Last Thursday we had a small group meetup at Microsoft Melbourne. The topic was ‘IT Pro Australia’. Danika Bakalich who is the regional director of CompTIA was collecting feedback and ideas for this new association/Group that CompTIA wants to form. The group will be called “IT Pro Australia”.

First of all, fantastic idea to create such an association. IT Pro group will be an association where IT guys (those who have a degree and those who don’t) can be members of the association. Based on their experience and knowledge they will be categorized under the right level (as I understand this is still not well decided). CompTIA will have a system in place where members will be able to assess themselves. The system will also give them a path way of what other skills/qualifications are necessary for them (members) to get themselves ready for the desired position. Apart from letting members upskill themselves, IT Pro also could be an association where people can network with each other, share & discuss their ideas, and can have walk in professionals who can talk on a range of issues from management to insurance topics.

I hope CompTIA also arranges for some of the really good benefits that can help IT Professionals to make their lives easy. The fee structure seems to be quite good. I was told they are going to charge $25 for the students and $85 for IT Professional (compare this will $3xx or so that ACS charges). Won’t this be a duplication of ACS or is this going to do the same thing as ACS?

As per Danika, if the idea succeeds here in Australia, than they are going to introduce the idea of IT Pro in other countries as well. They are going to make this public in October 2005. Well good luck Danika & group on creating the structure for IT Pro Australia. Hope to hear from you soon.

After the meeting Jeff Alexander, Henry Craven, Nirav,Duui and myself went to a nearby Japanese restaurant. The food was excellent, thanks for the treat Jeff. I had a chance to undergo a great new experience. Learned that Henry Craven knows much more about Indian and Indian restaurants that I do! Overall even in the bad weather we had a good time.

I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso

Tool of the day for me is Bitty Browser. Nice little embedded browser. Check out their website to see what are the possibilities of this browser and than start to imagine about the uses of it. I can really think of many uses, but the problem is my blog engine does not support native HTML code and gives me error messages for ‘IFrame’. Will try to solve the problem later on, but a good tool indeed.

Heard of picture in picture technology, this is browser in browser technology :). Good work guys.

Channel 9 Guy has landed in Melbourne. He has travelled nearly 150 Kms already in 8 hours with me so far. He is going to see many more places and meet many new faces over the weekend.Pictures will be updated soon on this website. I have decided to talk to atleast 10 people about Channel 9 website this weekend and make them aware of the efforts Microsoft is putting towards community.

Frank Arrigo, thanks for sending me the Channel 9 guy and Jeff thanks for bringing it over. Some more report tommorrow. Had a great night out.

BTW Jeff, you really need to fix the last post that you have done on your blog with Blogjet, I find it hard to read black fonts on grey background ;).

Hey Frank Arrigo, do you think we can get Channel 9 guy here in Australian without writing a post card to Jeff Sandquist? Yes, I can get some pictures near Crown Casino here, near Rialto towers and when I visit some place around Melbourne. What do you think?

I love to read inspirational stories and to learn something from those. The stories about rags to riches, how people overcame their fears, how people moved to the top from bottom and more inspirational stories. These stories get the blood pumping fast in my body. Now I learned something more about Bob Parson‘s of GoDaddy today. I learned something about him as person and about his life. Yes, it inspired me again. Bob posts 16 rules that he try’s to live by. They are simple but they do definately work.

Good stuff Bob. I am inspired and you will be glad (or I am glad that I am a customer of an inspirataional person)that I am one of your customers having two of my domains registered with GoDaddy (;) even though I paid nearly the double of what some other providers were).

Bittorent founder Bram Cohen slams Microsoft’s “upcoming” product Avalanche. ZDNet reports…

A friend tells me that Firefox 1.0.5 is coming soon. Does any body knows anything more about it?

Grafolicious is a cool tool that lets you search del.icio.us to see how many more del.cio.us users are linking to a given URL and great a graph of it. I have bookmarked it at my del.ico.us account.

Via. Robert Scoble.

Picked up the news that there is a new tool in the market called Reblg.com. It is supposed to make it very easy to reblog or link to another blog post. But the site owners really would have been better off structuring their site more properly. It hardly gives a common user a idea on how the tool is supposed to work. I did not really get a clear picture until I read the post by Marc Canter.

Guys, remember not all users are going to waste 15 minutes figuring out what the tool is good for and how it has to be used. It has to be obvious. Well you did select a name that is obvious but did not put much effort on putting it in words on your site. As Robert put’s it, I would say “An oppurtunity is wasted”. Yes but the tool does sound very interesting and usefull. I will wait for Greasemonkey script.

Hey Marc, what about atleast putting the code for this on your own blog or give us some examples where we could see the code in action?