Last week I was quite shocked when someone actually offered me a job! Its been so long (15 months or so) since I have worked that I had really forgotten what it was like to be able to get work! I shall be working for a company called “Samvo” who provide online gambling services. They are very big in the Far East apparently, but most things are run from London. It will be a combination of Windows and Linux Systems Administration and I am quite looking forward to starting on 23/08/2010. My only issue is that my commute (the job is in West London) is about 1hr each way, although I guess that is London for you! Formerly prospective employers in the North West didn’t want to know if I told them I had no car or that it would take me an hour on the train to get to their office, so just shows you how things are different here.

I have just spent about 2hrs trying to migrate my lighttpd configuration back to apache, mostly because there are quite a few things you can’t do with lighttpd… If you are trying to get things working, make sure that your browsers cache isn’t caching your fails, otherwise things will take you twice as long – including firefox caching the fact that its being sent php before its been processed and therefore trying to download it!

Well I think I should try to sleep for a bit, got to get up in 2hrs to go to Royal London Hospital and hopefully have the rest of my tooth removed!

Click on pics to show larger version…

(Stripped down Server)

After stripping both down to the motherboard I find that both had a mis-seated CPU, with the CPU coming out with the heatsink (even though the retention mechanism was locked!). So I clean the gunk off the CPU’s, re-gunk, put it all back together et voila 2 working servers.

(Intel Xenon CPU Stuck to Heatsink!)

(YAY! It boots!)

The thing is, even though I started doing this at 11:00pm and didn’t finish until 3am, even though the noise of them running (still installing operating systems) is so loud I can hear it in the next room, even though I knew there was going to be no payment for this job… I still loved it and put my best into it.

(My desk piled with servers!)

So working with hardware is what I love, I just need to find a job where there isn’t too much pressure and I don’t have too much responsibility. Any offers?

I hereby voluntarily withdraw my application to enter Canada and agree to leave Canada without delay.

is or it was, I don’t know what the correct term should be. Some names have been blocked out to protect people. You’re probably going to ask that question everyone asks in times like these, do you still feel the same? The answer is yes, I do.

So this is the third time I’ve been denied entry or as they euphemistically call it “withdrawing your application for entry”. I doubt, given the information which Interpol clearly holds on me (although I am unable to see) that I have no chance of entering any countries which I don’t have an automatic right to travel to – i.e. countries within the EEA.

I really hoped that I could pull this off – for a start it seemed that the Canadian Government wanted a lot less information from me on entry and none before leaving (See new US rules requiring incoming passengers to notify CBP/TSA of details before leaving their home airport). However I really think that the biggest problem is that I am the worst liar, clearly I would be no good at poker, for that is what it is like when you are travelling to foreign countries.

My plan was to get to Vancouver and then after checking out the city, to make my way south towards the border. Then either find a secluded enough place to walk across the border or maybe try my luck at the truck stops, see if the drivers could be bribed to get me across.

I would then make my way to Seattle and then travel to Denver by either train, bus or air. Whilst air travel would be the quickest method, must trust in the TSA not to run my details through some database is not high and it seems too risky. Airports are like prisons, difficult to escape from. The train would have been a nice, albeit expensive trip, changing in Sacramento and then via Salt Lake City to Denver, I have never been on Amtrak or seen the Pacific ocean.

I really thought I could help XXXXX, if I could get to Denver. I was concerned that despite her detox, she had started drinking again. I don’t like to preach to people (especially when I’ve never been an alcoholic) but if you are a recovering alcoholic then its no booze for life. I was prepared to help XXXXX by going to AA/NA meetings, therapy/education to get her driving license back and generally being there as someone who understands what it is to be different. I also hoped that perhaps in way of return for staying I could help in her Dad’s franchise businesses.

So what next, well apart from a flight back from Calgary to London? I don’t know what to do. I had basically given up on my life in England. Locked myself out of my apartment, sent bills etc. to my folks and only taken what I really needed with me. I had even emailed a friend asking him to change my passwords on social networking and email sites so that I could not slip back into my old life and potentially be tracked by the US Government.

Before I went to University in Plymouth in 2005 I had spent quite some time thinking that this would be the ultimate next step. That if I could get through 4 years of education and get that magical piece of paper at the end, then all my problems would be solved – job, social and financial. In my mind, my college experience may as well been written by Walt Disney. When I actually got there I found that I was good at some things but really bad at the things that mattered – maths and generally getting stuff done. At heart I guess I am a quitter with a strong sense of ‘self preservation’.

