While we were picking up Kathleen from the airport today, we had some time to kill. We all bundled into a photo booth, and…
MSDN disks arrive
I knew there was a lot of stuff in the MSDN subscription, but I hadn’t expected the box of disks to be the size of a small fridge. Sheesh.
Fog through the window of the yellow room
Windows XP SP2
Windows XP Service Pack 2 is now available for download to MSDN subscribers; the public download will probably arrive in the next few days. The Service Pack itself weighs in at a chunky 275MB download, but that climbs to 475 if you grab the ISO image of the installation CD. They’re not kidding when they suggest you order might want to order the CD instead.
I’ve been looking forward to SP2 mostly because there are now so many patches and updates to SP1 that doing a fresh install of XP takes bloody hours. Time to slipstream this puppy and ease that pain.
The edge of space
You know, $19,000 for a five-day VIP trip to the edge of space really isn’t all that expensive. (Via Nova Spivack) And that’s here and now in 2004. In another ten years or so, who knows what might be on offer?
It’s one of my dreams to see the Earth from orbit. It doesn’t seem nearly as unrealistic as it used to.
August is training month
I took the Microsoft exam 70-320 (“Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework”) this morning, and passed. Not a difficult exam, as these things go. As usual, I went into it worrying I was under-prepared, and came out of it thinking that I’d spent way too much time studying for it. Meh.
This August is going to be a training month for me. My last contract finished at the end of July, and I have a new one lined up for the start of September. As well as this morning’s exam, I’ve got two more scheduled for the week after next: 70-229 (SQL Server) and 70-316 (Winforms with C#). Assuming I pass those, that will sort me out with my MCSD for .NET certification. That’s the main goal for the month.
As well as that, I intend to get myself up to speed on WordPress and ExpressionEngine. And now that I’ve got my MSDN Universal subscription up and running, it would be kind of groovy to start rocking on an MCMS install, too. Content management, yeah baby!
Not to forget all the work I still have to do here on Sunpig to get the new site design and structure finished. Plus there’s a couple of friends’ sites I have promised to sort out. And I’ve got a nifty little Movable Type hack I need to write up. And…and…
Turns out that August is probably going to be busier than a normal month of work.
Oh, and I baked an apple pie this afternoon! Mmmmmmmm….Pie…..