I finally got off my lazy arse and set up a blog! I had been mulling over various possibilities of implementation, including setting up my own Web server, purchasing hosting and even coding the whole thing myself in Django or Ruby on Rails. There are some things I realised, though:

1. these things take time to learn, implement and maintain
2. I don’t have the bandwidth to host it from home, and hosting services cost money
3. I don’t have much free time these days
4. I’m cheap :p

So I got a Blogsome account for the supreme price of $0. This was some months after deciding to have a blog in the first place, and now I have a backlog of things to write about. At least something’s better than nothing, so be prepared for entries that begin like, "Four months ago I did blah."

I have thought ahead, though. Thanks to FreeDNS, my homepage links to here, and I have a redirect for http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog. The links for the RSS/RDF feeds also link to my domain rather than Blogsome directly. Hopefully, these measures should provide some degree of forwards compatability should I later decide to move my blog elsewhere. If you want permanent links to my blog, link to dhanapalan.com.

I did say I’d try to be more diligent in writing journal entries last time, but I guess I failed. Well, no matter. It’s not as if my life is a rich tapestry or anything. Suffice to say that I’ve had a few things take up my time over the past week, the most significant being my studies. I’m still getting into the rhythm of things (I still syncopate too much), but I’m managing.

By the end of my first week, I had completed two modules and was 50 hours ahead. I have 25-hour weeks (5 hours per weekday), so that made me 2 weeks ahead. Mind you, it was easy stuff. PC Fundamentals is about learning about basic hardware and MS-DOS commands. PC Advanced is about slightly more advanced MS-DOS commands and Batch files. Nothing I haven’t done before. I’m just glad it wasn’t as brain-dead as Operate a Computer, which is about how to use Windows (yuck!) and basic GUI apps at a single-user level. Fortunately the Network Engineering course doesn’t sink that low (although there are other courses which do).

I was supposed to move onto the CompTIA A+ certification, but it appears that I was moving too quickly and they didn’t have any of the materials in stock. Instead, I ended up skipping ahead a few topics and doing Help Desk Problem Solving Techniques. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a lot of theory to memorise. Given that I was two weeks ahead, I thought I should slow down and learn that module properly. Even then, I finished (just yesterday) with plenty of time to spare.

Now I’m 75 hours ahead. That’s three weeks! I should be graduating well ahead of the date which was forecast at the beginning (12 December).

Finally, I’ve been able to start the A+ course. I was given the choice of doing either the A+ Hardware or A+ Operating System certifications first. I chose the latter, being more familiar with software. Having only begun today, I can’t say much about it.