The Microsoft books are very good, as one would expect. They’re full of information and practical exams useful for learning the products, how to use them and – most importantly (debatably) – how to pass the exams.

There is nothing wrong with the books. The problem is that I haven’t studied anything since early 2005, for the exams in my first (and only) year of Uni. In fact, it was probably around this time of the year, so we’re talking a seven year hiatus. I didn’t much enjoy it then, either …

Since then, I’ve learnt on the job. I’ve relied on my professionalism, charm and good looks to progress up the ladder … OK, well that’s not quite right. The last two things do me no good at all ;). I digress. I find studying difficult. I need a goal, an achievable, tangible ‘something’ for motivation.
That’s why learning at work is so easy; you have all the tools and the available knowledge, and you are tasked to achieve something. If you don’t know how to do it, you learn it. Well, I do anyway.

With this though, there are end-of-chapter tasks but … what’s it for? I know that by achieving a certification, I will be more employable, I will understand more about the product, and I will be able to elucidate on the finer points of Powershell and Active Directory at interview. But as for all the work … they are but disposable virtual machines, contributing nothing to anyone.

I need to stop being so bloody arsey about all this and just get to work.

She has, in cohorts with her boyfriend (the immensely talented Rob James), created The Sleepy Backpacker, a blog which will be used to chart her progress across the great continent.

Not only that, but the site is already populated with articles on what to do and what not to do when travelling, as well as handy guides on what to pack, what to leave at home, and how to travel without breaking the bank!!

I think it’s a fantastic thing that she’s doing – I’ve travelled a minuscule amount in my years; if I were to create a site it would have to be called The Grumpy Bloke who Stays at Home.

If you’re at all interested in the wider world and travelling, I encourage you to follow Em’s adventures by using the following links:

The Sleepy Backpacker Blog

The Sleepy Backpacker on Facebook

It’s taken me a while to get domesticated, but I can now cook, clean, tidy, wash and iron as and when required. The one thorn in my paw, my kryptonite, has always been woollen items. I follow the instructions, but they never come out right.

Every one of them states ‘wash with detergent formulated for wools and silks’. It’s impossible to find!! I finally found some on Tesco’s website – couldn’t see it in store – so I bought it online (with a load of other shopping) and thought that I was safe.

I wasn’t.

Last week, I’d done pretty much all the washing I needed to. All that was left to conquer were three items; work trousers, a brown jumper and a striped red DKNY top. They were all woollen, so I gathered them together and put them in the washing machine. I used just enough detergent, and I put them on a 30 degree cycle. Nice and gentle. Safe.

No, no it really wasn’t. Observe my failure.

If I had a son, he could wear it...

So, I had failed. Yet again, I had shrunk an expensive piece of designer wear which was surely expensive when I bought it.

Turns out, this particular wool thing wanted a cold hand wash. Finicky bastard.

It promptly went in the bin, with a few choice swearwords washing it down.

But wait, the Great Wool Disaster wasn’t ready to spare me just yet!

The brown jumper had become incredibly fluffy; annoying, but not a total disaster. What had also happened, however, was a great moulting of woollen fibres, which the black trousers had done a fantastic job of picking up.

Inside, and out.

So I set to work with the sticky roller thing (thankfully, we have a lot of them). Sheet after sheet of sticky paper was torn off and discarded, to the point where it looked like I’d given a thorough ‘back, sack and crack’ waxing to a particularly image-conscious Wookiee.

Yep, I waxed a Wookiee. The table protector isn't mine, by the way ...

Thankfully, I managed to get it off. Mostly, anyway.

I’ve decided to boycott buying further woollen goods. As good as they might be when new, they have conspired to ruin my sanity, my other clothes and in some cases themselves, when introduced to a washing machine.

Unfortunately thanks to the BBC pulling out of showing half the races live, I can’t watch it on TV. I’m also getting up early to go surprise my mum for Mother’s Day.

So, I have the following options:

1. Get up early, listen to quali on Radio Five Live. Be knackered for a long drive and even longer day.

2. Sleep in, and hope that there’s a lull in activities when the BBC is showing the highlights in the day … Unlikely as we are cooking dinner and have a load of activities planned.

3. Record the qualifying from my parents house and catch up with them at some point … Whilst avoiding all F1 coverage all day.

4. Accept it ain’t gonna happen, read the qualifying report on Autosport when I get up, and make my peace with it.

When I was in my previous employment, I was a member of the ‘final point of escalation’ and we were seen as the de facto ’guys who knew everything’. Of course, a lot of it was Google but familiarity gained with the on-site systems over a few years and general knowledge of IT all came together to make us all look good – and get results.

