Dos Semanas Mas

Only two more weeks and my time here in Seattle will be over. Wednesday is Beta ship day so that ought to be interesting. All nighter sort of interesting. I am continuing to work on my BizTalk course and studying for my first certification exam. I would say that the BizTalk course is far more entertaining and worthwhile than the certification studying is.

These certifications are so bogus. They mean nothing. They don't make you a good programmer. They don't make you a good software engineer. Hell, they don't even make you a good Microsoft technologist. The only thing they say is that you were able to pass a test that had some trivia about certain Microsoft technologies. These things are easily memorized and forgotten. So if by chance any CEOs or management types are reading, don't take a certification as meaning any more than that. If you do, you are doing yourself a great disservice.

On another note, I find myself quite taken by the sushi here. Especially the salmon. It is absolutely delicious and if you are even in the area stop by a place called Saito's. Excellent stuff.

And here I am watching Michael Stipe talk to Bill Mahr about the impact of 9/11 on the American public. I hate celebrities.

In better news though, GDC started this week and Iwata is making a keynote speech on Thursday. Expect a few more details about Revolution to come out, I wouldn't hold my breath for too much though. E3 will be the coming out party. I do expect a demo of Zelda with the Revolution controller.

Zelda on Revolution?

Is Twilight Princess heading towards the Nintendo Revolution? My vote is yes.

With Zelda officially delayed until Q4 now, signs are pointing more and more to Zelda launching with the Revolution. But wait you say, Nintendo has repeatedly stated that Zelda would be a GCN game, that they owe it to their fans. Well, what if it is both.

Nintendo has stated that GCN games played on the system will only be able to utilize the GCN controller ports and memory cards. However, what if they release both a GCN and a Revolution version at the same time. This would allow Nintendo to have a AAA title to showcase the possibilities of the Revolution, and with the reported hardware similarities between the GCN and the Revolution, it wouldn't be too far out of the question to port it.

All in all I think this situation is highly probably since we haven't heard or seen ANYTHING new about the game since last September or October.

Good Quote

Software is revolutionary because of its mutability. To resist software change is to deny its fundamental strength.

You can roll that one up and smoke it.

Blog Neglect

Oh how easy it is to neglect your blog. I guess I can start from the top or something.

On February 16 I officialy finished the training program I was on, and let me tell you what a kick ass program it was. There was a group of 27 of us of which we were split into teams between four and six members. We then were given a mock customer from which we had to gather requirements and then implement a solution (in our case a hybrid type ASP.NET and SmartClient app utilizing the awesome new ClickOnce Deployment) based on those specification. It was alot of work, but also alot of fun. Think of it as .NET bootcamp.

The next day a flew back to Dallas for the weekend. I'm already getting used to flights and am well on track to obtaining elite status with American by the end of March, so good news on that front. One thing I will say about Seattle is the food sucks. Or at least its not to my taste. About the only thing worth a damn here is the sushi. Everything else is bland and overpriced. And don't get me started on Mexican food.

I am currently working on an internal project on an internship of sorts until the end of March. I am doing testing. Yes, testing. But it's not as bad as it sounds. What I am testing is actually a framework with people in my position as the intended end user. The result being that I actually write code to test the framework, and coming out I will know more about this framework than anybody else except for those who actually developed it. And that's not a bad position to be in at all.

I am also working on my MCSD, which Microsoft will be replacing in a few months with the far more convaluted MCPD. I am going to go ahead an pursue both. It's only two exams more to get both. Plus it makes me certified 1.1 and 2.0. I mean there's alot of difference between 1.1 and 2.0 but not THAT much. I'll write further about my thoughts on certification after I actually take my first test, but so far it's not too positive.

I'll leave ya'll on that note. Hopefully it won't take me too long to get back around.

Seahawks lose

Being in a town that ends up being on the losing side of the greatest game ever played is more depressing than I had anticiapted...

Gray and Green

If I had to think of two colors to describe Seattle, that would be it. Gray skies meet an evergreen forest.

The flight over here was very smooth. One of the smoothest I've been on in a long time. I'll be flying American alot. In fact, I have four round trip flights to seattle booked between now and March 31. As a result of this, I issued a Gold Elite challenge, which means that if I get 5000 points (which I will) in a three month period I get promoted to gold status for the rest of the year instead of having to wait a year and get 25,000 miles. I'm pretty excited about this since there are some neat perks to being a Gold Elite member.

Avanade has been great so far. Everyone is just awesome. One of the things that say about this company is that you "bleed orange" and I can definately see that being true. I don't mind bleeding orange since their particular shade is not a burnt orange. It also helps that they provide us with some pretty choice catering.

The apartment I am staying at is called Oakwood Suites. Pretty nice place right in the middle of downtown. Out my window I can see the water and also the space needle which is only a few blocks away.

Tomorrow we go to "cooking school" which is supposed to be really cool. Some sort of team building exercise I suppose.

Here's a picture of the living room. I'd upload more, but the internet connection in the place kinda sucks.

.NET The More You Know...

Did you know that .NET 2.0 supports anonymous delegates? What this means is say you have a function that takes a delegate as an argument. Well now you can do this:

SomeFunc(2,3, delegate() {Console.WriteLine("Anonymously pass code anywhere!");} )

Now that is some cool stuff.