After I dropped out of Plymouth in 2006 I tried to change, but so far I can’t seem to change the flaws in my character that make sustaining things difficult. Jobs, ideas, education, they never seem to last long. Sometimes I make great strategies that I will do whatever it takes to get through and get back on track, but these days the plans rarely last 24hrs before I wake up tired and disillusioned, thinking – ‘can I really be bothered to do this?’, roll over and go back to sleep. Sometimes I wish I was 18 again, amongst all the beautiful people I see today; but I doubt it would make it any better, I still wouldn’t have anything in common with them.

It has never really been my intention to be useless, I really wanted to be of some use to some one; hence wanting to go to Denver, by fair means or foul.

So I really want people to know how sorry I am that it came to this; my body has too many issues that I can’t really fix. My brain – well I have tried taking pills, many different doctors and mental health professionals, but I can’t seem to fix the issues that lurk up there, and that is before we mix in Asperger’s, ADHD, etc.

XXXXX told me not long ago that I was the person keeping her from killing herself. I wanted so much to help, but there is not much I can do from 4,000 miles away for a person who lives in a country I may as well be banned from. I guess its the old mantra “do what I say, don’t do what I do”.

So, it always seems a shame to me when I get to this stage. 2hrs ago I was resigned to my fate, that I would drift gently into a coma somewhere around 20,000ft on re-entry into UK airspace. Now I feel like shit, it isn’t working and I don’t know what to do now.

Sometimes I am inclined to believe in L. Ron Hubbard’s immortal words – that psychiatry doesn’t work. Most of it is an affront by Lilly et al to make money from SSRI’s – which isn’t working so well for them any more since the patents have run out. Even if I “turned myself in” – went to casualty at a hospital on landing, they wouldn’t be inclined to help much since I don’t live in London.

Other ideas:
Fall from heights – Out of the question since I am too scared to actually jump.
In front of a train/car – again too scared and have too much respect for train drivers.
Suicide by cop – Heathrow’s armed Police, maybe an option – but how much do you need to piss them off before they would shoot you?

I don’t want to go home, since then I would have to face people just to get back into my flat. In my mind failure was not an option. Damn you Asperger’s Syndrome and the Canadian Government.

I always know what people think when I do this, that I am too pragmatic about it. I talk about death the way old folks talk about taking a cruise of the Mediterranean. Resigned to the fate but not angry, verbal or aggravated. Maybe this is why I have never really been taken seriously or sectioned; Doctors simply don’t believe I will do it.

I could inject more insulin, but would it work or would the physical effects of low blood sugar be too much to bare – my kingdom for a cookie and a soda!

I am reminded at this time by the Meat Loaf song “Life is a Lemon (and I want my money back)” except its not my money, very little of it ever was – now of course Student Loans will catch up with the fact that I have effectively dropped out of Bolton and send the boys round for the grant part of the money. Why not just add to the bill – it’s never going to get paid back, the chances of me keeping a job with a salary of over £15,000 a year before I am 55 are very very slim.

Well Ben A’Lee has the magical list of passwords so no doubt you can contact him to get the word out about my demise, since its unlikely to make news in the UK, US or anywhere else I might know someone on Facebook, et al.

I was trying to be productive and watch a movie just now; the selection is pretty bad compared to Continental and Virgin whom I have flown with before – probably to save room for Canadian content in the hope of placating those Frenchmen in Montreal.

Memento – seen it before and to be honest its kinda boring. For those of you who don’t know the protagonist who is searching for his wife’s murderer is his wife’s murderer.

The Horse Boy – ‘tragic’ autism story – get a grip, so maybe your kid can’t speak, but its not as if you had any control in the matter and horses ain’t gonna cure him.

Post Grad – Annoying, mainly for the reasons that other people having that magical piece of paper are difficult to deal with for me.

Finally saw “District 9” (not great), Bandslam (Good), Some initial episodes of “Bored Stupid” (HBO) – Quite good. Also saw some episodes of Showtime’s Californication with David Duchovny, however its overtly sexual content always annoys me because it just reminds me of the fact that it seems everyone is having sex but me.

I suppose that my boredom and ranting may have reached new levels, the captive audience at 37,000 feet eh?

