This month has been so full on with Apple related stuff for me and yet aside from a copy of Filemaker Pro I'm still waiting on I have no Apple products in my hot little hands.

My March Apple Madness actually started around January/February when Polly from Kinetics (Filemaker's PR firm in Australasia) contacted me about them flying me over to Sydney to talk about how I use Bento, Filemaker's brilliant consumer database application. I had a problem because I've never left New Zealand before so I had to get me a passport which I had before the end of February, so yay Department of Infernal Affairs.

So on March 17, 2010 I found myself standing in front of a small group of people explaining how I use Bento in my day to day work. This is weird for me because I'm bottom rung. I'm barely above the janitors and yet here I am being flown over to Australia, the very first time I've been out of New Zealand, by a couple of companies whose products have actually changed the way I work for the better. I have to say that I'm better at talking to a large crowd than to a small one because there's a degree of anonymity in a large crowd because you can focus on the back and not see people's faces but when they're all just right there it gets freaky. That being said things seemed to have gone well and I got to help a couple of people.

But no sooner had I got home I was studying for the hardware aspect of my Apple Technician certification so on Tuesday 23 March 2010 I sat the exam and passed but not without some degree of irony.

The exam was of course an Apple exam but Prometrics farm their courses out to Auldhouse in Wellington and so the exam was on a PC which promptly crashed when it tried to print out my results. Still, they confirmed I passed and so I was halfway there.

But it didn't end there because it now meant I had to sit the software aspect of the certification so that meant studying. Now, I'm far from being the most studious person on the planet. I never did study for exams or do homework for that matter when I was a kid so 2 weeks of studying was doing my head in and I just couldn't get my head into it at all but come Tuesday 30 March 2010 I sat and passed my software exam so I am now an official Apple Technician...well I will be when my exam gets registered with Apple Certifications site.

Incidentally it's my first ever formal qualification as well. I've never been one for formal qualifications because in the tech world no one does it by the book so the qualifications are largely rubbish. Apple actually is different because they only deal with the latest technology and everything is largely about training for process of elimination. I've read A+ and got through about the first ten pages then promptly fell asleep. It's all about the old stuff. I mean it was talking about Centronix SCSI which largely died out 10 years ago. This is the problem with the PC world. So much backwards compatibility rather than accepting newer better technology.