Now that I’m trying to clamber on out of the depression, however, I’ve also had to do a lot of soul searching and come to terms with the fact that I was overconfident in my abilities. I still believe firmly that I’m damn good at what I do, because positive assessments and repeat hirings from previous employers can’t be wrong. There are, however, holes in my knowledge which shouldn’t be there. There are reasons for these gaps if you look at it from one side, but from another, you could argue that any experience I was not gaining in employment, I should have been gaining elsewhere.

Which is why I’m going ‘back to school’, as it were.

I’ve purchased Microsoft books and am starting to work through the first of it at the moment: Configuring Windows Server 2008 Active Directory. I’ve worked with AD for years and know my way around it well enough to do pretty much any job that I’d expect to achieve at my level, but there’s no harm – and definite benefits – in knowing it inside out and upside down.

I’ve also just purchased a Network+ training guide. Networking is one of my weaknesses; I know enough to get me by, but I’ve had a couple of interviews where I’ve made stupid mistakes when asked to explain a concept which has counted badly against me. Again, there are reasons why I never got heavily involved with networking in my career, but they’re excuses and ignore the fact that for almost all jobs, a good grounding in networking is fundamentally important.

After I glommed edhirst.com and synapticfire.co.uk together into the clean, streamlined, lovely site you see before you I realised that I needed to give ApertureFire, my photography site, an appropriate makeover. Whereas before I kept my professional site (EdHirst) totally separate in look and feel from the other two, I decided that I now wanted it all to fit together in a mostly-seamless design. After all, it’s all me at the end of the day.

So, after lots of tweaking, re-tweaking, and re-re-tweaking, I’d like to present the all-new, clean, streamlined and very lovely ApertureFire.co.uk.

Go on, off you go. I’ll just wait here.

Hmm, that was too quick for my liking.

Anywho, as you can see it looks just like the site you’re reading this on (more or less). It SHOULD do anyway – if you notice anything that’s really out of whack please let me know. I’ve viewed it on Safari and Firefox on my iMac and it looks fine.

I use SmugMug for my gallery hosting and they are, on the whole, very good. Their underlying page design, however, is pretty unforgiving hence the re-re-tweaking (when the crowd say ‘Bo’, etcetera!). The pages look very different when you’re logged in, compared to when you’re viewing it as a visitor (due to all the administration controls) so I downloaded Firefox to use as my ‘sandbox’ to view any changes through the eyes of the Average Joe (or Josephine).

This led me to two discoveries:

1. Firefox has a fantastic toolset for web design. I could highlight an area or element that I wasn’t happy with and immediately find out where it was referenced within CSS, and the properties I needed to override.
2. Embedding fonts didn’t work.

I’ll expand on that last one.

See the navigation up there? That’s a font called League Gothic. Chances are, you don’t have that font on your computer. However, the font files are stored on my web server, and I’ve embedded them using something called a Cascading Style Sheet. Your computer caches the font file, and then renders the text in that font.
It worked fine on this site, and on ApertureFire, until I called it up in Firefox.

The font displayed just fine on this site, but not on ApertureFire.

It didn’t take too much detective work to find the cause of the problem.

Without going into the technical ins and outs, Firefox prevents code sitting in one place (ApertureFire.co.uk) from calling content from another place (EdHirst.com). Not all content, that would be silly, but in this case the fonts qualified. A lot of fonts come with End User License Agreements that specify when and where they can be used. It’s easy to illegally hook into somebody else’s font files to use on your website if you know where to look. FireFox prevents this from happening.

It took me another bit of Googling, but I eventually found some code that I could include in the host site (EdHirst.com) essentially telling it to ‘give’ the font file to any domain that requested it. The font is free to use, so I’m not breaking any rules (and neither is anybody who links to the font) by doing this.

Here’s some more reading on @font-face and Cross-Site Font Usage.

Despite this, I still found it bemusing when we came across a Korean local walking through one of Seoul’s many picturesque (and hilariously educational) parks wearing a surgical mask. Obviously this individual felt that the pollution in the city was so strong that it posed a risk to his/her health.

I thought it was a bit on the ludicrous side. We see a lot of mask-wearing in rapidly developing far-eastern nations, as the pace of growth casts aside such niceties as air quality and pollutant controls. But in Seoul, where the air was no worse than, say, London, a mask seemed like overkill.

Standing in an airside branch of ‘R kioski’ in Helsinki-Vantaa airport a few minutes ago, I spotted another surgical mask-wearer from the far-east.

“In Finland??!” was my immediate judgemental reaction. But then the events of the last couple of days came rushing to the fore of my mind to make me rethink.