Other people’s words – Chris Slater-Walker once said that he “didn’t know how he could be any good to society”, this is pretty much how I feel. Folks often say “what a waste” when people kill themselves. But is it, really? I am probably more of a drain on society than anything else – perhaps I should offer myself as sacrifice to those militant tax payers who think of me as “Dole Scum”. Not only am I a drain on the public purse, but that of my parents as well – ideas that I would one day repay them for all the debts I have racked up are long gone now. They are the ones who ulitmately have to pay and I don’t think they should. Genetics and mental health is not really anyone’s “fault”.

There has to be some way I can make this suicide work today. I can’t run away, mainly because I am no good at that anyway – both physically and on-line. I guess I long for home comforts too much and space to do what I want, even when my flat seems to become a prison cell.<Photo 1>

I think the main issue with the Assignment – which was to write a report about a Engineer/Technologist who had made a significant impact on society, was that I had tried to go too deep. No word limit was specified and although pointers were specified about the sort of information required I didn’t really know how much detail to write about each bit.

Anyway, its all over now and I just have to get an assignment done for a module called “Product Realisation” which is about how the electronics industry actually works. I have 2 circuit diagrams and I have to copy them into a SPICE simulation package called Multisim, then do the PCB layout in Ultiboard (which is part of the same package as Multisim).

This is a fairly easy task, but unfortunately Multisim/Ultiboard are not available off campus due to licensing restrictions and the licenses are a bit difficult to bypass. But I have until 17th December to do that, so I expect it will be OK in the end. Incidentally Multisim is a very bad package and my tutor says he was once given a spec for a military project which specifically said “DO NOT USE MULTISIM!”

The issue with the Roaming Service was that I had my wireless driver set to verify the certificate provided, clearly something dodgy is going on at Bolton, because there instructions specifically say to turn off certificate verification! Again this is another example of how bad a University it is and how it has become too big for its boots! Never enough computers available for use, very small library and a general penny pinching attitude – we’ll try and get as many students on a course as we can, never mind if its booked for a room where there aren’t enough computers or we don’t have enough licenses for the software they are using!

I will try to decide in a few months time what to do next, weather to stick around or take my credits and go somewhere else…

I think that the latest batch of undergradates are probably members of the ADD generation – not that they have ADD, but more that life has too many distractions. Facebook, Myspace, IM, email, texts… we can now access these services anywhere at any time. Nearly everyone has a laptop or some kind of computer of their own and the temptation to go off and chat/social network is probably greatest when we are bored, but know whe have stuff to do: Procrastination. Workplaces have to block these sites because people would get no work done otherwise (not to mention the possibility of litigation).

Now I know I cannot blame anyone for this, no-one held a gun to my head and said “join Facebook” but sometimes it seems that way! I guess in these modern times our lives are bankrupt to the point where we just have to know what everyone else is doing to be happy!

Tonight I had a plan, thanks to agreements between North West Universities I am able to go to any University and use their library to study. I am also able (theoretically) to use Internet facilities of  any University in the UK that participates in the Eduroam Service. I made this choice because home is too distracting and Bolton has a very poor library with little space to study and never enough computers.

So I went to Lancaster University, because I know that there is no requirement there to show ID to get in, so no arguments with jobsworth security guards. I did do some work, approxmately 300 words about Alan Turing for an assignment due Friday, but sadly Eduroam failed. I could not logon to the system and I don’t know if this is the fault of Bolton or Lancaster, but according to JAnet their systems are supposedly up to scratch. I have emailed Bolton to ask what’s up.

Possibly this wasn’t the best of ideas, an hour’s travelling time or so each way to do 300 words, but I did do something and I suppose I should think about that rather than thinking “I can’t do this, there is no point in me remaining at University”.

it may be gray outside in Massachusetts — at least there are still rainbows in my soap bubbles – Star Simpson

I got back from a wet evening in Manchester and this quote made me smile. Its been been difficult lately…

For those of you who are new to the world of Seth, I have Diabetes and a messed up Pancreas, these health issues go back about 10 years now, before that I was skinny and had no problems. This is of course on top of my Asperger Syndrome and “additional mental health issues”…

The Pancreas issues started when I was 20, I suddenly got terrible pain in my abdomen and had to call an ambulance; this kinda thing went on for about 2 years, every few months or so. Removing my gall bladder didn’t help! The damage done to my pancreas by all these bouts of pancreatitis – basically the pancreas tries to digest itself – left me with a problem digesting fats… sometimes its better than others, sometimes I eat something with a minimal amount of fat in and minutes later (I kid you not) I am running for the bathroom.

