2024-09 Exams

This month there has been lots of travel for exams. I work in a regulated industry where I have to prove my skills every 3 years. That sounds reasonable but there are a lot of imperfect processes around that renew and a lot of politics. Enough for a post of its own. So I can’t promise to turn this month into an interesting blog post, but here it is warts-an-all.

Professional Exams

I started the month feeling quite negative and a little burnt out with the exam process.

The nearest exam centre accepting appointments is 450km away in Stockholm. The relevant exams all come in two parts. One of the exams wont allow a candidate to book the second part exam until the first is completed and registered in the exam vendors system. So either two trips or staying over.

Travel either involves a fast and expensive plane flight, return or a train ride. The train takes about 6 hours each way. I discovered that sitting on an overnight train with someone coughing every 60 seconds is cheap but going to leave you a tired wreck by the time you arrive.

For some reason, certain exams can only be delivered by certain test centres. I had to book a trip to Finland for one exam, only for the exam body to contact me to cancel the exam due to delivery preparation issues. I couldn’t get my money back on the flights or hotel stays and the exam support contact came across as a little unbothered.

I wrote “write a snotty email” on my to-do list. I found the senior management contact online. I wrote explaining what had happened and that I accepted that my distance to the exam centre wasn’t reasonably their fault, but that I also felt if was reasonable to be disappointed at having lost a significant amount of money and with the handling of the cancellation. I was expecting some PR style email telling me to go away. In the meantime I used the domestic/internal flights I’d booked to go and take the third exam, especially since I couldn’t cancel them.

The third exam felt like it went great, with 85% in the first auto-marked section but I dont get results back for the second human-marked section until some time in the next month. For some final minor drama, my heart sank when I got to get the flight home and found I had the exam centre locker key in my pocket – I was supposed to have returned it. I posted it back first class the next morning and gave them the tracking number, which they were fine with.

So the situation was that by the third week of the month I’d achieved the basic tier of recertification and was half way through the upper tier process. But the recertification process over the past few months had brought me back into contact with a lot of negative aspects and assumptions of the industry which had been tough to deal with.

Passing

But despite all the travel and drama I was now guaranteed at least a basic level of clearance for the type of work I do. I had also discovered the various exams had been greatly modernised. I was quite impressed with how on-topic the new exams were for the work we typically do. I was also surprised when the exam body messaged me back to organise a meeting to talk about the cancellation.

Having worked in support previously I thought back to the dread of facing a complaining customer and made sure I didn’t copy any of the negative behaviours I’d seen in the the past. I tried to keep it to the point and constructive. I explained what had happened and what I thought could have been done. They offered me a refunded for my most expensive exam, which was great.

I’ve still got one more exam to take to re-obtain the higher level, but I wont know when I can take that for another month or so, plus the exam centres will have a lead time of about a month.

Autumn/Winter Preparation: More wind breaks

November tends to bring some really strong winds that blow freezing air over all the plants, without any snow cover to shield them. We have a big open field next to us and the wind rushes down the side of the garage. Last year it killed three blueberry bushes back to the ground. So this year we wanted to make cover and wind breaks. We’d had a fence put in which would help a bit, and we added some arches from 45mm pressure treated wood.

The hardest part was getting all the arches to be both reasonably level, reasonably vertical and the same height, alignment and proportions as each other. Later I added an “X” overlapping cross brace to the end arches to make them stronger and give a little more shelter. I made a bird table with the leftover spares.

Woodchip

We got another woodchip delivery and used it to cover the area where hopefully a pergola will go to give plants shelter. We don’t care so much about having a pergola itself, but desperately need the spring sun and wind shelter for the plants.

By the end of the month the frosts were getting more regular and all vegetables in the garden are at at an end. We made sure to move all the woodchip delivery from the driveway and just piled it up for winter. The kommune said the pergola doesn’t need their permission. However they were not keen on the further query about if solar panels might be allowed on the top in the future – there is a limit on how much of the plot I’m allowed to have roofed buildings on and it.

Mice

With the stat of cold weather and the first frost, the mice start looking for a warm place to stay. I started putting anti-mouse netting around the base of the house to prevent them running up inside the air gap of the metal facade.

