HALO 2 - Has Landed

Picked up my copy of halo at about 12:30 last night. I managed to constrain myself to only playing through until 2 allowing me to still get 4 hours sleep as I am mid way through a very tight timeline project at work.
The levels I did manage to make it through were enough for me to give it the official stamp of being even better than the first one. So far I am loving the double handed shooting. Looking forward to putting in a bit of quality time at the console over the next week or so :)
The only annoying thing about the whole experience was being stuck in a queue waiting to pick it up a I had a bunch of winging mothers behind me the whole time lameting about their lack of understanding of how to use an xbox along with how much of a hassle it was to get back up for midnight (yes they actually went to bed and got back up !!!!).
Also gotta say the limited edition packaging is really slick I'm likeing the mettalic silver case a lot, also has a bit or weight to it which really makes it feel a bit more special.
HALO 2 - Xbox - Official Australian Website

HALO 2 - Tonight!

I've been undecided about whether I would bother to preorder halo2 for the last few weeks. I smack bang in the middle of a really tight project so I really can't spend much time on it when it is released plus making the trip into the city at midnight to pick one up seemed like a bit to much of a hassle.
Anyway I found out my local games store was opening a midnight for the launch so I decided to order one in. When I went to the counter and enquired the guy kept saying he had been waiting all morning for this order which kinda freaked me out a little. In the end it turned out that he had organised to get 600 copies of the limited edition in and I was order 600. This is a ebgames store out in the burbs so it looks like the predictions of halo2 being huge are not overstated.
Anyway I'll be trotting off at midnight (after six feer under finishes) to pick up my copy and give it a quick play tonight.....more on the game tomorrow.

HALO 2 - Xbox - Official Australian Website

BizTalk and WSS

I recently saw a session at Microsoft on BizTalk and WSS presented by the always entertaining Stephen Jefferies. Once again it is great to see a presentation from someone that can delve well beyond the slide deck into personal experience with the product. I've previously done a bit of work with BizTalk in the past (I even sat the 3 hour exam to get the MCP qualification for it !) and I've done a fair bit of training on BTS 2004. Also I spend most of my days doing SharePoint dev, but this presentation really gave me a great insight in how the complement each other.
Back in the BTS 2002 days one of the biggest problems I had was how to wow a non-techie with a demo. For some reason the fact that a file was placed in a directory in one format and then came out in another after a bunch of workflow just didn't look impressive :). But if you do that same demo with an infopath form that is part of a team site I think that would turn a few heads
I definitely learned a bit about how to present BizTalk to a bunch of business users, so hopefully there will be a bit more BizTalk work coming my way in the future.

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