We’ve now lived in the States for almost 10 months and we still hadn’t been out to an indian restaurant let alone a takeaway – after last night, that situation is rectified and we’ve found a great restaurant. I was actually looking on the internet for somewhere to get Fish and Chips from as a celebratory meal and one of the ads on googles map pages was for an indian restaurant – the amul India – with reviews on Columbus City Search. All of the reviews were extremely positive with comments like “the best indian food” so we decided to head to this place instead.
We were not disappointed – on a Friday night we were seated straight away, which seems to be almost impossible in american restaurants nowadays, and we were given plenty of time to read the menu. A lot of the other patrons were indian, which was a good sign, and the place had an atmosphere – a little bit of indian music in the background, but not too loud – and the chatter made us both feel comfortable and at home.
Ordering from a new indian restaurant is often a gamble as you have no idea how spicy their food is going to be and the spelling of every dish always seems to be different from any previous menu’s seen. I decided to have the Amul India special which consisted of “Aloo tikki and pakora, chicken tandoori, lamb curry, dai, mater paneer, nan, rice and dessert served on a silver platter” for the princely sum of $12.99, Kristen ordered the chicken curry, some papardam’s and mango chutney.
My starters arrived very quickly with Kristen’s papardams – which I’ve just read were described as crispy spicy lentil wafer’s – we’ve never had spicy, or lentil one’s before and they were pretty spicy- unfortunately too spicy for Kristen. The funny thing was that she thought it was one of the relishes so was eating more papardum to try and cool down but she had the opposite effect. The relishes were pretty spicy too – should have been a warning of things to come really 🙂
The main course arrived – Kristen’s curry had been ordered as Regular, and she loved it – she must have said how good it was about 20 times or more. My food was also excellent but a bit too spicy for me – I had ordered the medium, but it didn’t take long for my head to start sweating – I dread to think what the Medium hot, Hot or Extra Hot would taste like!
My dish was a reasonable sized sampling of 4 dishes and was delicious. A couple of the them were extra spicy, but mixing in the rice and nan cooled it off enough to eat.
The dessert was (I think) a Gulab Jamun – a fried cheese vall soaked in syrup which was really nice – it was a suprise when I bit into it as it was cold – I just thought it was part of the main course so I was expecting something hot!
Everything was reasonably priced (apart from the mango chutney which seems very expensive at $1.75 for about 2 tablespoons worth), food was great and the service was good too – Highly recommended and it deserves the 9 points it gets on citysearch.
Although I had to delay my test until this afternoon as my planned test date of yesterday was full, I passed my Small Business Exam, 70-282 this afternoon with a score of 925 – although not 1000 like my past test, still a respectable score that I’m pleased with.
The very first question had nothing to do with SBS (as did most of the questions) and was something I’d never heard of or probably need to do – it was how about how to migrate a dhcp server settings from a real environment to a test environment (hopefully that is vague enough to not get in trouble for breaking the NDA).
Some of the questions were very easy and very obvious but some of the questions were very ambiguous so I had no idea what the right answer was. They were things like “in this scenario, what are the two biggest risks?” when the choices are critical/security patches not installed, no antivirus defs, ISA client not installed and ISA server not uptodate. Apart from the first choice it’s very difficult to distinguish which is the next biggest risk – especially in a real world scenario.
Anyway, now that I have passed this exam I have another exam under my MCSE belt taken care of – 5 more to go 🙁 Once the results are submitted to Microsoft I also become a Small Business Specialist and gain entry into the exclusive Small Business Specialist Community. My company also benefits as they gain this competency/specialist too.
KB article 830836 gives the details on editing the registry when too many objects of type objtMessage are opened on the exchange server. I’ve had this a couple of times in the past and I thought I had blogged this post for reference – but I hadn’t
Microsoft are doing the 2nd chance again – see the 2nd chance site for details. Useful as I’m taking my Small Business Specialist exam on Thursday. I really need more time to prep for it but I’m on a tight deadline and things have been so hectic this week I’ve not had as much time to revise as I would have liked.
PrintConductor looks like a useful tool for printing multiple docs automatically – like all the manuals for Live Communication Server which incidentally I went live with some real users this afternoon. It’s taken this long to get the software, user documentation written and the time to install it myself. Work has been incredibly busy with a couple of clients and this week seems to be no better even though we had a new guy start today.
