As various people want to keep track of what I am up to and to make sure I am safe on my trip to India, I will try and post regular updates of videos and photos here over the next few weeks.

There may be times where I won’t have Internet Access or time to open up the laptop and spend time publishing a blog entry though! I can assure you that not having constant Internet Access will be harder for me than it is for you. :p

What I will probably do is start using my twitter account more though as its quicker to post a quick note when I have time, so feel free to follow me twitter for updates.

As I am working towards MCITP:EA I decided to install Server 2008 on it and see what it can do. Thought I would share the results and process.

The netbook is not upgraded so only has a 1.6Ghz Atom Processor and 1GB Memory. Unfortunately it also only has a 32bit processor, so I won’t be able to try with Server 2008 R2 as that only comes in x64 editions.

Step 1: Download Server 2008 from Microsoft. That link took a while to find as Server 2008 R2 seems to appear first for most searches. Once you find the download page on microsoft.com, you can download trials to test things or such from there website which is handy when learning Microsoft certifications. :)

Step 2: Take the data on ISO and throw it onto a Bootable USB Drive. Easiest way to do this is using Windows 7 USB/DVD Download. Could use various deployment methods though.

Step 3: Install Windows Server 2008 from USB and choose Server Core! However once installed, I could not do networking command line things as none of the networking hardware had drivers…

Step 3 (Attempt 2): Install Windows Server 2008 from USB and don’t choose Server Core! Everything worked and the netbook had no issues running the operating system from a requirements perspective. It was actually pretty quick. Kind of surprised, it seemed more responsive than Windows XP.

Step 4: Install Drivers. This time, I could get to device manager and confirm loads of drivers were missing. After much searching I managed to find drivers for most things.

First installed “Asus ACPI Driver” which removed a few not working items from device manager. This allows you to enable wireless, bluetooth and camera in the tray area. Camera drivers then install automatically, but not tested it.

Then I installed some Intel graphics drivers called “winvista_1583″ which after a reboot allowed the netbook to run in native 1024×600 rather than 800×600 and removed the graphics card error from device manager.

Then installed some atheros ethernet drivers called “AR81…” and moved onto wireless drivers. I installed the Wireless LAN Service Feature via Server Manager and tried the Wireless Drivers called “IS_AP…” from Ralink which worked after a reboot.

As for what I intend to use the server for… Not sure yet. I might try to install WordPress on it and call it WIMP… Its like the term LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but stands for Windows, Internet Information Services, MySQL and PHP. Not sure if the term WIMP is used much? If not, maybe it will catch on? :p

Will worry about it when I am back from Delhi as I should really be packing now.

As there is only a few weeks left before I start the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator course and exams, I need to be as prepared as possible for it, so I am trying to increase the amount of time I spend reading up on the subjects or watching videos.

Last time I checked I have about 50GB of MCITP learning resources, so its just a case of working through them and trying to be prepared as possible for it. The result of this is that I have even less time to do things in Eve Online, Minecraft or various other games. :(

Picked up a Amazon Kindle too, as I have finally got fed up with reading content on my Nexus One for long periods of time as becomes uncomfortable, even for someone like me who has no problems looking at computer screens all day. As I travel from time to time, it should be most useful then.

When I am back in May I intend to work on Volition Cult Academy videos again and upload a video of the pretty much finished Gallente Nyx model I built in Minecraft. For now, back to my studying.

Been meaning to blog about this for a while. As of the 29th December 2011 we merged all of the corporations in The Volition Cult alliance into a single corporation called Volition Cult and then joined -Mostly Harmless- alliance. Having always fought fights where we were often outnumbered and constantly having to deal with politics… Its certainly a nice change for our directors.

Things are looking good at the moment in Eve Online though which is cool. Already taken part in a few fleet fights and the Volition Cult corporation seems to be doing really well for itself.

Finished jury service early as they had to many jurors it seems? Arrived on Tuesday to a rather posh building with airport like security and got shown up to the jury waiting area where I signed in and proceeded to wait for things to be explained. After 2 hours of waiting we all got shown an introduction to jury service video and explained how the system works and what we have to do. Then came more waiting. After a few more hours, names were picked at random for cases and a few people got dragged away but I remained in the waiting area… Eventually it was 4pm and we got sent home.

This basically continued until they eventually decided that they had to many jurors and some of us got let off a week early. So after all of that, I never even got to see inside a courtroom and all I really learned was that the food served in the canteen in Bristol Crown Court is terrible, a rip off and the staff being quite grumpy! So always go out for lunch! In contrast the Subway just down the road were the usual bright and helpful selves. :D But that week had to be the most boring and unproductive week in my entire life.

Just a quick update. Her Majesty’s Court Service rejected my request to be exempted from the jury duty so I have to do it early in January.

However having emailed our chairman, he informed me that the Art Loss Register pays employees there full salary while they are doing jury service. So all of my financial concerns are resolved on that note.

As that expensive time of year is fast approaching, I decided to try and better manage my finances. In the past I used to do it with my own designed databases or spreadsheets but it was always time consuming to maintain. This time I got hold of a application called Moneydance that was recommended on the Which? website.

