Archive for July, 2009

RepRap and familiar faces

Wow! I just had to write about this. There I was, mooching through the submissions on reddit‘s front page when I came across an interesting looking title: “The RepRap is the most awesome machine ever built. We can only guess how these machines will change society when they will be ready.” I had a look at the site and sure enough the concept of a 3D printer which could replicate plastic objects in a similar fashion as a paper printer can do with documents today sounded pretty darn cool. I was watching the introductory video when lo-and-behold I see a familiar face. Ed Sells is a guy who went to the same school as me, a few years above my year and he’s an engineer on the project (which is GNU open source I might add). It’s really cool to see a guy I knew contributing towards something which may just advance our society in an as-yet unimaginable fashion.

Click the “Play” image to watch the video, or you can check out the full site, or even the reddit submission.

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Certification exams and the like…

Ok, so just this past week I think I’ve gone a bit crazy with the certification exam bookings. I booked myself in for two linux certifications which I was due to take yesterday. I say “due” because when I actually got to the place where the exam was meant to be “Professional Computer College, 85-89 Duke Street, Liverpool, L1 5AP“. The building looked just about abandoned, except through a ground-floor window I could just about see a noticeboard with some clippings about “Nerve”. A wee google later and it appears that they now occupy the building. The left brass placard next to the door had been removed so I only had the street number to go against. I rang the doorbell and what looked like a bodyguard (he had an earpiece with a spring cord) answered the door. I asked him if this building was Pearson Vue, or the computer college, he said no and looked at me rather suspiciously. He didn’t offer any information, or ask if I needed directions. He just closed the door rather quickly. As I was walked away, looking up a number on my phone, I was aware that a silver Range Rover with blacked out windows had pulled up rapidly outside the door I’d just been at. About three people, including the bodyguard guy I’d just spoken to quickly walked out of the building and got into the back of the 4×4 and sped off. That was… interesting.

Anyway, back to the story. I tried contacting Pearson Vue (or “Piss-On-You” as my sister honestly mis-heard on the phone) on three numbers, first off I tried the two numbers they gave for the test-centre both of which just rang out. Next I tried the customer services number which was auto-answered by a recorded message saying that “Due to an incident no-one can answer the phone at the moment. Please try again later”. To say I was thoroughly pissed off was an understatement. I walked up and down Duke Street twice more looking for a building that had anything like “Pearson Vue” of “Professional Computer College” as a placard. No dice. By this time I’d spent about an hour looking for the place. I eventually gave up after all possible routes of contacting Pearson Vue failed. I’m going to have to ring them on Monday and demand a refund.  Watch this space.

So, the exams themselves… these ones are fairly basic but I need to get them out of the way before I can move up to the more difficult (and higher regarded) levels. In case you’re interested, the ones I’m taking are with the LPI and they’re the Level 1 exams. Meanwhile in Windows land, I’m booked in for exam 70-290 at the end of July. I’ve been working with Server 2003 for, well, 6 years now, I’ve been on the course, I’ve read the book, I’m pretty confident I’ll do ok, I just need to keep in mind the “Microsoft way”.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-05

  • Radio 4 mis-pronunciation for the win… http://is.gd/1h8uj #
  • Holy crap! Torrential downpour of epicness. The road's flooded : #
  • Rockin' the Firefox 3.5 RC3 – all my favourite addons work out of the box… not bad. Mind you, it's nearly a year late so I'd kinda hope so #
  • Holy crap! Forget intelligent life on other worlds, we need to learn to speak properly to dolphins asap… http://is.gd/1hkWh #
  • Hmmm, looking at the LPI certifications, Levels 1 and 2 look relatively easy, 3 however is a bit of a leap to say the least! #
  • Kids today don't know they're born. The walkman was the daddy of gadgets… http://is.gd/1ii0u #
  • Got 2 LPI cert exams this weekend and and MCSA exam at end of July. I think I might have overdone it slightly :/ #
  • TBP being sold :( but #Firefox 3.5 released :) It seems things are balanced in the force today. #
  • Critical #zimbra patch http://is.gd/1mGR9 Updating my servers now :/ #
  • Holy crap Transformers 2 was utter, utter crap. There were three (count 'em) times I seriously wanted to get up and walk out. #