The notion of being certified is an interesting one.  In the IT world there are so many certifications, being mostly vendor-oriented, with a few exceptions.  Cisco, Novell, Microsoft, Lotus, they all have their certifications that one can obtain.

I myself am a Microsoft Certified Professional, meaning I passed at least one certification exam.  Which I did last year, the 70-290 “Managing and Maintaining Server 2003″.  Now I got my sights on the next step up the ladder, the MCSA (Microsoft Certified System Administrator), which requires another 3 more exams.

This is the sneaky part of these certifications, you need more and more to be consider a higher up IT dude.  Good thing Microsoft and everyone else charges for these things; from between $75-$300, they must be making a killing off us IT people!  Last I checked there were millions upon millions of MCP’s out there.  Profit!

But regardless of this exciting and wallet-draining news, I will continue to contribute to their profits and continue to get more and bigger certs until the day I retire, change careers, or die. Why? For myself it gives me a challenge and reason to learn more stuff.  Also, God only knows my future, and having piles of certs and on the job experience and a degree gives me an edge over the next guy that doesn’t if I need to look for another job.

This is my first of probably many, many, thoughts on this topic.  As I never know which certification I will be going for in the future.

Ok I went out today and purchased Call of Duty 4.  This was brought on by my renewed interested in the first person shoot-um-up type came being nurtured at work playing Battlefield: Bad Company.  But since I do not own a Xbox and it is not for the PC, I needed something fresh, exciting, and can be run on  a PC.  My co-worker,Tadd, fellow Bad Company soldier and ping-pong opponent had mention getting COD4.  I was also reading his blog about joining a clan, having fun, etc…, with it all, so I figured I might as well join.

Now comes the frustration: I get the game installed and figure I better get it patched up to current levels.  Sounds easy enough for me, a network admin, nope! I went to the publisher website, Activision, and for the life of me could not find any COD4 patches.  It is a slick website, but not very user-friendly.  Thanks to the boys over at Google, I of course found the patches and have them installed now. But what a pile of crap! I even went to the actual makers of the game, Infinity Ward, and nothing.

Enough said, I need to blow some steam off and learn a new game!

After talking to my co-worker Tadd, it came to me: if I keep waiting for the perfect website to come to mind in all its glory and I sit down and create it…NOTHING is going to happen.  Bingo, then with a little nudge from other friends, I just went to the Wordpress Theme library place they got and picked one the look like a good start. So here it is, HERE IT IS, finally. After paying for the domain name and hosting at 1and1 and sitting on dreams for three months, the ball is rolling.  Now I need to work on content and some other ideas, that I will be asking Tadd about since he knows more about web design than !.

of Pete’s blog there were many comments about its lack of content…