I fail it will probably be a very short post ;).

Although I was initially booked into a motel, Chris (one of the guys from the course — who also works as Deakin Burwood, incidentally) offered to let me stay at his girlfriend’s parent’s beach house (nice, close relationship to the owners there). Glenn, my boss, was happy about the arrangement as he got out of the motel fees. Anyway, it made the whole thing a little more interesting since I had a “study buddy” (such a crap term). Least we managed to belt out a few hours of Xbox games last night to clear our minds from all the study, study, study.

Speaking of study, if you’re interested in what the course is actually about, it’s basically best practices for pretty much all IT stuff. Best practice for disaster recovery (actually it’s more than that), new releases (of software, or hardware), for instance, helpdesk management and other things like service level agreements. A broad bunch of stuff.

That’s really all I have to say at the moment; tired, going to have a boring Friday night, I think.

Oh, if you’re wondering about the title, it’s from my year 10 Business Management class. The definition ends “… of the cost of a non-current asset, over it’s expected useful life.” It was drilled into our heads enough I’ll probably remember it when I’m 70.

I will be a little harder to contact over the next couple of days; I will be in Geelong training for an ITIL … qualification (I guess it’s called that, and not a certification). I will be learning the “service essentials” section of ITIL which appears to focus on the (yep, you guessed it) service side of things. Basically, it involves project management and dealing with people who you are creating projects for. As well as “service delivery” (i.e. resolution of help desk issues).

I really don’t know the course will entail but it runs for three days (Wednesday 28th - Friday 30th); my boss will also be attending. This means we’re leaving the new recruit at work, Richard, on his own attending to 120 users across five sites — good luck dude!

This also means that there will probably be very few posts during this time. That’s something you expected though, right? I mean, since when (besides very recently) have there been frequent posts on this site? That’s right!

If I do make any posts, it will probably be from a laptop (I’m actually using it now) using a dial-up connection through Deakin (eww, dial-up).

This course doesn’t look like the sort of course I’d pursue myself, but since it’s being paid for, I may as well do it! Pity that Glenn (my boss) won’t pay for me just to go and do an MCSE course, since I’m not motivated enough to do it all myself.

So very, very strange. My father bought a digital set-top box along with his new TV. I knew he’d been planning on getting a new TV for ages, but he’s suddenly ahead of my technology-wise!

If we hadn’t subscribed to cable TV back in December, I would’ve already bought one anyway, I suspect. Hopefully Optus will get moving with their digital service; stop dragging your feet. I’m getting left behind!

For some reason I’ll never fully understand, the Jewish school next door is, once again, blaring Jewish music loud enough that it can be heard at our school.

Maybe if they were playing something interesting, I wouldn’t mind; but damn, when it’s loud enough to hear clearly when the windows in this building are shut, it’s gotta be loud!

Just a quick note to say that I came across what appears to be the only available copy of my old website(s). So, not only have I migrated the posts from the Nuke site (December 2003 - present), but I have (very few, considering) posts dating back to March 2001!!

Obviously a reasonable amount of the links contained within the posts won’t work (the Internet has moved on ;), and since the posts didn’t actually have a time associated with them, I just set the time of each post to midnight on that day. It’ll have to do.

March 19 marked the 3rd anniversary of my blog (actually, it marked the 3rd anniversary of mike.bludger.org; bludger.org existed for 6-9 months before that — might have to hunt those posts down if they still exist)! Woah! You should have a read through sometime; it’s like a time machine!

NOW it’s bedtime.

OK, the site is just about ready to go now, so I figured I might explain how it all works (in user’s terms, not technical terms that most don’t care about).

The calendar on the right shows the current month. All the days in bold have posts made that day. Pointing the mouse at the day for a few seconds should show how many posts were made that day. Clicking on a day will show only posts from that day. Clicking on the month name at the top will show all posts made so far that month.

Clicking on default view simply goes back to the default “last 5 days with posts” view.

Moving along; if you want to see older posts (and I’ve moved all the posts from the Nuke site to this one) you can simply select the month from the dropdown box on the right. Assuming you have a browser new enough to see the menu bar on the right, JavaScript should be enabled, which means the selected month should load straight away. It shows all posts from that month, and I can’t be bothered creating ways to view less. Clicking on a month in this list changes the calendar view to that month.

Next, you can view all posts under a certain category. Again, that shows all of them. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

The third box then, should be obvious. You can view all posts when I was in a certain mood.

The last box on the right (at present) allows you to select the colour scheme; this requires cookies to work but most new browsers should have them on by default unless you’re paranoid. The cookie is saved for two years — you’ll probably have bought a new computer, formatted the hard disk or something before the cookie runs out. But doing those things will delete it anyway.

In the main window, clicking on the title of a single post only shows that post. Clicking on a day only shows posts from that day. Clicking on the mood or category loads posts relating to them, respectively.

There’s not much else to the site at present, so poke around and have fun! For me, it’s now bedtime.

Update: New bludger.org site is now live (obviously, since you couldn’t read this if it wasn’t).