Oh dear - nearly a fortnight since the last time i posted anything.... Poor show me.

Anyway i have some excuses - firstly i was signed off work last week with Bronchitis (is that how you spell it?); and this week is my last week in my current job so i am very busy tidying up lots of loose ends and eating mince pies.

I have got 5 weeks off until I start my next job as a Senior Systems Analyst, so if i manage to sort out broadband at the new house then i can post lots of rubbish whilst i am a lady of leisure!

Oh yes and i will have loads of time to sort my christmas shopping - ha ha! One for dad, one for me, one for mum, one for me..

Junior Science Lesson 1 - Creating Lightening.

You will need:
Scissors
Selotape
Aluminum pie tin (one careful owner)
Styrofoam takeaway chip box (one not so careful pissed owner)

Directions:
Wash the leftover ketchup from the chip box.
Cut an L shaped-corner out of it and tape the corner onto the centre of the pie tin.
Rub the remains of the chip box vigorously on the hair of a willing volunteer. I used my boyfriend as his last haircut was several months ago and he now has a curly afro, he wasn’t actually that willing but i have my ways...
Put the chip box on the floor and, picking it up by its styrofoam handle, drop the pie tin on to it.
Touch your finger to the pie tin and watch the sparks fly!!
If you pick the pie tray up by the handle and touch the tin again it will spark again!
If the tin stops sparking, just rub the chip box on someone’s head again and go again, or go back to watching Eastenders.




How it works:
Electrons get passed to the chip box by rubbing it on your hair. When you add the pie tin on top, free electrons in the metal try to move as far away from the Styrofoam as possible

*N.B. I take no responsibility whatsoever done to yourself, your kitchen or your relationship. If you stupidly chose to use the biggest bit of aluminum and styrofoam you could get your hands on then you deserve to die from eating that amount of pie and chips ;)

Next lesson - the Pinhole Camera.

Spong!

I have, **ahem**, obtained a copy of Photoshop CS2 9 so i post this for your animated delect.



Once i have learned how to use some of the new features I will expand your minds... (and mine).

Internet Explorer V Firefox.

When i booted up my PC this morning it kindly asked if i would like to download Internet Explorer 7. What the hell, i thought, after all it couldn’t be any worse than version 6 and i always have Firefox 2 to fall back on if version 7 is also rubbish. My next thought was, what the hell am i talking about? I don’t even know what the differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox are, I had just heard people berating both - so I have found out.

Internet Explorer 6 v Internet Explorer 7
In version 7, the bulky top bar containing home, refresh, print etc... has gone leaving a substantially simplified bar. The next big difference you will notice are the 'Tabs'. Instead of having to open a new window for each web page you are in you can now just open a new tab and click to move between them. You can even add a group of tabs to your favorites so that all the windows will open at once. Version 7 has also fixed some existing memory leaks so you should now see nearly a doubling in performance.


What does all this mean? Basically your pages are more efficiently organised and should load a lot faster on the new version. You can download IE7 here.

Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2
Firefox has proved to be almost twice as quick as IE7. It also has tabs, although you have to manually open a new tab from the 'File' menu. New security features exist that stop hackers trying to get onto your machine, and there is an inline spell checker. You can download Firefox2 here



Conclusions
Don’t bother with IE7 go straight to using Firefox. It is almost 4 times as quick as IE6 so you should feel a noticeable difference. They already have a 10% market share and who wants to line Microsofts' pockets even more anyway...

Tabilda MCP, MCSD, MCTS

Yay I passed my exam so now I am a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist.

I spent £80 on some Transcender practice exams, i have used these before and there is more than often a few questions that are identical in the real exam. Today - nothing, not one single recognisable question! Lucky i had done lots of revision then and i scrape through with 788/100 (79%).

I am very glad that’s all over, next step - the world!

In un-related news, I went for a test drive in a 1972 Bond Bug on Wednesday:

It was amazing, i must have one...

Here kitty kitty!

You will be glad to know I woke up in a much better mood than I went to sleep in yesterday (apologies for the swearing), afterall it's Friday and I have paid £1 in aid of Children In Need for the privelege of coming to work in dress-down.

Another reason for my cheerier self is my latest technological acquisition. We have been lucky enough to get hold of one of the first hundred PetPortes that have been made and i took ownership of this sparkly white new bit of kit on Wednesday.



We werent asked if we wanted one of these because the vet is a friend and it hasnt come off the back of a lorry, more the fact that the vets know mine and Pingus' name off by heart after the number of times she has been attacked by other cats. After all she is very pretty and smells nice, just like her owner...

Im sorry but no it doesnt magically transport the cat particle by particle from one side of the flap to another, it simply only allows those cats you have programmed it to accept to use the catflap. It recognises the correct cats via an identity microchip that most pets have these days, saving the need for dangerous magnetic collars. It would even work for a small dog, and will keep the unwanted un-neutered cats from raping and pillaging my little Pingu in our new house.

Sorry no time for a rubbishly animated cartoon today, i'm on a deadline! Have nice weekends, think of me while i'm revising.

F^ckwit b*stard incompetent twats...

So i got about 2 hours sleep last night, revision running through my mind in little lines of code creating SQL Assemblys and Stored Procedures, I chewed off all my nails, and woke up at 7am this morning looking like a character out of Shaun of the Dead.

I drove nervously to the Prometric Test Centre, sat down with the IT-illiterate adjudicator and began the sample test that they make you do at the beginning to ensure you know how to use the system. 3 minutes later the machine crashed. In came the adjudicator who decides it would be a good idea to reboot the machine and start again. He couldn’t actually say this by then as another candidate had arrived and was happily tucking into a driving theory test on the machine next to me. So everything was said in a mixture of sign language, body language and poorly-written handwriting, all while i started to seethe at the injustice of it all...

Half an hour later and we are still there, as the machine decided that im already taking a test on one of the other machines so wont let me take another. I start to cry silently, and the adjudicator suggests it might be better if i come back another day. Another half an hour later and Prometric kindly inform me that i have to pay for the exam again as i was rescheduling it. 80 quid that exam cost me not to take!!!! The ironic thing is that if I had failed I would get one free re-take.

However, after a lot of swearing from myself and my new best friend Ken-the-adjudicator, we talked them into re-scheduling it for free next Thursday at 7.30am. Positive point: more revision time. Negative point: no beers for me tonight...