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December 28, 2005

Last Day of Geek Freedom

Tonight the person who does her best to surpress my geekness returns from spending Christmas with her family. I was unable to join her as I did the last part of my CCNA (Semester 4 - WAN) course just before Christmas and the flights were then too expensive. So yesterday and today have been spent 'totally geek' and I have done some very cool things. Check out my tech site www.binarysignal.org for my experience installing OXS on my Intel P4 PC, and look out for an update later on playing with Fedora Core 4, just as long as I can get the screencasting application to work.

Posted by lonesniper at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

Best Christmas gift was a total surprise

After a few years, say 33, Christmas is not that exciting. There are no surprises as you normally always know what 'Santa' is going to bring you. But today this gift was a totaly surprise to me when it was delivered, and my best present this year. It was just a little piece of spoungy rubber, but the Channel9 Guy was the one thing I had wanted for months.

Back in September I emailed and also sent a postcard to the Channel9 Team at Microsoft, in Seattle, asking for one. If you don't know, the Channel9 site is full of videos created by Robert Scoble as he tours the Microsoft complex talking to the developers and discovering all the cool things Microsoft does. I really enjoy the site, but my only problem with it is that there is just not enough spare time to watch all the video's.


My Channel9 Guy is now going to take pride of place on top of my monitor next to the 'Pointy-Haired Boss' from Dilbert.

Posted by lonesniper at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2005

Discover Music

From a link in a blog I read, I can't remember which, and probably got that link via another blog, I discovered a GREAT service and have been RE-discovering music. The website is www.pandora.com and was started by the Music Genome Project, who ever they are. Basically it is a streaming music service were you give it one artist or song suggestion and it creates a random playlist of similar music to your suggestion. You can create your own stations of different types of music to go back to and listen later. I have a couple of stations set while experimenting with the site and my current favourite is my 'Alison Krauss and Union Station' themed station. It is mostly bluegrass and soft folk but has a great coffee shop sound to it. If I owned a coffee shop (one of my dreams) that is the kind of music I would play.


Posted by lonesniper at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

Study, Study, Study

The second half of October and November were very busy for me, I was spending all my spare time studying. At the end of October I did the CCNA Semester 3 course and passed then November was spent revising for the CCNA Intro Exam which I did on Tuesday and passed.

But it does not stop there as I now have to study for CCNA Semester 4 which is all about WAN technologies and I am taking that course from 19th 23rd December. The plan then is to take the final CCNA exam in January which will give me the full CCNA qualification and I can start thinking about doing the CCNP.

What is CCNA you ask? Well I should have explained that at the beginning, CCNA stands for Cisco Certified Network Associate and is a Cisco qualification to certify you understand the principles and technology behind networks, the equipment used in networks and how to configure the operating systems to those devices. The first semester is very theory based, but semesters 2 through 4 are mostly all hands on configuring of routers and switches. It is very interesting but can be quite difficult to understand and there is definitely lots of remember.

I am really excited about nearing the completion of my CCNA and am enjoying teaching it to.

Posted by lonesniper at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)