I can't believe the Sox have a 2-0 lead over the Cardinals!

So many basic defensive errors and yet they still won. Saturdays game was tense, but really enjoyable, so many twists and turns. Last night was less tense but still enjoyable. The Cards are gonna have to wake up soon, they certainly haven't looked like the same side they were in the regular season, although Schilling's performance on the mound last night was excellent.

The St Louis starting pitching seems to have struggled so far and their bullpen looks shaky at best. I'm looking forward to Tuesdays game immensly, you never know what you're gonna get when Pedro takes the mound. Here's hoping we see the Pedro of old!

Away from the baseball I'm still hitting the books. My next exam is booked for November 12th. I have more time to get through the course books for this exam and it covers more of the stuff that I do day to day so I'm hoping it will be easier going. The added time is a big bonus for me, if I don't understand something I can set it up in the lab and play with it. I find things easier to learn like that and my retension is better.

The server hardware is all fixed now after another bout of failures. Blown PSU and fried hard drive. I think one caused the other to be honest, boy was that case hot when the PSU blew and I could hardly handle the HDD when I was trying to remove it. Still, everything is all well now. Bigger PSU in there and lots more cooling (about 30 quids worth to be honest) in there now. Don't want to be replacing HDDs again in a hurry, even if the prices are coming down.

I'm attempting to refine the website a bit more, though between everything else I'm struggling for time. Next phase is to get everything converted over to the CSS layout and do away with the pages that are using frames. I hate frame pages but when I was starting out with the site I didn't know any better way to achieve what I was trying to. As I've learnt more about CSS I'm able to achieve more without frames and tables. Reduces the size of the code a hell of a lot too.

Oh well, its Monday morning and as much as I hate to do it, I really should get some work done.

So I'm all set ready for game 1 in the world series. I got the beer, the nuts and plenty of smokes. I can't see that I'm going to get much sleep this week, all the WS games are being shown on Five and I'm intending to watch every one of them. If you've seen the front page, you know who I'm cheering for, but being a Cubs fan I'm used to disappointment.

My Prediction: The Red Sox will win it in 6. I just don't think the Cardinals pitching is strong enough to shut the Red Sox down. As for the Sox pitching, if Schilling and Pedro bring their best stuff, its in the bag.

Go Sox!

Lets go Red Sox!

Ok, so I'm not a big Red Sox fan...but I like the Yankees even less! I've only managed to catch a couple of games in this series so far. I saw games 2 and 3 and when they went down 3-0 I kinda thought it was all over. Me and the rest of the semi-impartial people watching. I'm still having a hard time believing they've pulled it back to 3-3, but rest assured, I'll be awake and watching game 7 tonight. At least its being shown on Five so I'll have nice crisp pictures, all I need to do now is go get some sleep so I can be awake to watch it and make work tomorrow.

It works out kinda well though. I've been having problems with an RSync server for the last couple of weeks and I need to do some work/testing on it remotely overnight. So I can fit that in with the game. I still can't figure out whats wrong with this bloody server, it works a treat in the test lab, syncing 30Gb of data for a whole week before I moved it to the live environment. First time I try to sync in the live environment it abends the server and has every time since. I'm hoping once the initial sync is done and it only has to sync about 5-6Gb of data a night it will settle down ... well, heres to hope...

Feeling : Relieved

One exam down, seven more to go!

I feel quite relieved to get that one out of the way. That was the first exam I've taken in a few years and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I wasn't really expecting that tough of an exam and felt really prepared when I went in. In reality the exam turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. I guess I was expecting a lot more straightforward theory type questions rather than the scenario based questions that make you apply multiple rules to one scenario. In the past, when I've hit the end exam button I've pretty much known if I've passed or failed. This time I wasn't sure, I actually felt more certain that I'd failed.

One thing I will say though, if you want realistic test prep engines don't use the ones from certify.com. I paid $70 for the 206 question practice test and the questions were nothing like the actual exam. I'll be trying the test-king test prep for my next exam, I'll let you know what they're like.

