Jims' Network Diary – musings of a network admin

.. is brilliant!

Using it mostly as a study resource at the moment – my current series of training videos are loaded on, along with an e-book from MS about the changes made in Server 2008 R2. A colleague recently took the 70-642 exam, and found it to differ greatly from the learning resources (offical MS Press book) he’d been using. A little digging found that the exam had been changed to be very much R2 specific. So I’m covering my bases with the e-book.

As well as this I’ve got a subscription to the practise exam from Measure Up – incidentally, this is now identified as “60-646R2” instead of “70-646”, which I subscribed to February. So I’m pretty sure the exam will focus on the R2 changes in much the same way described above. The Measure Up site works perfectly in Safari, so I’ve been using the iPad most recently to do their online practice exams.

The form factor of the iPad and the instant-on make it perfect for my lunch-break study sessions – makes a real difference to having to lug my faithful old Dell Latitude 6400 (well overdue a swap-out, admittedly) around, then wait for the ancient installation of Vista to boot and decide it’s actually ready to load Media Player 😉

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a solution to the fact that the various books I’ve bought for my iPhone don’t scale to fit the iPad screen – they’re made for the iPhone screen size and that’s it. But it’s not a massive issue.

iBooks is also an absolute must – I’ve downloaded numerous whitepapers in PDF format when before I wouldn’t have really even thought about it.

So all in all, a great purchase – post to come soon RE: other useful Apps I’ve found.

Well it got here about 15:30.. Already purchased logmein ignition (amazing) and a leather case.

Bit disappointed that my purchased ebooks don’t auto scale to fit the screen, but haven’t searched too hard for a solution yet. Otherwise it’s sweet!

Decided on a whim that I wanted an iPad 2. This mainly stemmed from the fact that my Iphone 4 doesn’t render the tabular data in the the e-book versions of my learning materials very well, but I’ve also now decided to stick my CBT videos on there too.

The Apple Online store was saying 2 weeks for delivery; the local Apple Store were “getting deliveries daily, call at 9:00 every day to see if we have one” (bollo**s to that), and some joker is selling the 16GB WiFi model, with a retail of £399.99, for £515.99. So I’d almost given up when I checked out PC World, who had them available for delivery in 2-3 days. Thinking this may have been an error I phoned to verify, and had it confirmed that this is indeed the delivery time.

So now I’m sitting at work waiting for DHL to get here – hopefully I won’t have the negative experience of them that several of my colleagues have. Gulp.