Well I haven’t blogged since last year, so… happy new year !!

It ended good, not all of the stuff I wanted to do were done but some other it was and it was nice. I became a Mandriva contributor, started Mandriva-co community in my country, went to a LOT of metal concerts (Heaven & Hell, Arch Enemy, Haggard, KISS, among others), and on December 30th, I took and passed the “Oracle WebLogic Server 10g System Administrator Certified Expert” exam that I needed for my current job. I scored 78% (over a 66% to pass it), which is a decent score for one of the complex tests I have taken. Maybe it was due to the fact that I had to read,understand, and pseudo-memorize a lot of the ~2500 pages of the three course materials + plus > 50 course labs, all of that in just two months and on my spare time. Also I have had just a single project at work of prior experience with that product (and it was over a year a go, so go figure what I did remember from that), I have worked with application servers for several years now and they all work in very similar ways, but each one has it’s own details that you need to know very well to take a cert exam. I’m not quite proud of taking these kind of exams on proprietary software, but I have a career to build and unfortunately not all people can earn a living with free software :(. I hope one day I could, but for now I have to stick with what the market needs here, that’s what pays the bills.

Some of my plans for this year are blogging more, specially about Mandriva Linux. I think more exposure is one of the important things it has been missing since a long time, to show to the public in general their goodness in many areas, like the Control Center, or their excellent hardware support. So, if someone has an idea of what could be really good topics to blog about, post a comment and I’ll try to write about that too.
Oh, and of course, I plan to go to a lot more concerts, I’ll be starting with Metallica for the second time this coming March (first time was 10 years ago !!), Iced Earth was going to play on Feb 14, but unfortunately the concert got cancelled this week :(. Anyway, we’ll see what surprises this year has for us, what other bands will make my head bang and my heart pump to the fullest 🙂