I flew out to Helsinki from London Gatwick, on a Norwegian flight. Everything had gone smoothly, and I was enjoying a Jo Nesbø iBook on the iPad, nestled as I was in seat 01C.
About halfway through the flight, an elderly gentleman approached – obviously in dire need of the toilet. It was occupied. He vomited all over the floor of the aisle.

Anyone who has experienced the misfortune of a good ol’ chunder (tactical or otherwise) will appreciate the ‘spray pattern’ as a fickle bitch. This particular instance decided to cover my jacket (which I had at my feet) in vomit-spatter. Despite wet wipes provided by the cabin crew, I didn’t get it all off.

24 hours later, whilst in a countryside house in Assikala, replete with outside bathroom, I started to feel a little ill. Nothing major.

The following evening, all hell broke loose.

The attack was on two fronts; the north and the south. The southerly offence was a sustained guerrilla assault, designed to destroy my spirit with repeat visits to an outdoor, non-water-based toilet in temperatures that fell to -8 degrees Celsius in the middle of the night.

The northern campaign was more of a blitzkrieg. The signs of impending doom were there for a time before it began, but I refused to admit the inevitable. When it came, the resultant explosive force brought me to the affirmative answer of a question I had never asked, chiefly “Can my stomach hold half a bucket of substance?”

With my body voided of all fluid, useful or otherwise, I spent the next day and a half recovering. Recovering and cursing the man who threw up at my feet. There is no other explanation for my sudden onset of debilitating gastrointestinal hell than that scenario.

So maybe that woman in R kioski had the right idea by wearing a surgical mask in the middle of an airport. That guy could still be out there.

For years now, we’ve been slumped in economic gloom. Jobs are being lost, the banks have all gone bust. Interest rates are lower than the tone of an after-dinner conversation with Katie Price and whatsherface from Atomic Kitten and the Iceland adverts.

Everyone is complaining of having no money, of tightening their belts, of only being able to afford one holiday this year, and how little Dwayne has to hop to school because we cooked one of his shoes for tea last night.

Which is why, as the BBC themselves note in the headline, this is quite surprising. UK retail sales rose by 0.9% in January, following on from a 0.6% sales increase in December. That’s right, we’re all poor as paupers, but throw Christmas or January sales at us, and we’ll still crack open that wallet, fish out the credit cards and spend spend spend. Then spend the rest of the year complaining about it of course, after we’ve just lost the job we had.

I think that, in Britain, we’re all a bunch of morons. I say this with conviction because I include myself in the category. In three and a half years from the last seven, I earned over £117,000 after tax. That’s an average take-home of £39,000 PA, which amounts to a £63,500 year salary, taking into account deductions and student loan payments. That figure isn’t accurate, as I earned significantly more in one six month period than in one of three years, but still.

It’s a shit lot of money.

I spent it all, naturally. I rented accommodation, I bought computers, iPhones, an iPad, a BMW, a TV, lots of designer clothing, lots of expensive food, and I travelled a lot of miles (fuel is expensive, if you hadn’t noticed). But however you look at it, £117k is a lot of cash to burn through in not a lot of time.

Since settling into ‘permie life’ and thus earning a much more average sum year on year, I’ve struggled to bring the costs down. It’s hard adjusting to a life where everything needs to be budgeted for, when you were used to just buying what you wanted because the following week you’d receive another cheque for £860. I think I’ve done it though, more or less.

Yet, I’m still not averse to the odd binge on something nice. Even low-cost items that add up; music is my weakness. I can spend a surprising amount in a month on music.

It seems, however, that I needn’t feel like it’s just me. In these harsh times, the figures show that despite the country having massive debt and no jobs, we’re still managing to hit the high street and buy Shit We Don’t Really Need.

So the country bitches and moans about austerity measures, increases in taxes, decreases in public spending and on and on and on … and then goes out and gets further into the debt that got us all into this sorry mess in the first place.

Idiots. All of us.

What I find interesting is the train of thoughs going on in each team. To my mind, Red Bull and McLaren are the only ‘original thinkers’ when it comes to overall car philosophy.

Whilst every car is unique in many ways, clearly Red Bull fostered the ‘high chassis for undercar airflow’ theory. Newey and his team obviously thought the whole package through, which is why it was so fast; everything worked in harmony.
As time went on, everyone else started copying, to the point where everyone has the high chassis concept, because ‘If Red Bull did it, it must be the best’.

Yet McLaren, who have been the only consistent challengers to Red Bull’s dominance, have gone an entirely different way. Low-chassis, a completely different concept. Yes, we weren’t always as fast, but at the close of last year we were often as fast, if not faster.

