I have been studying off and on for the past two weeks in preperation for the Apple Certified Support Professional examination in Mac OS X 10.6 Essentials. And there are a lot of essentials: Installing and configuring Snow Leopard; Boot Camp; User Accounts; File Systems; Command-Line Work and Unix; Applications; Network Setup and Services; and Peripherals. Much of the stuff I already knew; some of it is new to me. But what was a good sign was that I took the sample test from the Apple site and, for the first time ever, got all of the ten questions right!
And yet, when I took the test, I got within three percentage points of passing. But I still didn’t pass!
Worse, I know why I didn’t pass: weaknesses in knowledge of network configuration and services — again! And weaknesses in data management and backup (with Time Machine) also caused me trouble.
I will try again sometime in May, during my spring vacation.
It has been one winter storm after another this past month. I have lost two days of work due to being stuck at home in the snow. We have had at least one death in town due to the weather. And last month’s library board meeting had to be cut short because we did not have the necessary quorum.
Now spring is struggling to return. The snow, which not one week ago was piled up level with my deck, is melting away so much that most of the lawn is now visible. The weather is slowing getting warmer, too. Both have made the ground very soggy and wet. This, in turn, is forcing out the ants from their nests into my kitchen!
The ants are coming out of the floor along the bottom edge of my sink cabinet, and climbing up into my sink. I have tried pepper to slow them down. It does not work. They are ignoring the Grant’s ant trap I laid under the sink because their trail does not go there. I decided to lay another Grant’s trap near their entry point, hidden by a toolbox to keep the cat away. I also scrubbed the ant path with Comet to remove the pheremone trail.
So far this has been working. The ant invasion has been reduced to just a half a dozen ants on the countertop, cabinet and floor.
I also have other insect problems.
There are firebrats (black silverfish) coming out of the walls next to the stairs. They are coming from the cracks in the plaster caused by the stress from the stairs when I walk up and down them. I intend to seal the cracks. But before I can do that, I must prop up the stairs, supported as they are only at the top, the bottom, and at some post anchored to the ceiling.
I bought two six-foot lengths of 2″ × 2″ posts usually used for decks. I plan to cut them to size; to paint them white; and to pound them into place under the staircase to give it bottom support.
Bioshock 2 came out just after my last entry, and I got my copy a couple of days later. I find it a nuisance to have to set up a Windows for Games Live account, and then to have to log onto it every time I want to play Bioshock 2. But, otherwise, I have had no trouble with installing the game.
I have gone over the differences between the first and second Bioshock games on my own Bioshock 2 page (which I am redesigning), but I summarize them here.