arghhhhhh

I knew it was going to be a naff day when I managed to knock the new toilet roll off the top of the cistern into the toilet this morning, thus wasting an entire roll of bog roll and the rest of the day didn’t improve much either.
I don’t think I managed to get any decent work done today. This morning I decided to try and do some more vb.net programming on the microsoft training course and got as far as the online labs only for the website to come back with an “error – please contact support” message. I then spent the next 2 hours chatting with support trying various things, none of which made any difference. The only thing that I did get working was the screencapture of this process using Microsofts media encoder. This tool is great for doing screencams to send to support people and for some reason I had been getting weird error messages saying that the input stream was invalid, but this morning it worked!
I’m still waiting to hear back from Microsoft on the reason the web page doesn’t work though.

So this afternoon I decided to do some more job hunting and started to apply for a job with verizon wireless as a techie. However, part of the way through they wanted to know the date that I received my mcp qualifications. Trying to access the Microsoft site I found that they had now integrated their logins with their passport scheme and so I didn’t have any username or passwords that worked (my combination was pre passport). On the phone to Microsoft Support and I realised that using the cordless phone (the only option down in the basement) disrupts the wifi signal and I can’t use the internet and be on the cordless at the same time. Eventually I get sent a new username and password for the website, based on my mcp id, so it was a good job I could still find my mcp card which had the details on it. However, by the time I had got all of this information the verizon site had timed out due to lack of use and I had to start again as a new user even though I had originally gone through the username/password signup on their site – it doesn’t actually save these details until you hit submit a resume.
So I finally managed to apply for the two jobs and I thought I’d take a self assessment test before doing the Microsoft desktop support qualification exam (which starts to bring my qualifications uptodate). The microsoft website shows the self assessment test as being available until the end of august yet when you click through to the measureup site it expired end of May. Not only that, but half way through this process I somehow managed to get the passport site to say click the *logouticon* to log in to the website. Anyway, if you ignore the date information and continue on to register when you finally get to start taking the test your 30 questions are generated and the next page says “error ‘80020009’
Exception occurred. /test/Display_Question.asp, line 526” I then got on the phone to Measureup and walked them through the problem and an email has been sent to the developer so hopefully by tomorrow morning I may be able to take the test.