Ugh...Moving sucks...Selling a house sucks...

Joey and I are in the final stages of selling the house and are basically fried from this process. We may have only 10 days to move out, but that's what you have to do to CLOSE!

Then I strut around with my phat wallet full of cash money...

Anyway, good Lehrer program last night. Jimmy Carter was on, talking about the Israel / Palestine conflict. He seemed to slant towards the Palestinians and their plight, and though I agree that these stubborn orthodox settlers / archetheologists (if there is such a word) are not helping the matter at all, lobbing rockets at them in retaliation ain't exactly the answer either.

Since I'm a genius at merging words, perhaps the solution is to unify the two countries into Pisrealistine...

Also, a moving, thought-provoking essay on suicide by Richard Rodriguez. I did a quick Find On This Page search for the word "victim", with no results. This is odd. Almost always where the word suicide comes up in a sentence, you find the word victim (e.g. "victim of suicide"). And, I would argue that, in almost all those cases, the "victim" is the one who committed suicide. As a person who has gone through the suicide of a best friend, it is this part I find to be complete gay. Everyone around - his family, friends, everybody - were the victims of his suicide. With a suicide bomber or kamikaze, the victims include innocent stangers (albeit supposed enemy strangers) and useful vehicles. IS THERE NO END TO THE SELFISH DAMAGE THESE SELFISH SUICIDERS INFLICT?

Sorry there...It's actually not these two stories that got me so riled up; they just helped pop the shiny bubble filled with bad gas that had been developing in me from the real pieces of news of late: the break-ups of Spears-Federline and Anderson-Kid Rock.

The Anderson-Kid Rock one, whatever. Federline, though. I have no idea what it is about him that makes me want to vomit so roughly. His obviousness? The un-originality of his entire persona? The fact he got to poke on Britney?

Your comments may help enlighten me on this...

Almost ready for my final MCSD exam: the 70-300. If I pass it, I'll give what I can out to you, my beloved readers who care. I can already say that anyone who has done any programming / development already, especially involving databases, will have a much more comfortable disposition when first taking a look at this exam. I can already suggest that, if you're thinking of taking this exam, download the MSF white papers as well as this paper on ORM. Look for some sample case studies by Microsoft, too, especially any with included project documents like Visio diagrams, spreadsheets, etc.

Okay all, until next post...

~simon

The MCSD and Me.

So, before moving on to the East coast (sometime this late Fall / early Winter), I've decided to take advantage of my workplace and get both my MCSD and MCDBA. I've been teaching some of the MOC curriculum anyway, so I needed the certifications in order to teach, but since I might leave work -- where I get the classes for free AND my certs paid for if I pass -- nuff said.

I've been teaching C# Windows Apps and the newest Core Data Access (2541), so I already had 70-316 passed. Went in and took 70-315 last week and thought I'd gotten bent over something awful. Got a 927 or something, so I was very pleasantly surprised. For all you looking to take it, here's some pointers:

Know your .config files
Know caching, sessions, and applications big time
Know your (SQL)DataConnections, DataAdapters
Know DataSets, DataTables, DataViews
Know control binding to data
Know assemblies and adding assemblies to your applications (and the sn.exe tool)
Know setup and deployment of projects / assemblies big time

Basically, know everything...After programming in C# since god-knows-when, I thought these exams would be gravy. Obviously it really helps to know the "core" classes well, like System.Data, System.IO, System.Text. It's really the sheer breadth the exams cover that gets you. However, I would have to say that 70-315 was easier than 70-316, most likely because I'd already been spanked and beaten by 70-316.

Prepping for 70-320 now. This should be gravy after the other two. I've already worked on Windows and Web Services (I wish I could post a project here; I have a service for gobbling up M0n0wall syslog into SQL or Access I'd definitely share...and a Jawbreaker clone called Ball Gobbler -- the term of endearment the brick mason I used to work with gave me), and the Kalani book is pretty much the bible, so...

I'll post after taking it to let you all (all 2 readers I currently have) know how it was. I'm really curious about the 70-300 exam. Please share your thoughts on this one: whether it was hard or not, etc.

~simon