Life is just a roller coaster ride, isn’t it? I mean, yesterday started out rockin’ with me passing my test and getting my site moved over to the new server, and then I got home and got the mail.

Remember a while back I tapped a lady’s bumper? Well, I got my insurance bill. It went from $800 every six months to $1300 every six months. That’s right, nearly doubled. Fucking ridiculous, that. I’ve got a totally clean record except for that one incident. And, of course, the insurance company’s got me over a barrel on that one for 36 months from the reported time of the accident, so I’m looking to be paying out the ass for the next three years.

You know that thing where they say your insurance goes down when you turn 26? Mine didn’t. No change. God forbid these assholes give me a break.

On the other hand, I can’t complain at all about the service. If I need anything, they’re on the stick. There’s never a time where I have to wait a day or two to hear back from them (the way it’s been with other insurance companies I’ve been with) and they’re always open and let me know what the status of things is. Plus, they’re cheaper than the rest of the places out there.

Of course, now they’re gouging me.

Such is life, eh?

My boss had me schedule a meeting today to “open communications” between the project team (me) and a couple of the people that are being impacted by the project I’m working on. I already know the questions they’re going to ask me, and I don’t have (what I would call) satisfactory answers for any of them. As far as I’m concerned, I’m implementation, man. If they want to provide requirements, they need to talk to the requirements people, which isn’t me.

Bah.

I watched The Original Kings of Comedy last night on TV. I hadn’t seen it before, and I like Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac, so I thought this would be pretty good.

Eh.

See, I’m all about talking about “the differences between people” and “the battle of the sexes” and all that sort of thing, but when a comedian harps on one particular thing over and over, it gets old. It’s called variety, people - look into it. See, on their TV shows, Cedric and Bernie have a good variety of humor topics - kids, men vs. women, black vs. white, common problems… all sorts of things.

Not so in their stand-up.

In their stand-up comedy, the only topic available is “black people vs. white people.” That’s it. And let me tell you, while I enjoyed about 75% of it, it got old pretty quick.

The same thing happened to Ellen DeGeneres when she first came out of the closet. Her show was really funny, then she came out and every single joke on the show was a gay joke. Yawn. Variety is what keeps folks entertained. Without it… disappointment.

So, disappointment.

Finally, I printed off the practice test questions for my next test and looked them over a little bit.

Whoa.

I’ve taken a lot of Microsoft classes and whatnot, but I don’t recognize shit from these practice questions. Seriously. At least with the other tests, I pretty well recognized some stuff but had a difficult time with a few of the key areas or technical details. I don’t recognize any of this stuff.

Which brings me to another interesting insight I had. Before, when I was taking my first test, and most of the way through the second test, I was very much in favor of knowing exactly how a given technology worked in order to understand why test answers are what they are. I was all over that - sort of like knowing how to do math before you get a calculator. Looking at this new set of questions has changed my opinion. You can’t possibly know everything there is to know about any given technology. You work with about 30% of a technology - the common parts. The rest, if you need it, you look up in the documentation or check out code samples. There is never a time you’ll be stranded without any resources and have to have everything memorized - there’s just too much. So now I’m starting to see the merit of learning the technology you’ll use and learning the answers to the test questions so you can pass. I don’t honestly see any other way around it. Does that make me feel good? No. Will it help me to pass and get on with life? Yup.