Since then, Newey has admitted that RB7 was designed around the blown diffuser – the source of its power – and McLaren have admitted that they tried their own version and had to quickly copy RB. It makes me think that last year wasn’t an effective comparison of the high-chassis vs low-chassis concepts.

If McLaren had had testing / development time in all the tests as they should have, might they have been more on top of Red Bull from the get go?
Which brings me to the point. Red Bull went one way, McLaren went another. Both cars traded wins, fastest laps, qualifying positions, and so on over the years that the concepts have been in use.
So why has the entire grid only copied one team? There is no definitive best way – if there was, surely Red Bull would have finished 1-2 in every race?

Red Bull and McLaren, the only two original thinkers. Contentious? Absolutely! But I think it’s a theory that makes a certain sense …

Back with the iPhone was originally announced in 2007, a big deal was made about how the device ran a ‘mobile OS X’, and that was part of what made it so good / powerful / magical. Since iDevices and iOS market share has shot off into the stratosphere, rather than OS X shaping iOS, the inverse has started happening.

Apple still has a very strict separation between ‘mobile devices’ and ‘computers’ (some would argue that the MacBook Air classifies as a ‘mobile device’ but not for the purposes of this blog). Mobile Devices are all about touch interaction and focusing on one app at a time.

In actuality, this is the way we work best. Forget all the bullshit about ‘women are better at multitasking than men’ and so forth, the fact is that, as humans, our brains are not built to multitask.

Studies have shown that productivity increases when a single application is presented on the screen. We focus on that app, and the work activity taking place in that app. When more is on the screen, our attention is divided, even if the other content is dormant.

For example, at this moment, my screen is shared between this browser and Outlook. I’m keeping an eye on Outlook, as I’m waiting for an email to come through, and the notifications don’t quite work as I’d like. However, even though my eyes will pick up the email from the periphery of my vision, I still keep checking manually. My attention is divided.

With Lion, Apple introduced full-screening of applications, bringing a similar style of working across from their mobile devices. It actually makes sense, works well, and with the multi-touch gestures available, is very nice to control (and better than multiple-windows-on-one-screen as you get in the Windows world (by default)).

With Mountain Lion, they’re going a step further, bringing across things like the Notes and Reminders apps, the Notification Centre, and so forth. For some time, tech pundits have speculated that OS X will become iOS, and it seems that things are moving in that direction with no signs of stopping.

I have a theory that by the time we see OS XI (or whatever it’ll be called), computing power for mobile and non-mobile devices will have converged to the point where the experience is the same on either. Whether OS X drip-feeds this change in, to the point where we don’t notice the difference, or whether Apple is working on OS XI in secret, ready to drop the bomb on an unsuspecting world at some point in the future will be interesting to see

All of this, however, is causing a lot of the Mac Faithful to get awfully upset. View the comments on any of the latest OS X releases, and you’ll see people ‘getting off the Apple train’ because they don’t like the way it’s going.

But where will they go?

Taking a look over the fence at the Windows world it’s plain to see that, although Microsoft came late to the modern-mobile party, they’ve pulled out all the stops to catch up.

Windows 8 is being designed specifically with mobile devices in mind, with the Metro interface from Windows Phone 7 being adapted to the ‘daddy’ software. Microsoft still have a way to go, and it’s foolish to suggest that the desktop is being lost forever – corporate customers would never have that – but both Microsoft and Apple are realising the same thing; the user experience is key.

They’re both moving away (either in part or altogether in some scenarios) from the tried, trusted and true interface paradigms that have shaped desktop computing thus far.

That isn’t a bad thing. Just because something is familiar, it doesn’t make it good. I’ve used a mouse ever since I’ve used a PC, way back to the boxy, square-buttoned mice of the RM computers we had in primary school. But after using the touchpad on my MacBook Pro, I now HATE using a mouse. Gestures are brilliant, end of. I hate using my work laptop, because it doesn’t support them. The trackpad is lousy, it’s over-sensitive. It doesn’t seem to know what I want to do the way the Mac did.

I loved it so much that, when I bought my iMac last year, I bought a ‘Magic Trackpad’ to go with it. Now the only time a mouse gets used is for playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Which, I guess, is a perfect scenario to illustrate the point that I’m laboriously trying to make (and often try to make in life) – use what’s best for the task at hand.

A mouse is best for playing games.

A trackpad with gestures is best for navigating a desktop.

To everyone decrying the mobile-isation of OS X or Windows, have you ever thought that the new way just might be better? Have you given it a chance? If the answer to one or both of those is ‘no’, then I’d suggest a rethink.

The future is coming, whether you like it or not.