stuart test blog

One of the interesting articles that popped up was how to prepare for an interview by prepping yourself with 50 common questions. The famous one that I’ve encountered often wasn’t there: “What’s your biggest weakness” but someone asked about it in the comments and got a harsh response.

The reply to the comment was that if anyone has asked you that question before, then they do not know what they are doing and probably shouldn’t be interviewing. He gave some examples of the typical, cliched answers and I must admit to the fact that I’ve used them all myself!

I’ve also asked the question to candidates while I was interviewing for engineers at the last company I worked at. But I worded it differently and my reason for the question was slightly more valid. I really wanted to find out what technical area the candidates thought they were weak in and how they planned to develop that. The typical answer was that SQL server was the weak spot, but that’s because the developers tended to configure it more often than the engineers.

But I guess it is a bit pointless so I’ll be sure never to ask that again!

Tags: interview, work, questions, answers, productivity

Now that I’m back in Wellington after the four days in Auckland for TechEd, I’ve been catching up on my reading. Fortunately, FeedDemon is great to work with so I’ve got everything all up to date now.

Funny little bug keeps cropping up though. I’ve got FeedDemon set to open links in an external browser (as opposed to it’s built-in browser) and every now and again, the links will open internally instead. If I click the back button to get back to the feed, then click the link again, it will open correctly. Not sure if anyone else has seen this on the forums – I haven’t had time to check.

Lots and lots of good stuff popping up in my subscribed feeds, so I bookmarked a whole bunch of them with del.icio.us – you should see a large post appear shortly with all the links.

Tags: delicious, teched, wellington, auckland, feeddemon, bug, feeds

Day three of TechEd has just finished with brings the event to an end. We were all a little bit weary after the brilliant TechFest last night but we still managed to get in a couple of good sessions.

The Active Directory session from Brian Puhl was quite interesting as he went through the details of the Read Only Domain Controller (RODC) and some of the Server Core stuff too. Server Core is a method of installing Longhorn Server so that it has no gui at all – just the command prompt. So I find it odd that Microsoft’s new PowerShell scripting won’t be able to run on Server Core as it doesn’t support the dot net framework.

The Exchange sessions today were good too and we got a live demo of the new clustering and high availability options in Exchange 2007. This will be interesting to follow as there are a couple of third-party companies like XOSoft and Neverfail that will compete directly with this new technology.

Unfortunately I didn’t win one of the XBox 360’s :-(, so I guess I’ll be buying a PS3 when it comes out – as long as the NZ prices are too ridiculous.

Tags: teched, techfest, teched-nz, active-directory, rodc, server-core, powershell, dot-net, exchange, exchange-2007, xbox

We went to TechFest last night, the big geek-fest that Microsoft puts on for all the attendees to TechEd. The event was held at the St James theatre and featured a couple of comedians and a few bands. The highlight was local band, The Feelers – they were awesome live.

Here’s a video from last night, I’ll be posting more photos and videos soon.

Tags: teched, teched-nz, techfest, the-feelers, comedians, microsoft

The second day at TechEd was pretty good. The best sessions I attended were the Exchange 2007 ones. Charlie Chung gave a flawless demo of Exchange 2007 and its integration with PowerShell.

The worst demo of the day came from Softricity whose session I was really looking forward to. Their presentation was all marketing based and none of their demos worked and they couldn’t fix them! Sometimes you can forgive a presenter whose demo fails, but they had three, unrelated failures so we didn’t get to see any of the product.

Also, I found a video of the (annoying) Jaquie Brown interviewing us the meet-and-greet function that was after the first day of TechEd. Its’ quite funny to watch as you can see that nobody wanted to talk to her. Here’s the link – http://www.techedlive.co.nz/Video.aspx?v=4, fast forward to the 4 minute mark to see us.

Here’s a photo from the TechEd Live site showing Nathan from Microsoft demloshing a hard drive!

Tags: microsoft, teched, tech-ed, teched+nz, exchange, exchange+2007, softricity

Well the first day of TechEd 2006 is over. The keynote speech from TradeMe’s Rowan Simpson was the most interesting. The most painful was the dreadful MC,  Jaquie Brown – if you’ve ever been to a comedian that wasn’t funny, you’ll know the feeling. That horrible, painful feeling you get when the presenter on stage is cracking the worst jokes ever and getting no laughs in return. It felt like I was having my teeth pulled out – sorry Jaquie, that was terrible.

If I had known the keynote was going to be so bad I would have stayed in bed. I could have done with the extra sleep too – after stumbling home from Minus 5 at about 2am in the morning!!

On a more positivie note, I attended some great sessions today. My highlight was David Roundtree’s presentation on ISA 2006. Other good sessions were on Vista, Longhorn and PowerShell.

I’m up in Auckland for the next few days to attend the number one geek-fest that is known as TechEd! I flew up early this morning to catch up with Damian and Shelley, and got to meet the new edition to their family – 2 month old, Lola.

The next three days are going to be full-on, with sessions running all day. I’m most looking forward to the active directory presentations as well as the content on Exchange 2007. Not to mention all the new Longhorn and Vista stuff, plus the latest MOM and SMS packages… You can follow the action live here: http://techedlive.co.nz/

I’m staying at the Carlton Hotel in Auckland, and I must say that it is rather nice (it’s not often I stay in 5 star hotels!) Not sure how much I will blog over the next few days, but I’ll hopefully post some teasers on the beta @ amanzi site if I encounter any cool news worth blogging about.

If you’re also going to be at TechEd, look out for me – I’ll be the geek with the backpack!!!

A couple of interesting articles to read if you’re looking to lose weight and increase fitness:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Six-Pack-Abs
• http://www.carbohydrate-guide.com/archives/2005/09/16/thermogenic-foods.html

Also, read this article too: http://positivesharing.com/2006/08/low-rent-living/. It’s not anything to do with diet or fitness, but I like it…

Interesting reading for any current or wannabe bloggers, the blogosphere is not quite what you expected!

A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

• http://www.techmeme.com/060816/p8#a060816p8
• http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_great_unrea.php
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=343

I discovered the Traineo site which is the latest Web 2.0 offering aiming to fill a need in the online market place. I’m not sure whether I’ll file this with the other sites I sign up with but then lose interest in, but we’ll see.

Anyway, the aim is to track your weight, diet and fitness so that you can reach your goal weight. I’ve been trying to lose some weight recently and the Body for Life programme definitely helped a lot, but my biggest problem has been my own lack of commitment (and love of food too!)

So perhaps the site will help me reach my goal – I’ve set a reasonably sensible target which is just 8kgs away. You can track my progress here: http://stuart.traineo.com (I though the photo was quite fitting, here it is again.)

Tags: fitness, traineo, weight, body-for-life