This morning started off badly with all the remote sites complaining that they were getting a message saying that Windows Updates had finished installing and the computer needed restarting but the restart now, reboot later buttons were greyed out. I should have realised they were talking about the screen appearing in their terminal server window and they don’t have permission to reboot the server! Instead I spent a while poking around in their event viewer trying to find out what the problem was. I’m not sure if the problem is me not being clear enough when I ask if they are using terminal services or whether its just too complicated a question…. Maybe I’ll rename the TS icon on their main desktop to “IF YOU CLICK THIS YOU ARE USING TERMINAL SERVICES” and put a default background saying the same thing.
Had a brand new client pc unable to install the first set of windows updates this morning – the Windows Installer 3.1 and the Package Installer to allow smaller downloads.
The fix was to delete the c:\windows\softwaredistribution folder – not something I’d normally recommend but seeing as though this was the first set of windows updates to be installed I wasn’t going to loose any preinstalled data.
Magnolia is a new social bookmarking site that is similar to delicious but has the option of making bookmarks private too. It looks really nice and seems to have good integration through the use of bookmarklets. My Magnolia homepage is available and I’ve also started a geocaching group.
I’ve yet to import my bookmarks into the site (that will be a long job!) and the only downside I’ve had so far is the fact that adding bookmarks to a group is a pretty painful process – first you add the bookmark to your page, then you have to go back and add each one to the group, with a “choose the group” followed by “edit details” page – which takes a long time when populating a lot of links (which I guess will slow down the spammers!)
Just downloaded the new Windows Defender – Microsoft’s AntiSpyware software which was released a couple of days ago. It does make you wonder why the definitions are 22 days old if the product was only released a couple of days ago though.
The interface is pretty spartan but clean – I think it is meant to be the Vista look but to me it looks more along the tellytubby path that XP started out with.
One thing I did like, but that wasn’t made clear in the download pages is that you don’t need to uninstall the previous AntiSpyware software first – Windows Defender will remove it for you.
Had a good days training at the Small Business Exam Cram today. Today was mainly focussed on the Sales & Marketing aspect of the system but we also went through the initial install and configuration of the server. Everyone had a laptop with SBS running in a virtual pc and it was soooooo slow. It was comforting to find that it was slow on these laptops though as I was wondering if I had something wrong on my install of sbs on my own laptop which was also incredibly slow (although once the system is up and running it’s not too bad).
During lunch, most of the attendees got out their work laptops and surfed to get email, messages from work, did some work or in some cases just watched the IT Crowd from Channel 4 which you can’t get in america now 🙁
Anyway – the funny thing was that the couple of guys behind me were complaining about how bad the network was after everyone had fired their laptops up – and blaming it on the bandwidth hogs of vpn, remote desktop and other such tools (that I was using). Mind you – you’d be crazy to not use vpn or rdp in a room of techies as there were quite a few copies of ethereal and network sniffers running. What I did find amazing was that the people using outlook2003 all complained that they weren’t able to contact their servers back at the office due to the bandwidth requirements, but I had the once in a lifetime opportunity of saying “If you were using Lotus Notes you wouldn’t have that problem” and actually meaning it. Normally I’m *blaming* Lotus Notes for causing me problems.
We were given homework to do tonight – to complete the Sales and Marketing assessment which was actually fairly easy – especially as you can keep retaking it (for free) until you achieve a passing score – it took me 2 attempts! The scary thing about this is that you are then halfway to becoming a Small Business Specialist, and so is the company that you work for. Some discussion this morning took place about Best Buy and the Geek Squad going for Small Business Training and how they were trying to get the Small Business Specialist certification – this was a worrying prospect for a lot of the consultants as they can’t compete on price (which a lot of small businesses will focus on) and they are nervous about the fact that it is unlikely that the Geek Squad are going to do a very good job. It was even more disconcerning when I pointed out that in theory the GeekSquad only needs *1 person* to get the qualification and then the whole company, countrywide, can claim Small Business Specialist accreditation. To me that is just wrong (although it was pointed out that it is more likely that each branch is going to go for accreditation individually) but it does make you think……..
Microsoft Virtual labs will be handy – especially as there is a Live Communications server one and a Windows 2003R2 one. I’ve not really heard much about the new features in w2kr2 so will try and attend the lab soon.