Certified!

On Wednesday I took a break from the studying and we went to an expats' meet up over in Papamoa. We took all the girls and Vicky which necessitated two trips. We met a number of new people, including a couple who had moved here recently with their two 16 year old sons. Hmm. Not sure I'd have made that move with kids at that stage of their schooling. Phoebe and Freya spent a lot of time playing with a little girl who we'd met several times before and who's sister Rhiannon hangs around with, so we let them go back and play. Rhiannon's friend was also there, but got up Rhiannon's nose by talking to someone else. Consequently Madam decided she wanted to be taken home before all the fun was over. I obliged and took Imogen home too, since she was complaining that there were no kids her age to play with.

Later on, we went to the Mount to watch one of the cruise ships departing. If you walk clockwise around the Mount, you get to a point where the boats sail right past and you get a really close look. We met up with Phoebe and Freya, and watched Scott tying to fish with plastic crabs as bait. It didn't work very well. Freya spotted a seagull attacking a fish head and chased it off. Di then proceeded to pull the head to bits and extract the eye which she insisted on attaching to Scott's hook. It didn't improve his luck and he continued to hook vast quantities of sea lettuce.

When we got home, Craig informed us that the plumber had called and that he'd said 8AM was OK for the plumber to call. I informed him differently which was not well accepted.

Thursday morning and the plumber turned up at 8AM and removed the knackered waste disposal and replaced it with a standard plug hole. All relatively painless and took 1/2 hour. After a spot of hoovering, I continued the revision until I got fed up again and gave it up in favour of a further attempt at VL's prelude. It is coming together. Di took the kids to the school pool and chucked 'em in for half an hour or so, returning later with a copy of the B.O.P. Times. It seems that my angry rant about the cost of school uniform, written in response to their rather naff headline feature on how to save money and ask the school for exemptions, got printed. They must have had a slow week.

Friday arrives and I set of at 9AM for Auckland to take the ZCE exam. The journey was pretty straight forward and I found the place without too much trouble. I was somewhat early, arriving at around 12. I sat in the car of about 90 minutes with the laptop doing some last minute cramming and wandered in to the testing centre at 1:30, the exam being at 2:30. I was shown into a room and allowed to do some more revision. The place seemed to be staffed exclusively by Indians, and the strategically placed sign saying "English at all times on campus" did make me wonder whether the exam might be in Urdu or Punjabi.

2:30 came and went, so I rattled a few cages and eventually someone came and asked me to fill in the required forms and checked I was actually who I said I was. I was presented with a laminated note pad and marked pen and the taken to the test suite, basically a small room with a PC. The PC had a preloaded program running on it which asked 70 mostly multiple choice questions with about 10 where you had to put a name to something.

The first 20 or so questions had me wondering If I was doing the right exam. The content of them was nothing like the sort of thing the practice exams had been. Thereafter the questions were more familiar and straightforward, although some of the code examples were a bit nasty. I reckon that I answered at least half correctly and another 10 or so were likely to be right. The rest were just intelligent guesses. However, after the 90 minutes was up, the program told me I'd passed and was now a Zend Certified Engineer. Huzzah! I was presented with a rather scruffy looking piece of paper which is I guess my certificate, but it could easily have been faked using any word processing package. Maybe a real one will arrive in the post?

The journey back home was uneventful, other than a bit of slow moving traffic on Highway 1 as I got on to the motorway. One thing I did like was the "one car at a time" traffic lights on the slip roads. This allows just one car to join the motorway an a time, and thus keeps the traffic moving slowly but surely without 7 zillion idiots trying to cut in from the left.

On arrival back home I was roped into a game of piggy-in-the-middle which I tried not to dominate and then I was sent to New World for bread and milk. Somehow some beer fell into the basket as well. Shame about that.

Rhiannon had also done an exam today, for entry into the Gifted and Talented class. It turns out that she'd already done the exam before, but her results (and presumably the results of the 20 or so others taking the test) were not available. She says she did OK, but not as well as the first time she took it.