Speaking of the next exam, I've got it booked for four weeks time. I'm taking a bit more time to prep for this one but now I've got into the routine of studying I'd don't want to let it slip, it was hard enough to get started again after a couple of years so now I just want to get these certs out of the way. So don't expect too much to appear here for a while...

After another bout of the car cutting out on me randomly (usually starting after about 20 minutes running) it would seem the problem has gone away again.

It started early last week driving home. Doing about 75mph up a dual carriage way the engine just lost all power. Dipped the clutch and sure enough the engine cut out. Turn off the key and back on again and away it went again. I didn't think much about it the first time. Parked the car up until next morning. I left for work the next morning and everything seemed ok until I got about 20 minutes into my journey and the engine died again. Same thing again, like a bad misfire. Turn off and on again and away it went for another few minutes. It did this about 6 time before I got to the office. Same thing for the next couple of days. It did this about 6 months ago, the fuel pump has been whining a while so I figured it was on the way out. I finally bit the bullet and decided to take it back to the dealer and have the pump replaced (French car, fuel pump being a dealer only part and costing about 200 quid - trust the bloody French) so I called in on the way home. I didn't expect to get booked in that day, but after being told it would probably be two weeks at the earliest, I was less than impressed! Several conversations later and several layers of personal at the dealer who ranged from apathetic to bloody ignorant I was asked to leave. So I decide to try another approach, I called in at the local auto spares place and picked up a can of injector cleaner...what the hell, it worked last time for 6 months...and what d'ya know, cars running sweet as a nut again. Glad I got asked to leave now, saved me about £250!

French cars, nice to look at fun to drive...cost a bloody fortune to maintain...bit like French women I suppose.

So I'm off out tonight in my newly revived motor to do a web server install. Unfortunately its not NetWare or Linux, its running on Win2K. Least it will be running Apache web server and not IIS. Small mercies huh?

Another baseball season over, at least for the Cubs anyway. Disappointing end to a season that looked like it would go to the playoffs. I can't believe the team crumbled the way it did in the last week and a half. Things were looking so good towards the end of August as well. I guess we'll have to try again next year.

The playoffs look interesting, I'm really disappointed that the Giants didn't make it. They would have been my second choice to the Cubs. As it is I'm torn between the Dodgers and the Red Sox, to be honest I'm not really that bothered as long as the Cardinals don't make it.

Aside from baseball, not really been doing much other than reading. I'm watching a couple of TV shows at the moment, one of which is Carnivale. I'm not sure what to make of it, its a bit strange to say the least. You can check out the show at its website, http://www.hbo.com/carnivale/. Be warned though, there are some spoilers in the episode guide.

I've now got a date for my first exam, October 15th. Only a couple of weeks away so I'm trying to spend as much time studying as I can. I really can't fail any of these, the guys in the office will take the piss big time! I'll be alright once I get into the study routine again, the first exam is always the hardest, get that one out of the way and I'll be fine.

The regular visitors here might have noticed this sites unavailability over the past few days. This was due to another hardware failure, this time the raid array on the NEC server failed and managed to take out the whole bloody lot. The website has moved yet again to a different server and is back up and running, you might have figured that out already seeing as you're reading this....

I guess using second hand kit to run a network has its benefits, but it also has its drawbacks as well...usually in the reliability department. I'm getting increasingly tempted to buy a new DL380 for this place, would be useful for some real world testing too but at the moment the cost is a little prohibitive.

So what else is new, in all honesty not much really. I'm still recovering from this cold type bug I had last week and feeling very tired. Its also time to upgrade my certifications again! Starting this weekend I'm going to have my head stuck in tech books for a couple of months until my upgrades are complete. The count on exams thus far is eight, but I can see that increasing by a few more before the middle of next year. I'm guessing one exam every four to six weeks should be a relaxed pace but I'll probably up that to one every three to four weeks so I can actually get my life back quicker...not that I have much of a life away from computers anyways, but you know what I mean.

Time for me to go hit the books anyways...