Experiments in Geekery

The beta exam consists of 85 questions and 230 minutes, including 5 minutes pre- and post- for some questions. There's not much information out there at the moment about this exam other than this guide . I completed the exam today, and out of the 230 minutes available I used about 130m (2h 10m) to go through all 85 questions and double-check my answers on questions I flagged. I could have spent longer going over some answers but after 2 hours+ in a room with a noisy air conditioning unit, I was struggling. Sadly, results aren't available immediately for beta exams, with results being made available around 90 days after the end of the beta period (which is today!), so I've no idea how well I did. What I can talk about is what the exam was made up of. It was not as bad as I expected it to be, given that I had all of 3 days to prepare for this (I asked my manager to approve the expense in early December, they only got back to me this week and the beta period ends today!)

In late 2017 thanks to some acquisitions, I landed a new job based in London - still an Oracle DBA but now within a corporate environment. The move to London has meant that I now have access to all the entertainment that London can provide. In 2018 I saw 52 shows (theatre, musicals, etc), and in 2019 I saw 58. The point of this blog post is that also in 2019 I saw over 110 events at the cinema. I phrase that carefully because it wasn’t all films. There were other events too, such as Mark Kermode in 3D, launches, previews, and stuff like that. I’ve decided a platform to write up some reviews of the things I’m seeing would be a good thing, so here we are. I hope to write up some reviews of some of the more memorable films I saw in 2019 and continue writing reviews through stuff I see in 2020: I’d like to keep this going, maybe once a week, but we’ll see. Consistency is not my strongest point.