When I was 24 I found out that not only had the enzyme producing part of my Pancreas messed up, but the Insulin producing part had as well and I now had diabetes. At first it was easy, I would ensure, no-matter what that I had my insulin pen and my glucometer with me and would always test and inject before meals. Then I got depressed, pissed off and I have never really gotten it right again for very long since about 2007.

Recently its been really getting me down, over the summer I had a blood test which seemed to suggest that I am making my own insulin and that my diabetes might be more like Type 2 than Type 1 – Type 2 diabetics produce insulin but can’t use it, Type 1 diabetics have no or very little insulin production. So I started taking tablets instead of insulin during the day and then I realised they weren’t working, so try a different tablet – last week I figure out this isn’t working either. Yesterday I realised I couldn’t bring my blood sugar down even by injecting an amount that would have been normal for me a few months ago.

So it seems for the past few weeks, my blood sugar has been sky high, I have spent the best part of my waking life on the toilet, but I am still alive I guess and not going blind, etc, yet…

The weirdest part is that you can have these problems with blood sugar, but not really feel any different. Granted I want to sleep a lot – which has kinda messed things up: On Thursday night I was supposed to take my Intermediate Amateur (HAM) Radio License exam. I got home from University and all I wanted to do was sleep, I could not contemplate getting on 2 buses, taking the exam and getting home… I turned my phone off and went to sleep. Now I have voicemails and emails to deal with – “where were you?!”. Today I wasn’t at my lectures – the most boring ‘crossover’ module on “The Engineering Environment” is shared with mechanical engineers and mostly seems to be about writing about your favourite dead engineer – I have chosen Alan Turing, although I haven’t started writing the essay yet.

So tomorrow I will go in, I will go to bed in a minute and I will try my hardest to get up at 7am, shower, do the things normal people do and sit for 3hrs soldering my function generator project together and hopefully have something I can test at the end of the lab session.

So I hope that explains “where I have been” these last few days…

I found out about this film by accident, there was no big press about it but a friend in Colorado sent me a message on twitter asking if I had seen it. I was quite amazed by the trailer and even more amazed when I actually saw the film.

This is probably the most accurate film about Aspergers I have ever seen, most films make some mistake or the actor playing the person with aspergers does something we would never do, but this was just right. The other thing that made it so different was that it did not try to portray things as being the best or the worst, it was a little of both. Some of the themes that are included are: Death, being laid off from a job, romance, being misunderstood by society, change, parties, but most importantly; theory of mind.

This film made me laugh and it made me cry, Adam could so easily have been me. I can’t praise it enough, go see it while you can. In the UK it is on a very limited release – it is playing at Odeon in Manchester Printworks until Thursday and also at some cinemas in London. Click here for more locations.

Realtime DNS Block Lists (DBL)

DBL’s store a list of known IP addresses which should not be trusted when receving mail, either they are IP’s assigned to home machines (DSL/Cable clients) or known spammers caught out by traps. There are a few DBL’s, but until now I have only been using one – Spamhaus, but sadly this doesn’t catch most spammers. I have now been through my configuration and included a few more DBL’s which are listed below. The advantage of this is that looking up an IP in a DBL is not processor or RAM intensive and does not require an external program – like Spamassasin. I have also implemented a few features in postfix which allow the looking up of hosts who try to exchange mail with my server, if the hostname they are giving doesn’t match their actual hostname or they have no A record or MX record for the domain they are using, postfix will end the connection.

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks,
permit_sasl_authenticated,
reject_unauth_destination,
reject_invalid_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unknown_sender_domain,
reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net,
reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org,
reject_rbl_client b.barracudacentral.org,
#reject_rbl_client t1.dnsbl.net.au,
reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org,
reject_rbl_client dnsbl.ahbl.org,
permit_mx_backup

It is very important that “permit_mx_backup” goes at the end, because I am finding that spammers will take advantage of backup MX servers to get their spam accepted in some way, which then causes a lot of dead return to sender messages in your queue later.

With the “reject_rbl_client” lines I have in this config, I don’t have to use Spamassasin or other spam anaylsis programs at presnt, the few spams I am getting are minimal and may have been things I accidentially signed up to in the past! t1.dnsbl.net.au was blocking Google Mail last night, which is why I have blocked it. barracudacentral.org requires that you sign up to use their service first.

Moving MySQL

I have to admit that I am no programmer; Systems Administration, Network Administration and troubleshooting come fairly easily to me, but programming has always passed me by. I have often just blindly copied something someone else has done to get by and I remember when I was young spending hours typing in source code from magazines to see try out programs and stuff!

