A % of the nigerian police are probably on the payroll of the scammers to make sure they're not bothered by the police

I live in cambridgeshire and will be hitting the job market in about 14 months time.  Part of me is looking forward to it as i'm getting to detest the job i'm in at the moment and a part of me is dreading it as i've been working for my current company for 20 years now.

You do need to network like buggery in the UK as only about 40% of the jobs get as far as being advertised over here. 
Try get to the 'trade shows' like infosec or BSides (both next week but BSides sold out this year) or any of the other security or it events so you can get yoru face seen and drop off a few business cards (with a potted resume or your key skills on the back)
Get yourself on linkedin, join the it and security groups and get know through those as well

I'm playing with MoinMoin at the moment and find it quite simple to use.

Was also looking at soyWiki that plugs into Vim but as that's flat file based, it may not be what your looking for

How does Don keep blackmailing these companies for these prizes and not get arrested?

I've got the verbal go-ahead and should have the written go-ahead in my inbox when I get back into work after my weeks leave.

Got some books on the way and, if this weather holds up, will spend the week in the back garden with a cold drink or 3 and do some serious reading. 

Work out a plan of attack and see just what I can do.  Will be interesting to have the website/server control console up, watching the logs realtime on one machine whilst I probe from another!

hear, hear.  If you don't want to learn then you shouldn't be in this job

Best of luck and let us all know how you get on both with the course and exam (without going into too much detail of course)

If you want some hands on without using a simulator then look on e-bay for CCNA Lab Rigs.  You can pick them up for a few hundred £, get back in practice then sell it back on for about the same money when you've finished with it.

It's even possible to combine it with something like GNS3 to 'virtually' expand your rig.

Bsides has been booked up solid for nearly two months now!

My boss is going to infosec as well as he finishes with us end of this year so he wants to go do some networking.  Means I don't get to go to infosec this year.

Next year I hope to get both in as i'll be the one leaving and needing to do the networking!

If you look up wifite that will do a lot of the legwork for you, even to changing the mac address.  Has a nice little randomise attack button.

The site has been hacked 3 times in 4 years (they changed the sites default language to swedish once) and I know from the logs that it's not the php app that we're using or that they brute forced the passwords (26 character pass-phrase) but the SQL on the machine was a much older version and not patched fully.

Have had quite a disussion with their tech and sales guys about this and was thinking about doing a discreete white & black test to give me some ammo to light a fire up their asses

If someone can point me in the right direction of some good reading materials, i'd be interested in finding out how to black and white box a website. 

I'd like to find out if there are any vunerabilities in a website I admin as i'm not to happy with the patching and updates as well as the software versions that the host is running.

I've manage to get a ticket and am looking forward to it.  Looks like there could be some interesting talks on the cards.

Just had a read through the syllabus and looks interesting.  May need to pencil that one in for early next year as well.

Thanks for those, some good stuff there.