Stephens’ Blog

Well it has been a while is I have updated this much to my own dissatisfaction. I have been up to a few things in recent months and will try and write about everything now but I may well miss somethings.

So what have I been doing?

Ice Skating -

I have still been going fairly regularly and I am not improving at the rate I was but still a nice rate, my personal fitness could do with a lot of work but it isn’t anything to be worried about.

Computing -

1. I have been trying to setup shrewsoft VPN client to allow me to my office systems without using my desktop, this means that when I am on call I can be out and about without having to worry about staying too close to home.
2. I have also been playing the sirens game at hack3r website I am currently on level6 trying to gain access to level7 and I hope to have that done at some point tonight.

Photography -

1. Having played with my samsung trying to get the best pictures I could I decided to upgrade to the sony A200k entry level digital SLR. ( I shall write some more on the camera by the end of the week).
2. I have a photo I have taken with it up at “My Gallery” and there will be some more photos added shortly.

Well it has a long time since I have updated this with what I am actually doing, so here goes.

On Sunday I did the usual think of going ice skating and I most say that over the past couple of month I have been improve a lot, I still can’t ice hockey stop but that will come with time.

Over the Weekend I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I decide to do this at 22:00 on a Saturday night which is never the best idea I could have as I kept falling asleep and the whole process didn’t finish until 5:00 the following morning and then I had to go back through the ubuntu guide to make sure everything was working on my laptop correctly.

All of last week I was learning about Active Directory (AD) at the “Learning Tree” centre in London. I must admit that I did know some of the things that were being discussed the slightly more basic things such as adding machines to the domain, promoting a machine to be a domain controller and creating users, groups, Organisational Units (OUs), but I was unclear about how to actually plan an AD but this course I believe has helped put me in the mind set of what requirements to look at when planning.
Also on Sunday the 26th of October I was invited by Microsoft to watch an American Football game at Wembley Stadium in there corporate box. It was the San Diego Chargers Vs New Orleans Saints. The Saints went on to win the game but is was a close game which went down to the wire.

That is about all I have done over the past week and a bit and I shall update with a bit more technical information shortly.

Well I have decided to complete wipe this site clean yet again. So it is another blank page. I have been at my new job for the last 3 weeks and can say I am completely enjoying the challenge of a new position.

So far I have been show off Lights Out of the DL140 G3 machine I have been building. These machines use lo100i cards which are cut down versions of the ilo cards but they seem equaly impressive. I shall create a post of all the problems I have encountered and I how I go around them so other people need not go through the same pain I have trying to get them to work.

I have also started playing Magic the Gathering in one tornament, I really sucked and lost all my matches and relaised that just playing a stock deck is not a good idea so I will attempting to improve my deck so I can actually win some matches.

That is all I have been doing in the last 3 weeks bar iceskating which I am trying to learn the icehockey stop with a little bit of success.

I am off now to spend an evening with my wife. I shall write about the HP lights out sometime next week.