Its probably overkill for the use I need, but it does do a very good job of both visualising my expenses so I can see where I can cut down as well as allow me to quickly review and check the years transactions for anomalies or “expensive things” I should not have paid for.

Another potential issue for most people will be the complexity of actually managing your personal finances in such a detailed way. Using online banking it was easy enough to download a years worth of transactions in .ofx format and import it. Unfortunately, you do have to define what category each transaction is one at a time. Thankfully, Moneydance learns and starts suggesting categories so it only took me 2 hours to check a years worth of transactions.

I also had to provide opening balances to get things to balance. I have an accounting background so expected as much, but I can imagine it would cause confusion for some people when you see your current balances not matching live balances.

Results:

To the right, you will see a comparison of my income and expenses for the entire year to date. Giving me an overall picture of how well I am doing in terms of controlling my spending and not living beyond my means.

Its interesting to see the spikes visually like this. A is when I deposited cash I got as gifts from Christmas. B is my expenditure from attending the Denmark meet up. C is from selling various assets. Ignoring those, my expenditure remains consistent, slowly increasing due to inflation I would guess? But as my income is not increasing it does highlight the need to address my expenditure and cut back more.

In the left image, you can see how easy it is to browse transactions by category. Unfortunately I could only download the last five months credit card transactions online. Income and Expenditure graphs still look correct because payments to the credit card are on the current account so I had accurate total values. I just lacked the option to view the details for the start of the years credit card transactions.

Finally, on the right is one of the graphs that show the top ten expenses.

This is perhaps one of the most useful reports though, as once I get it working it shows the highest expenditure. There is no point me worrying about how to lower a £15 monthly bill when I have £200 going to Sainsbury’s that I could try and cut down on for example.

Anyway, that’s all I have been up too… Now that I have set this up, its easy to maintain on a monthly basis and I do love playing with new applications and playing with figures. XD

So this morning I received a letter from Her Majesty’s Courts Service because my name is on the electorial register. Apparently I have been selected for jury service in January 2011 in Bristol Crown Court which by itself is quite a pain to travel to for someone who dos not drive. However as I read the paperwork, I came to the following conclusion.

Presuming a court case lasts two weeks, my employer is legally required to give me that time off work unpaid, so I would lose about £850 (gross) income in that month. Plus £68 for train travel to Bristol gets the total to £918.

However the maximum reimbursement I can request for the two week period is £650 (gross) which means I would be out of pocket by £268.

Considering how I have very little expendable income, this is an absurd request. It makes me wonder, how do they get any working person to agree to do it when its so expensive?

Furthermore, I am the only IT employee for the Art Loss Register and Equipment Register so if I was stuck in court, what would those businesses do for day to day IT demands? Even when I take holidays I get emails and calls for things that need to be done as soon as possible.

As a result, I have requested exemption. Just as well, as the government don’t seem to understand how inappropriate my personality is for jury duty. lol.

Having got back to the office after a two week holiday, I am pleased to report that no one decided to break anything and all of my (technically my employers) lovely configured servers are still functioning as intended.

Just spent the time relaxing, sleeping and not doing much of anything. Although I did see my first few 3D films though at the cinema, which was an interesting but I was not overly impressed by it all. The 3D effect is nice, but as the flat screen is large and far away I suspect the effect is lost a little. Get the feeling it might look better on a PC, but needing to use special glasses is a pain in the rear.

During the end of my break, headed out to Nick’s and managed to watch Avatar. Its an average film with nice effects but kept me entertained for a few hours I guess. Cheesy ending though, I would have hoped it would have ended the opposite way to what it did as that would have made it interesting.

Apart from that, not much of interest although I did start watching season one of White Collar which had a surprise for me in episode five as it mentioned my employer. Although they said “Art Loss Registry” rather than “Art Loss Register” but it was still a “wait what?!?” moment. I did try to share a 20 second video clip of this on YouTube, but Google knew it was copyrighted so blocked it. So while I can’t add a YouTube video here, I can just link the video file directly instead.

Download Link: ALR in White Collar S01E05 (14Mb)

Also installed CyanogenMod 6 during my break, but more on that later.

For those of you that have visited and taken note of the local wildlife that lives in the roof of the building next to my kitchen window. Those birds are still present and I finally managed to get a photo of a couple of them without them disappearing when I wonder off to fetch a camera…

At the time I was actually moving furniture, taking a couple of desks apart and doing a general spring clean so left my phone on the window seal. The idea was to make my living room more efficient you see, fixing the problem of where to leave drinks and snacks when I am watching films and also the height of my computer monitors.

Until now they had always been on a raised shelf on the desk so you look up at them which was never good for posture. As I had just submitted my order for a new computer over the weekend, I thought it best to start work on ensuring that the environment it will live in will be suitable. More on that another time.

In any case, below is the photo taken before I spooked the birds to fly off. Its funny because they won’t go into the hole when I am stood near the window, they pretend to be just sitting there randomly waiting for me to go away before jumping in.