Certificate IV in Information Technology

2 June 2009

On Thursday, I was presented with my Certificate IV in Information Technology (General) from Campbelltown TAFE.

What does this mean? I’ll tell you what it means: fractals. The more you discover about something, the more you find out there is to learn. I’m currently doing the Diploma of Information Technology, due to be finished by the end of this month, which branches out even further into the mystical realms of network security, project management, and other crazy stuff.

Probably the most annoying thing at this point in time is the fact that the certificate is in landscape format, which means it will not look good next to my bassoon certificates, which are printed in a portrait format. I wonder if TAFE offers a certificate in document forgery so I can make a portrait version of the certificate…

Plague of mice

30 April 2009

While I prefer the cold weather to hot weather (it’s much easier to warm up than cool down), it seems to have two awful side-effects.

One, it’s harder to get up in the mornings. I have enough trouble with that without the cold weather.

Two, mice have been raiding our house for comfort and shelter. Two nights ago, I caught a mouse in my bedroom. I closed the door, cornered it in the corner of the room where the bed is, and proceeded to sift through every single box under the bed.

Of course, the mouse was nowhere to be found, so I left the door open so he could find his own way out. And I just found their way out: through the front door. Turns out there is a slight gap on the hinge side of the door that the mice can squeeze through. How do I know? I just caught two in the act.

Mice: just take what you want (bedding, food, supplies) for the winter and leave us alone!

Bushfire updates

8 February 2009

Google Australia has mashed together a live map of the bushfire situation in Victoria.

Also, Lindsay Holmwood has created a NSW Bushfire Twitter updater for those of us in NSW.

Ten things you didn’t know about me (and don’t really care about either)

10 December 2008
  1. I’m left-handed. (Although I still operate a computer mouse with my right hand.)
  2. I love the art of typography. I’m not a typographist myself, but I appreciate reading material that is well laid-out, and special attention is paid to the line-spacing, font, whitespace, etc. When reading a book or sign, I’ll often discover that I didn’t take in any of the textual content, but I was trying to deduce the typeface name.
  3. I’m obsessive about the selection rectangles that Firefox draws around hyperlinks. Whenever a link is selected (focused), it draws an ugly dotted selection rectangle around it. You can click somewhere else on the page to get rid of it. Even worse, when you middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, the selection rectangle is left behind. So, I have developed this awful habit of middle-clicking a link, then left-clicking near it to get rid of the rectangle. That’s twice as many clicks.
  4. I’ve been overseas twice: once to Indonesia, and once to Spain. In August 2005, my two sisters and I toured with the BlueScope Steel Youth Orchestra to Yogyakarta, Indonesia to perform in an event called Gita Swarasisya Buwana, a benefit concert for victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami. Scarily, I went through Bali, in between the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings. In April 2008, we toured northern Spain through some pretty awesome cities, and performed in four concerts while over there.
  5. Something about bureaucracy really turns me off. I don’t know what it is, and I know that in some cases, bureaucracy is the only way to get things done. However, I have an awful habit of attributing just about anything negative to bureaucracy.
  6. I deliberately say words grammatically uncorrectly or emphasise words in strange ways (e.g. pronounce dangerous as dan-GEE-rers) every now and then. Not sure entirely what I do it. Often, if somebody I’m talking to is being lulled into a stupor by what I’m saying, inserting a few strangely pronounced words can jerk them back awake again.
  7. I’ve never broken a bone in my body. When I was small, I was always scared off by people (usually older than me) taking risks and ending up with a cracked skull or broken arm. Because of that, I stay firmly in the sidelines. The closest I’ve got to breaking a bone was actually during packing up my bassoon one day while on my knees — my knee got momentarily dislocated. Very painful, although I could walk within a few minutes of that happening.
  8. The highest high school year I have is year 9. I was homeschooled. For year 10, I started CGVE via OTEN, but that royally sucked because it was really not designed for 15-year-olds, and the support staff didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and didn’t give me the help I really needed. As a result, I dropped out of the course. Good riddance.
  9. I’ve been on a TV ad. When I was roughly 12 or 13, I appeared in a five-second scene in a Buttercup Mighty Soft ad. The scene was filmed at our local swimming centre. In the scene, I got to stand on the edge of the pool, getting ready to dive in, but I waved to the man walking past who was carrying a tray of Mighty Soft bread.
  10. I have two scars on my chin; both of which I got when I was around two or three years old. One was from jumping on my bed, where apparently I fell and hit my chin on the bedhead and my teeth went through the skin. Ouch. The other was from jumping out of the side of our house, which I distinctly remember. I had called out to Dad something like “Hey Dad, catch me!”. As my luck would have it, Dad didn’t hear me, so when I jumped out, naturally, there was nothing but the ground to break my fall.

WordCamp today

29 November 2008

Rise and shine! I’m going to WordCamp Australia today. See you there!