So when it comes to SQL people say “well its not that hard, its mostly english!” but you have to remember the order things go in and weather a line needs a ; at the end, etc… I have tried to get into PHP and stuff, but I just get really bored and give up. I have a load of programming books on C and PHP if anyone is interested!

I use some SQL on my server – WordPress, which makes this blog work uses MySQL… but to keep it going I had to move it from my old server to my new one.

I followed the usual instructions, to backup your databases use:

mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > database_backup.sql

And then to restore:

mysql -u root -p < database_backup.sql

Then presto and everything is back, but is it working? Well it might be a good idea to try:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Because when you import your old databases, you overwrite the passwords for the users that are stored in them. In the file /etc/mysql/debian.cnf there are settings for a user called debian-sys-maint which is setup when you install MySQL. A password is generated for this user and then stored in the file, when you import all databases you overwrite the users database which then overwites this password, causing debian-sys-maint to be unable to access the database and a failure when you try to start MySQL, although the daemon is running.

phpMyAdmin is your friend here, because you need no knowledge of SQL commands to go in and change the password for a user, therefore fixing this nasty problem! Once you’ve done that you can then use this command to stop MySQL (as /etc/init.d/mysql stop won’t work):

kill | cat `/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid`

Then go ahead and start MySQL as normal:

/etc/init.d/mysql start

Uninterruptible Power Supplies and their lack of Uninterruptible-ness

An Uninterruptible Power Supply or UPS is a big battery that will keep your computer running if the power goes off, it will also protect it from surges and incidents when the power dips to what it should be. They are very useful for when you need to move things around or if you have electricity that you have to pay for in advanced (and will therefore be switched off automatically if you have no credit).

I have had small UPS’s for a few years which are about enough to keep an average desktop PC going for about 10 mins if the power fails. However, I have recently had to start dealing with them at work, since we have moved away from Co-located hosting to hosting our servers at our office. When you are running UPS’s commerically, the need for power cannot be overstated – you need things to be as overkill as possible! Most UPS’s (anything designed for keeping more than just one PC going) will have overload detection and if the UPS detects an overload, it will start to shut itself down – because if the power were to be lost, the batteries could not take the load and the servers connected would not be able to shutdown gracefully.

However this means that mains power is lost to these connected servers and hence zap – no power… Well, in our case it means a 50% reduction in power as the servers have 2 PSU’s each which are redunant. However, it is not so easy to build redundancy into a network, and taking out the UPS that the network switches are connected to will take down the servers as they can’t talk to the outside world… resulting in my mobile phone ringing and someone giving me grief that they can’t do any work!

Teamed Network Cards are network cards that can run in pairs (or more) providing greater throughput or redundancy if they are connected to different switches (in different UPS’s!) however my employer apparently has little interest int he redundancy aspect of this and uses teaming only for throughput… why have 1Gb/s when you can have 2Gb/s?!

After this happening twice today, I had to bypass the UPS’s entirely as they were getting less reliable than the service from the electricity provider!

Whilst I like my job, I hate the fact that my employer prefers to buy his parts on eBay and expects great performance from a limited budget!

Well, I think that is all for tonight… until next time (in the imortal words of Sara Cox) – “rave safe kids, rave safe!”

If you think this will fit on your desk, you’d be mistaken, it is huge and probably about 10 years old. Getting it home proved to be a problem when we realised it wasn’t in Preston, but in Garstang (half way to Lancaster), but Garstang has a PR3 postcode!

Tuesday evening I started to play with it, I plugged it in and immediately it told me there was some kind of jam, then it told me that something else was wrong, when I finally got it to the point where I thought everything was OK, it said “Call Service F5 Charge HV”, I figured that HV is High Voltage and that this had something to do with the fuser – the bit of a laser printer that heats up the dust like toner to make it stick to the page. But the fuser doesn’t seem to be a part you can take out easily. I undid one screw then another, pretty soon it was just a massive collection of plastic, metal and circuit boards on my floor….

It went from this:

(Admittedly I stole this photo from the Interwebs because I forgot to take a before shot!)

To this:

At which point I decided I couldn’t be arsed if I could get it to work or not, I probably couldn’t get it back to being one piece again!

When I was a kid my Aunt brought me this book called “Miles and the Screwdriver”, Miles got a screwdriver for his birthday and then started to undo all the screws he could find… until he nearly undid the world… at this point “God” was angry with him… yeah, so that is quite believable, right?! But I guess I am kinda like Miles, I just can’t stop undoing those screws; It could be a metaphor for my life really!

