I wanted to go into the details of the Skills Ontario competition that I attended in early May 2009, and go over the entire experience. It has been 15 years since I competed at the Skills Ontario competition. The Skills Ontario competition took place from May 4 to May 6, 2009, at the RIM Park and Manulife Financial Sportsplex in Waterloo, Ontario. I won first place in the IT and Network Support competition which qualified me for Skills Canada in late May 2009, which I also attended.

On May 1, 2009, I finished the last day of my field placement at Health Sciences North in Sudbury, Ontario, and completed the final course that I needed so that I could graduate from Cambrian College in the CETY (Computer Systems Technology) program. The following week I travelled to Waterloo, Ontario to represent my college in the Skills Ontario competition in the IT and Network Support category. I ended up winning first place in that competition, and I then travelled to Charlottetown, PEI a few weeks later to the Skills Canada competition to compete again where I also won first place. It has been 15 years since I competed at both events, and I wanted to go over the experience.

On March 21, 2024, the United States Justice Department and 16 States filed suit against Apple for monopolistic practices in the smartphone market. The main allegation is that Apple has violated antitrust laws by making it difficult for competitors and other third-parties to interoperate with the iPhone (and with iOS), and as a result they have a monopoly on the smartphone market in the US. This was certainly an interesting thing to hear about and it seems to have come out of nowhere. It is a complex case, and despite what others are saying, it is not completely related to the whole ‘‘green bubble’’ situation with iMessage.

World Backup Day was a few days ago and I wanted to go into the details on my current backup strategy, and the reasons behind the way that I handle the backups of my important data. While it is not overly complex compared to other backup strategies that I have seen, it is important to have a formal process in place to ensure that data is being backed up and correctly protected. It is very easy to just assume that everything is being backed up and that is the end of it, but not properly scheduling, validating, or tracking your backups is what usually causes data loss.

Several years ago, I acquired a Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client while I was doing some contract work. The company that I was working for was getting rid of several dozen of them and offered me one if I was interested. Right after that happened, I moved and it ended up in storage, and I only just recently rediscovered that I even had it. This turned out to be quote convenient because I was using a Raspberry Pi as a Pi-hole server on my network, and I needed to repurpose that device for something else, so I decided to use this system to replace it. Even though it is an old system that is end-of-life, it is still useful.

Once again, the year is over and I wanted to take some time to look back on what I accomplished during 2023, and what I am planning to do in 2024. Overall, I think the goals are quite achievable and I should have no issues with getting the things done that I want to get done.

I have released some new and updated publications in the last week that I wanted to mention. I also wanted to quickly go over what I have planned for the remainder of 2023 and for the beginning of 2024, as some of my plans have changed slightly from the last time that I talked about it.

In September 2022 I took a 3-week trip to the Azores to visit family members, and to have my first real vacation since the end of 2019. I wasn’t planning on taking my daily driver MacBook Air with me because I was concerned about it getting lost or damaged, but I wanted to take something with me in case I needed to do some work or to connect to anything at home. I ended up getting a Chromebook for the first time in several years, and it worked out exceptionally well, despite some minor limitations. I wanted to see if a Chromebook could actually be useful as a primary device for an extended period.