They call them "blue swimmer crabs"

That's because they swim bloody fast! Well, when I'm diving in the swan river as I was tonight, trying to catch them, they did dart about avoiding me and the other two divers. Especially as you lose them once they are out of the beam of the torches, which in my case wasn't very much at all as I was using my backup smaller torch at the time :)

It seemed a good suggestion at the time to try and catch some prawns and crabs in the river. Except for it being COLD..... although my dive computer told me it was still 16 degrees (that's about 60 in old money), I didn't believe it for a minute.....brrrrrrr!

But was fun and would do it again, as long as I had another layer on and make sure my main torch is working properly! And caught three good size ones, so crab for dinner tomorrow night.

Do you know who I am?

I'm finally an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional)! What does that mean? you may ask. Well, it means that I have actually got round to doing some microsoft exams, specifically architecting and configuring SharePoint.

Now I know I've been doing this for many years and probably should done the exams a long time ago, but you all know how much I love studying and didn't have any real drivers to do it earlier. It does get registered against me so I have this as a recognised certification, but also importantly is that it goes towards the company maintaining the microsoft gold partner status.

And like most of these things the studying and practise exams were harder than the actual exam, so will have to be a bit more pro-active in the future in doing the new versions of the exams as they are relased.

Am I more proud of my MCP than my MSDT (Master Scuba Diver Trainer) certification....I'll let you decide ;o)

Is it a Dualis or a Quashqai?

Depends upon where you live, it seems...

So, we have just bought a new car, a nissan Dualis (also called a Quashqai in the UK, and I thought Dualis was a weird name!) It is a raised hatch type thing with AWD (that's 4 wheel drive for part-timers) so we can get along some tracks and on the odd beach.

It's black, which is different to all the other white cars, but apparently in WA not the best idea as it absorbs the heat on the hot days, but with air con being much better nowadays we hope that won't be a real problem. Time will tell :)

So will have to get out and about on some trips soon to test it out, just not let Glynn and Marc get involved or they'll have me off down some crazy tracks to "test it out"....

We've become a 2 car family

Tried to avoid getting another car but it's difficult here in Perth and now that we are living a bit further inland, which makes the commute further for me. Got a deal through work for a car allowance which makes it a better deal so started looking seriously and after many deliberations, that nearly made the house choice seem easy we went for a test drive of a Nissan Dualis we decided that was the model we wanted. Good timing gave us access to an ex-demo model with very few kms on the clock, so was too good a deal to pass up.

Excited to pick it up tomorrow and go cruising around in the new motor :)

Welcome to our new house

A well overdue post to introduce our new house to the world!

It's just over 3 weeks that we conned the crew into helping us load up the van, trailer, cars and anything else that moved with our furniture and belongings. We were not as prepared as we thought we would be, a case of denial and "oh God, not another move" I think was to blame. But everyone helped out and Sue was on a mission to make sure we did it all in one day, as Janice and I were looking to finish off the next day. As it happens that was a good idea as we still had a car load of clothes, etc to move over after we finished cleaning the Scarborough beach villa. So after three very busy days, we went back to work for a rest....

We are now in an area called Yokine. Not quite as close to the beach as we were, and would like. But reality has to take hold at some point I suppose :( But all that said it is a lovely area and looking forward to discovering more of it over the coming months.

The first weekend after was a good time to "attack" the garden as it has become quite overgrown and it was green collection time, so we got some tools and hacked away :)

I'll put a bunch of photos up on my picasa site in the next day or two as I don't have them here on this PC right now.

My excuse for not posting something earlier is that after a week I was then away in Melbourne on business for 3 days and then Sydney the whole next week. Sydney was an entertaining week with us doing an impromtu presentation at the Australian SharePoint 2010 Conference, rather than just sitting back and enjoying it. I wouldn't recommend preparing a speech "the night before" for something like that, but Clayton and I managed to make it look professional enough (I hope) and got some good interest, so all happy from the companies perspective.

Good to be home and I think Janice agrees, mostly :) Now it's time to plan the new kitchen!!