Today something happened that I had been dreading for more than three weeks. The results for the ITIL training arrived.

The pass mark for the examination is a pretty low 26/40. I didn’t do spectacularly well — I passed with 31/40. Apparently that’s around the average for our trainer (the average average is around 28) so I suppose I did well enough.

Three weeks of looking at my pigeon hole at work, and stressing over the envelope sent from the UK has finally been replaced with relief. Mainly because my boss had paid for this course, and also attended with me. If I didn’t pass, I knew I’d never be able to live it down. My boss hasn’t received his yet, but I suspect it will arrive today or tomorrow in Hicksville Geelong.

I didn’t really kiss the teacher (thank God).

Update: I have scanned in a copy of the ITIL certificate for those who may be interested. I have blurred out some bits in case someone, somehow finds this site and tries to pass the certificate off as their own.

One of the things I learned at ITIL training is that outages, or downtime should not be called such. They should use the loathsome term “unscheduled maintenance” or even just “maintenance”. So, this server underwent (is that even a word? why yes it is) some maintenance earlier for a few hours this morning.

The cause of the problem is thus, Optus saw fit to move me from one CMTS to another CMTS within the same node. Each CMTS has a specific pool of IP addresses. My Internet was not working this morning, so I restarted the router PC. Upon restarting, the computer had been assigned a different IP address (the first time it’s changed since we have had it installed).

The dynamic DNS service that I use was not automatically updated by my router for some reason (it’s supposed to be) which caused bludger.org to be pointing to the old IP address which is probably now someone else’s computer. Once I’d determined the problem it was easy to fix, and shouldn’t take too long to float around so you can see the site again.

If you can read this, it’s been fixed.

Update: Oh yeah, I have reduced the days being shown on the front page to three. That is, only the last three days with posts are shown by default. It used to be five (if you didn’t notice) but was getting a little long.

I am still working on a rather large project at work (detailed here) and am making pretty good progress on said project. For those who care about technicalities, a Visual Basic app talks to an ASP server using XML. The ASP server then discusses with a Microsoft SQL server the possibility of storing and retreiving records. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist of it.

At the start of last week, once I returned from ITIL Training, I was asked (asked is such a nice word for what really happened) to ensure that the project was ready for testing at 9am sharp on Monday 24th May. Essentially this means it needs to be ready on Friday 21st May (unless I feel like working all that weekend in the office, which I don’t).

Now, based on the progress I am currently making, I think the project (which entails the stuff I mentioned before, but from the user’s points of view, 2 Visual Basic apps and a website) should be ready for testing. They want to test it for a week (originally they allotted only one day of testing; ha!) which I still think is too short but will have to do.

This morning, I was again asked to ensure that our entire Division’s website (it’s not my design, let’s just make that clear) reflects the new university-wide templates by the end of June. I just checked, and on the website, there are over 1,100 files with either .php or .htm(l) as their extension. This means they probably all need to be changed. I have already created a number of different samples we could use but they haven’t even decided what they want it all to look like. I’ll be getting help from the new guy — Richard — as well so that will help a fair bit. Still, we have over 500 pages each to change in a month. Now, I had been under the impression since around October that I we wouldn’t have to be responsible for this, since we already have enough bloody work to do. The powers that be have now decided that not only do they want us to do it, but they want it done now, as opposed to October/November when it had originally scheduled to be rolled-out. This is in addition to everything else we need to do.

It was nice of my boss — Glenn — to offer me to take as much overtime as I need to get both of these projects done but I would really prefer to have a light workload than have authority to take any overtime I want. At least count, there are another 23 IT-related projects people want us to complete by the end of the year; there are two of us (myself and Richard) providing support for over 120 users across five sites at the same time.

Hence the “Hooo boy” title for this post. Eep.

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.