Sadly after doing two sides I hurt my back and I’ve not had luck finding someone to finish the digging. We have captured about 5 mice so far, releasing them in the forest far away.

I’d wanted to put a snow guard on the roof before winter to reduce the risk of a dangerous weight of snow sliding off onto the postman or other visitors. It looks funny in cartoons but in real life it can be several times your body weight, landing on you from a big height. I think I’ve left it too late however as I’ve not been able to get responses from the roofing installers and similar.

Camera Update

For the past couple of years I’ve been using a old DLSR camera I purchased second-hand. The aim was to see if I found photography interesting without investing too much, and also provide family and friends in the UK with photos of what we’re up to. It has been fun to use and learn with. It is a 14 year-old model however, and after 2 years I’d quite to get more into the hobby.

In the meantime, the camera industry is moving to a new technology and so there are good deals around with people selling off their old equipment – which is what I’m using. So late this month after finishing the immediate exams and my work position returning to a normal risk-level, I’ve purchased a slightly newer and advanced model of the old range second-hand as a replacement.

I successfully resisted the urge to spend money on the current flagship model, as it would be an eye-watering amount of money for diminishing returns. The “new” camera that will arrive is 10 years old but can fight a reasonably-close losing battle against the current models, and has weatherproofing which is no longer used. Compared to my current camera it has improvements that will help a little with winter shots and with photographing wildlife. The weatherproofed body which should be suited to the conditions in autumn and winter.

Having pseduo-“saved” some money by not buying the expensive body, I instead spent a little on two lenses.

Long Range Lens Replacement

I found a replacement for my standard-issue (“kit”) long-range lens, which it turns out has had a well known defect all this time. Apparently my lens was a “mk1” version that gets fuzzier as you move past half the focal length and gets worst at full zoom. Everyone on the Internet has apparently known this for the past 10+ years. I found out last week. So anyhow a second-hand mk3 lens is on the way. I’m going to spend some time comparing the two lenses.

I’m also hoping to replace my slightly fuzzy moon photos, used on this blogs intro page. It’s always annoyed me that I couldn’t get a good picture of the moon despite clear skies. One late evening I even had a “moon-off” photo competition with the family by us all trying to photograph the full moon that evening and they all got clearer and detailed photos of the moon than I could produce.

But I have to be careful. I’d love to say this lens problem was the cause of all my fuzzy pictures of the moon and blurry foxes, but I suspect my lack of experience is a bigger contributor to the problem. I’d also been getting a high rejection rate when attempting to submit photos to Adobe Stock images.

It looks like AI image generation tools are going to kill off the stock image industry however so I’m perhaps too late to get into it. It’s hard to predict some changes.

Wide Angle Lens

On the subject of industry changes, it looks like my camera manufacturer is maybe going to kill off the type of lens-interface my camera uses. You can get various adaptor plates so it’s no massive deal. But it did prompt a quick look at their remaining lenses for sale to compare against all the different advice I’d had. I got a special wide-angle lens that will let in more light than the default lenses but was cheaper because it does less automatically for the user. It will be for for photographing the night sky and for photographing the landscape especially on low-light winter days.

I think that is enough camera-purchases for the year. I should be able to sell my older camera and the old lenses for not much difference in price to what I paid for them. I might however give it to someone locally who can make good use of it.

HAM Radio training

For at least 6 years I’ve had the UK HAM radio license training material in a box and not touched it due to the world going crazy and the time requirements of emigrating. With the onset of autumn I was thinking about the next few months and signed up to the Swedish radio license process. I thought it would be an interesting hobby to learn and might get me into contact with a few local people as I’ve seen some houses with gigantic antenna.

The EU/Swedish system involves one exam instead of the three separate exams in the UK, so there is a lot of material to study. The course material is also all in Swedish. I thought I would take the Swedish material and split all the words out into an “Anki” flashcard program deck where I could then practise each word but there is so much material that I’ve just had to select specific keywords.

I’ve also been looking into “Meshtastic” radio networks, which are relatively new technology on tiny transmitters and have possible resilience applications which I’m interested in. I don’t think there is an existing network where I am but I’m going to find out and maybe do an article on this.