Long time no blog

Ah it's been a while. So what's been happening lately. Let me think.

Caught up with a few friends for lunch and had a nice dinner at Toowong with Thanh (the organiser), Jared, Jeremy, Anna, Chandni, Sana, Peta, Alan and Mohammad. Yes it's been a while since we've had a get together like this one. The fish I had was beautiful. I'm not a fish fan but I have to give it a thumbs up.

I am not going to the Pancake Manor for lunch ever again. The service was absolutely horrible.

Had our first meeting with the staff at the ACS branch office. Got the nod from them for our ideas. Hopefully we can get the ball rolling soon.

I still have Biztalk coming out of my ears at work. We're getting a M$ consultant in for $2000 a day. Yes, a day! Now I can see being a consultant as a prospective occupation in the next few years.

And speaking of M$, I sat my exam today. It was at Queen St and scheduled at 12:30. I got to Queen St at around 12:15 and starting heading down the road looking for number 549. Got to number 379 and that was it. The next building along the road is on Eagle St. I got to the end of the street and there was no number 549. It was 12:25 then. I called for help. Lucky Jeremy wasn't busy and looked up the map and the phone number for the place for me. I rang up and got directions on how to get there. It was all the way down towards the valley. The first half of the exam was really hard and I thought damn I'm going to fail again. Then I started the second half and it was a lot better. Got right to the end before time was up this time. Passed by a comfortable margin :) I don't think I'll be doing another one of those exams for some time... not until I feel masochistic again.

Happy camper

Yeah my Biztalk server finally works. But I am getting some weird performance issues that seem to apply only to my W2k3 servers. More reading tomorrow.

500 Internal Server Error

Don't you just hate it when things chuck an error that says nothing more but that an error has occurred?

That happened today with our Biztalk test app. It drove me nuts.

500 Internal Server Error was all I got. I've looked everywhere - application event logs, security event logs, system event logs, web server logs, SQL Server logs and turned on all things that I can possibly log but nothing, NOTHING tells me what is going wrong.

Obviously the developer says it works on his machine so he's not changing his orchestration.

I can see myself doing some serious googling on Monday. And with 2 people being away on Monday, it's gonna be a hell of a day.

Irish Technology

After digging to a depth of 100 metres last year, Russian scientists found
traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years and came to the conclusion
that their ancestors already had a telephone network one thousand years
ago.

So, not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, American scientists dug
200 metres and headlines in the US papers read: "US scientists have found
traces of 2000 year old optical fibres and have concluded that their
ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years
earlier than the Russians".

One week later, an Irish newspaper reported the following: "After digging
as deep as 500 metres, Irish scientists have found absolutely nothing. They
have concluded that 5000 years ago, their ancestors were already using
wireless technology".