Wednesday night I got around to installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my home laptop. I use a triple booted macbook pro at work, where I am using Ubuntu intrepid almost exclusively. It has really grown on me and I've become addicted to the small, but very nice visual effects. Needless to say, I was looking forward to see how my home laptop would run Jaunty Jackalope. I was pleasantly surprised by two things in particular. The boot speed is much quicker, which granted, I don't notice that often as my laptop rarely gets shut down. Secondly, the improved font rendering looks great. One thing I always have to give the mac fans credit for is the way type is rendered. Now, I feel like I am no longer lacking in that department. The difference is amazing, and I am really considering upgrading my work laptop just for the font rendering, even though I don't have the best record with my update manager, less strain on my eyes will be worth the effort. Plus, I notice the lack of awesome font rendering that much more now on XP and Ubuntu intrepid.

I also recently took the Zend Certified Engineer (PHP5) exam and passed! Woo! I didn't think it was that difficult to be honest. I bought the study guide and the ten practice tests. I passed the first practice test and then excellent on the subsequent three. The actual exam did have a few odd, trick-like questions...but nothing extremely difficult. I do need to learn more about stream and SimpleXML functions as I haven't really done too much with them and I'm sure I missed a couple of those questions. I do think I have learned a lot in the last year, having been able to work on many different kinds of projects and needing to quickly learn new things has definitely helped. I'd like to thank all the guys at the OmniTI office that I constantly badger with questions for their help. :D