SCWCD

I haven't done a review in a while, so I am going to write a review about this book: SCWCD Exam Study Kit, Second Edition, by Hanumant Deshmukh, Jignesh Malavia, and Matthew Scarpino.

If you are considering getting yourself SCWCD certified, I would highly recommend you to *not* get this book. There are just so many problems with this book.... for starters, I don't find this book making the studying any easier. Cert guides like these are supposed to cover the exam objectives which the reader needs to master in a clear an concise manner. This book however, has a number of sections that goes into details that are mostly irrelevant for the exam while other sections don't cover the topic adequately.

And for a book that's in second edition already, it's hard to believe there could be so many mistakes, just take a look at http://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?messageID=51256. That's just plain sloppy

My rating: 3/5

Bill Gates' Predictions

An interesting read while on break:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/316483_software21.html

So apparently, Gates never said 640K of memory is all anyone ever needs. Well, shame on us, we had you wrong...

Up and Running, Sort of.

Cause of death: faulty power supply leading to frying the motherboard (see the blown capacitor in the picture below...)

I got the board and power supply replaced at PCvillage. And sorry to disappoint you Ed, I didn't upgrade my comp, just wanted to get it back up with the minimum hassle. I don't really have a need to get a super fast computer and video card simply for checking email and going on Internet (kind of sad really, I don't play computer games anymore, but there's the DS =). In fact I have downgraded to using the onboard video since the they didn't have a board with the old AGP slot (oh gee, seems like only yesterday that the AGP was the next big thing in gaming, and now it's obsolete...) The board does have a PCI Express slot so I could get a better card later on.

So at least I can boot up now, had to repair Windows which turned out to be less painful than I expected. But my system is a bit "flaky" now, there are stuff here and there that doesn't work quite like it used to (for example, my bluetooth keyboard and mouse just refuses to connect). Well, I gotta format my comp, something I expected to have to do anyways. What fun.

Isn't it odd that I blog more when my computer is busted?

Computer is Fried

My computer started making a siren sound during the middle of the night; it was like my alarm clock going off. I sleepily got out of bed and shut the darn thing off.

This morning, I turned my computer on and it ran fine... for about 10 minutes. Then it made one more siren sound before it promptly keeled over =( I can power on the computer but nothing happens after that, it doesn't boot, nothing on screen... dead. Probably the mobo fried I suspect... *sigh*

The Hype is Over!

** This post may contain spoilers about Spiderman 3 !!! **

The hype of course is the long awaited Spiderman 3 which opened on Friday. Before going to see it, I had already heard the reviews saying the movie is only so-so. But still, it's the blockbuster of the summer and I just had to go see it! So off I went on Saturday for the 11 am IMAX show (yup, that's am).

Now that I've seen it, I agree with everything the critics said about the movie; there are just too many plot elements, even for a movie that's 2.5 hours long! And they didn't pace the movie very well, lot of the scenes felt rushed and were not developed fully, they simply do the bare minimum to tell the story so that people who don't know about the storyline from the comics can follow. It's the age old balancing act of quantity vs. quality.

And I am disappointed that Venom got such a dinky treatment in the film, wasn't he supposed to be the focus of the movie? And he's suppose to be Spiderman's arch-nemesis, he's not supposed to die so easily... let's hope he's not really dead and comes back for a proper treatment in the next one.

I give it a 7/10.