Forced Furlough

I had a double feature again on Friday. I think I am going to start calling them "frightful friday" or something. Sure it's nice to pay most of my bills in one day. But OTOH I leave at the crack of dawn and get home past dinner time.
In the morning I started the first phase of a 6 phase project. This large institutional client was having budget problems last year, then one of their cash cows quit on them. When we showed up there was not a single person there, save the security guard.
They are enforcing forced furlough days to save money. Concurrent with this they have just undertaken a 2nd round of layoffs. A little birdie tells me that they are considering a 3rd round of layoffs.
So it's one of those blood on the floor environments. You move Jane and Dick and Harry to the third floor. and Sally and Joe and John go into storage!
Got that all done and swooped off to the city for my 2nd gig. Answering emails for the swell kids at Syncplicity.com check out their website, they have real neat service.

and the honeymoon is over

Well I have been digging around with Win7 a lot. The windows experience index give me a measly 3.0 score! I have a lot of ram, fast hefty hard drive and a decent processor.
2gb corsair ddr2, hitachi 7k200 200gb SATA II, and T7200 core 2 duo mobile (2ghz). Not the latest, greatest but not a freakin PIII either!
Well I get nothing higher than 5.1 on the individual scores. And my hard drive, which was the top of the heap for notebooks last year, scores a measly 3.0.

I went back and turned off all the crazy eye candy in an effort to improve my score. While this goosed up my video scores, it leaves the UI looking very win2k. I would think that they could have made a sub-aero interface that wasn't so ugly. Maybe something more monochrome a la Mac OS system 4.0?

On the plus side the wireless connectivity is better than win xp. And windows expericen score aside my mere GMA 950 does okay with the aero stuff turned on.
Though every 15 minutes or so I see a little video gremlin hiccup. I attribute this more to the beta runtime aspect.

se7en? 7even? seve7?

Well I just installed Windows 7 on the old laptop.
So far it is pretty snazzy. Like it better than Vista.
Somehow it is able to see more wireless access points than my XP install does?
How do they do that?
Creating a dual boot was super painless. I didnt even have to format the partition I chose. I will be bombarding it with applications this week to see what breaks it.
On the downside it hates my laptops video. Intel GMA945 or whatevs. I get a 2.0 score. Which on the win 7 experience rating means my overallscore with a core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram and a 7200 rpm 200gb drive is a...2.0.
Weak with a side of weak sauce!
I will try turning off a bunch of stuff to see if it makes a difference. but so far Win 7 is faster than vista given the same hardware. Even with all the candy turned on it runs okay.

SQL S3rv3r

Well it looks like SQL is all the rage these days right? So I think I am gonna leapfrog a few tests and take one of the SQL Server tests, either
70-431 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 – Implementation and Maintenance or
70-445 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence.


Yeah I know dry freaking stuff right?

Well the true nexus of geekdom is going out of business. Stacey's bookstore on Market in downtown SF. I have been nerding out here for years. They have/had an aggressively well stocked computer book section up on the 2nd floor. Heck they even encourage loafing, loitering and just plain reading the stuff in the store. There is/was even a nice reading area up with chairs and junk. Wait, what did you say? Barnes and Noble does that too? Well Stacey's is/was over 80 years old. And the point?! Well the books are %50 off. So I can save like $30 on the study materials for my $125 test...

MCP!

There is this certification exam I meant to take (and pass). But I kept having scheduling conflicts. I would book an exam at the Prometric testing center. Then work would come up. Sure it's important to get certified. And lord knows, I am certifiable! But income trumps all, so I have been canceling and rescheduling over and over. I procrastinated one last time in mid February. I rescheduled via the Prometric website, then I went into my outlook and made an apointment for the new date, Thursday the 26th
Then the day before, I remembered that I had a test coming up and had forgotten to study, so I went to the Prometric website and clicked on "reschedule". The webpage informs me that I have no tests to reschedule. Uh oh. I have been here before! That means that I have less than 24 hours until the test. It's not booked for Thursday, its booked for Wednesday! Well I had to go in and take the test anyway. I was pretty bummed. I had convinced myslef that I was going to fail no matter what. So I may as well take it and just get over my mental block. The picture above is poor depressed me. Dragging my worthless carcass up the elevator when I really just want to get a pint of ben and jerrys and cry. Boo hoo. Little baby.

I actually passed. Not with a spectacular margin, but passed nonetheless. Not bad considering I hadn't cracked a book for a month!
Well I'm an MCP finally. I had been planning on taking this test (70-270) since last year! Now for the rest of the MCSE panel.

Relocation Inundation

I forgot to mention one thing from the move on the previous Friday.
While eating pizza I noticed the strangest thing. In addition to the usual amenities of a high flying company in the Bay Area (fancy coffee machines, sub zero fridges, Herman Miller Aero chairs, integrated AV systems)
they had a freakin hotline to the Kremlin! Well maybe not the Kremlin, but a red phone, with the words "for disaster use only!" labeled to the handset. Maybe its a hotline to Homeland Security?