Happy Birthday
To Steve Bates of the Yellow Something Something and NTodd of Dohiyi Mir!
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14 comments
Yup! Happy Birthday to both!
.-= last blog ..Just Different =-.
Thanks, gentlemen!
.-= last blog ..Another One Of Those Days =-.
If you ever admit a birthday on the ‘Net, you can’t go back to anonymity.
Have a happy, Steve.
two of my favorite blogopeople too!
.-= last blog ..Health care town hall meetings, August 2009 =-.
Happy Birthday (belatedly) Steve (and NTodd, who I’m afraid I don’t know)
I hope you had a great day. 🙂
Sorry for the delay, been AWOL the past couple days.
Cheers! 😀
NTodd is kind of an acquired taste. His current passions are a son on the way, and the Palestinian issue. He is part of Code Pink, which is an activist group, and a militant antiwar Quaker, if you can figure out what I mean.
an acquired taste? i fell in love with ntodd immediately.
.-= last blog ..Dominoes 5 =-.
It all depends on what his current obsession is.
Nothing wrong with obsessions. I have several. I even obsess about finding new obsessions. 😀 😛
OT: I’m going back to school, again, tomorrow. I have the flu, and the course actually started last week. Good thing I love a challenge! You might say… It’s an obsession. 😆
If anyone is interested, I’m doing this:
Certificate IV Training & Assessment
I’m not sure any more how the scale works in the USA, they keep changing it here… But a Certificate level IV is the highest prior to a diploma or degree, and for which one can get significant credits if one were to peruse it further. This will be my third level IV cirt in the past 5 years (as well as 4 or 5 lower level cirt’s). And some joker once told me that school ended once one finishes College or University. Aha.
Why am I doing this? Because I’m a sucker for punishment? (Well, that’s normally true, but not the reason in this case). 😉 No… I am doing this because our glorious Government (Howard started it, Rudd hasn’t seen any reason to change it), has decreed that even 30 years of knowledge and experience, and a significant number of credentials within said subject area, are worthless unless you receive a piece of paper stating that you are Nationally accredited to pass on said knowledge and experience. At least, that the case if one wants to make any money out of doing so. If you want to give it away for free, that’s fine and dandy. The curious part is that this particular accreditation has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s actual subject of expertise, it simple means that one is authorized, so long as one follows Nationally mandated standards, to actually deliver one’s body of knowledge in an acceptable and approved manner. I could say that it also ensures that the schools delivering these courses stay in business and don’t require continued Gov funding. But that would be cynical, no matter how accurate. 😉
WTF that actually means, I am slightly hopeful of knowing by the end of this course in some 3 Months. 🙂
I know what you mean about Certification, Kryten. I was asked during an interview if I used any 4GLs and told the interviewer that I wrote them, I don’t need to use them. It’s pretty insulting to be asked if you have proficiency in Visual Basic when you’ve written device drivers. When I finished my actual CS/IT degree because of the need for a piece of paper, I had to correct errors in the textbooks on Unix, and the guy teaching the network security course offered me an instant A+ if I would promise not to go to class. He knew what he was talking about, but hadn’t been around long enough to know the background to what he was discussing, and certainly didn’t have a couple of the interesting courses I had taken in the military about physically accessing networks [well, the techniques are totally illegal in the civilian world, so you obviously can’t teach them].
The flu is a total pain and saps the will to live. At least you are putting it in the past. You are better off than young people because you are old enough to have encountered it back in the 1970s, and have better defenses. One of the few bright spots about mucking about in Southeast Asia is that you get exposed to just about every disease that exists, so your defenses aren’t totally overwhelmed like the kids today who live in an environment dominated by antibacterial soap.
Get better. At least you can take showers and change clothes which was not a major feature of SEA.
Thanks Bryan. 🙂 And yeah, I figured you’d understand how it works… or doesn’t, as the case may be. 😉
I think I’m finally at the tail end of the flu. It started last Wed, and I spent fri-sun in bed on med’s. I had to go into hospital Fri because there have been cases of swine flu around here and they wanted to make sure I didn’t have it. I’m spending the day pretty much sterilizing my bedroom. LOL I apparently have a suppressed immune system because I’ve been constantly getting ill since teh breakdown. My immune system hasn’t had a chance to recover yet, it takes time. I’ve had 5 colds and the flu this year so far. I’ve seen a naturopath who is putting me on a system to help boost my immune system. I’m sick of getting sick. 😉 😆
Yeah… SEA was bad. Many of us in Cambodia got sick with something or other. We had to live in our clothes in the humid hot jungles for weeks in some cases. There weren’t any laundry facilities, and much of the water sources were more contaminated than we were. But, we survived by being smart and doing things that would never be considered in a modern city or even country town. 🙂 The saying goes “You live, and you learn.” but in the military, our quote was “You learn, and you live.” (which actually makes more sense to me anyway). 😉
Anyway, first day of school starts soon for me. 🙂 Tuesdays are evenings, Sat is all day. I am actually looking forward to it. It will at least give me some options I don’t otherwise have. 🙂
If you put the certificates in frames you can cover cracks on the walls, but it is getting so you can’t get to see anyone who might be interested in your skills unless the gatekeepers see a slip of paper.
I have honestly lost count of the number of certifications and accreditation I have. Many had to be renewed annually also. Even though, as we both know, things in IT don’t change much if at all in a year. I didn’t mind the annual rectification, I rarely did any study for the exam’s and passed in the high 90%. The company I worked for often had to fly me somewhere and I’d generally take a couple days off annual leave and have some fun wherever I was sent, unless I was sent on a Fri, in which case I’d get a return flight late Sun. 🙂 Those were the good ol’ days! 😉
I don’t know if you noticed, but many of the IT accreditation’s are handled by Thompson. I have a box of cert’s with their logo embossed on them. And most of the exams I sat had errors, but I learned to answer with the required answer rather than the correct answer. The Apple Tech exams (I have 3 Apple cirt’s, via Thompson) had several errors.
We used to joke about them being cheap wallpaper for the toilet or bathroom. LOL
I was refused a job some years ago because my M$ accreditation were outdated. I pointed out that M$ hadn’t come up with anything new in several years, so I was in fact current. But most HR people are just checkbox drones with the IQ of a GOP senator usually.
It takes forever to wade through the bureaucracy to find someone who actually knows what the company wants you to do, and the bureaucracy’s sole function is to check off boxes on forms. Most of them have no idea what the boxes mean.
The military and business are great ones for certificates. It must be a law somewhere that the more insignificant the course, the grander the certificate must be.
The military gives you the skills to ignore it an plod on to the next stop.