I think my Jawa days are behind me, either that or stuff just isn’t as fixable as it once was!

At the beginning of August I had to sell my car and declare myself bankrupt. I was at the point of owing £15,000 and at my current level of income that would have taken me about 10 years to pay back, plus I would have been fairly povety stricken for that duration. Given my record of finding and keeping jobs(!) I doubt that I will find myself in some great earning IT job anytime soon, despite the fact I could pretty easily do the work.

The bankruptcy is going well so far, thanks to the Co-operative Bank I have a current account with a Visa Electron debit card and a fair bit more money available to me from my benefits given that I am not having to pay back what I owed to the banks and credit card companies.

Interestingly enough the Halifax, whom I owed approximately £6,000 to, has recently been taken over by Lloyds TSB (whom I owed £1,500), apparently because the Halifax had itself become insolvent. I’d like to say that I brought down one of the biggest banking groups in Britian, but sadly I think my debt is just a drop in the ocean to them! This is just the latest in a series of banking failures here in the UK, mostly brought on by the US ‘sub prime’ loan problem and the general ‘credit crunch’. Notice that no-one will use the word recession, and according to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, “this is not boom and bust”; who is he kidding!

My personal feeling, although this is extremely controversial, is that now is the time to wipe out all debt – after all, it is really just numbers on computers. Once we have done this, we should quit lending money to people with the soul exception of mortgages. No more credit cards or unsecured loans, because I believe this is what has caused all the problems: Consumer greed, and I think we are all guilty to some extent. But who is more guilty, the people forced into borrowing money for a better lifestyle (or sometimes just an existance) or the banks who spend all their time convincing us that we should take out loans and credit cards, sometimes to the point where we can’t ignore them.

Also during August I helped with a number of Autism research studies at University College London, but missed out on a MRI scanning experiment because of a small piece of metal left in me after my Gall Bladder was removed in 2001. It seems that I will never be able to find out the full details of the clip (make, model, etc) for the paranoid radiographers who control these experiments, because the hospital where the surgery took place have ‘misplaced’ the notes relating to it.

I also took part in research for my friend Kalen at the University of Manchester, who tells me that even if she can’t use my data – my reaction times suck and I definately have ADHD! Most people who meet me for just a few minutes know that I just can’t keep still, unless I am unconcious!

Whilst I was in the North West I was asked by a friend of mine to help at his workplace with some IT stuff. This taught me a few things: that my Windows Server skills are out of date and that eToken is more complicated than you’d think! eToken is basically a authentication system similar to smart cards, but uses a device that looks very much like a USB pen drive. It can also work over networks and this was the purpose, to secure servers at a remote site.

I have decided that I am going to use some of my time over the next few months to study for the MCSA exams or Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. This is, I know a bit of a diversion from my Linux work over the past few years, but I don’t think I have the nessecary programming experience to be a proper Linux sys-admin. I last studied for these Microsoft exams back in 2000 when I passed the “Network Essentials” exam, but the failed “Windows NT Workstation”, sadly there was no credit for Network Essentials, it was just something you had to pass at the same time. So given that, my skills on the server aspects at least of Microsoft’s operating systems is about 8 years out of date. Maybe if I can improve my skills (and I’ll have bits of paper to prove it), then I’ll have more chance of getting a job… but can I keep it?

Spending about a week working 9-5 really made me realise how little I use the time in the day, since I have been back it has been a struggle to find things to do and not to spend money fleetingly. The lack of structure has if anything made me more depressed.

Last weekend I went to the NAS International Conference in London, it was a fairly good conference and a good chance to catch up with friends that I hadn’t seen for some time. I also got to meet some fairly big names: Alex Thompson from Channel 4 News (who has an Autistic son), Jane Asher (President of the NAS and all round good cake maker) and some of the producers and writers of Holby City and the film Snow Cake. I managed to ask some good questions as well!

Next wek I will be trying to spend my time wisely by doing some work, helping with binding for a printing company in Saltash. Its a bit of a long way to go, but its only for 5 days. So hopefully I manage to work out those 5 days! I’m also signed up to help chase up and collect in the voter registration forms for Plymouth City Council, that kinda pays on a piecemeal basis apparently, £1.50 for each form collected of which I will have 300 to chase!

Until next time… rave safe kids, rave safe!