We got Alex measured up for a kilt today. My cousin Cameron is getting married at the end of September, and of course all the Sutherland men have to be dressed appropriately for the event.
MCSD.NET
Achieved.
I passed 70-316 this morning, the last one in the series for my MCSD (.NET) certification. Woo! With a certain amount of Yay!
I didn’t find 70-316 a difficult exam, but then I’ve been coding Windows Forms since Visual Basic 4 back in 1997. It may be a C# exam, but forms are forms, and a familiarity with the “Microsoft way of doing things” works wonders. ADO.NET was the other big part of this exam–probably about 25% of the questions related to data access in some for or other. So really, if you know your C#, WinForms, and ADO.NET, this ought to be a breeze.
Of course, then along comes Scott Hanselman with a bubble-bursting set of ASP.NET interview questions that show that MCSD.NET is only the beginning of professional expertise….
Halo
I finished playing Halo last week: wow. Despite some annoyingly repetitive sections about three-quarters of the way through, it was an enormously satisfying game. The climactic ending was the best I’ve come across since Ico. It wasn’t as emotional (I didn’t cry), but it was adrenaline-filled, rousing, and pleasingly cinematic. (I had been half expecting an Alien-style final encounter with a Flood creature on board the escape ship.)
By rights, Halo should have been the game that made me go out an buy an XBox. The best multiplayer fun I’ve ever had was playing 8-way split-screen Halo on two XBoxes and two big LCD wall projectors. I had enjoyed playing through some of the early single-player missions on friends’ boxes, both alone and in co-op mode. The choral opening music still gives me goosebumps.
For a long time, I had an XBox + Halo on my wish list, in case anyone was looking for ideas for a Christmas or birthday present. But for an equally long time, Halo was the only XBox exclusive game that held any real interest for me. I already had a PS2 and a GameCube, so I had multiformat games covered, £150 is a lot of cash to lay down for just a single game. I had thought I might get it on the PC when it came out last year, but performance issues convinced me otherwise.
In the end it was Rainbow Six 3 that was the tipping point for me to buy an XBox. Or, more specifically, the XBox Live multiplayer aspect of the game. Tactical squad-based shooters don’t light my candle, but co-operative team-based play does. And when you can slip on a headset and enjoy a lively shared experience in the comfort of your own home, well, that’s a whole new ball game.
So would Halo alone have been worth the price of an XBox? Good though it was, I don’t think so–especially as I already had plenty of games hardware. If I hadn’t had a PS2 or a GameCube, it might have been different. Having said that, I have Halo 2 on pre-order, and I’m planning to take the release date off work to put in some quality time with the Master Chief. Oh yeah.
Sarah McLachlan in October
Just booked tickets to see Sarah McLachlan at the Edinburgh Usher Hall in October. Cool.
Another one bites the dust
That’s 70-229 down, only 70-316 to go on the road to MCSD.NET: Friday’s the day.
70-229 was a toughie–the hardest one I’ve had so far. I scored well, but there were very few “gimme” questions. Most of the questions were quite long, too–just reading through the lead-ins, the exhibit code and diagrams, and the possible answers took a lot of time. I finished the last question with only eight minutes to spare, which left me precious little time for dithering and worrying about the answers I was unsure of. Anyway, I passed. Yay me.
Photo Booth
While we were picking up Kathleen from the airport today, we had some time to kill. We all bundled into a photo booth, and…
