I downloaded a nifty little package called ChangeDesktop that does pretty much what its name implies. Every hour, it changes the background of my two desktop monitors by randomly choosing an image for each monitor from the 1900+ photos I have filed away. Not coincidentally, most of these photos are of family members. It’s wonderful to see the progression of our sons over the years, but at the same time it’s bittersweet to see (e.g.) a photo of David at age three: I can clearly see how that little proto-David had the seeds of the David I see now, and it’s hard to be reminded of how fast they’re growing and how little real time we have with them. Excuse me while I go snivel for a bit.
The Ali G translator
me is glad dat there’s a way to turn ordinary text into da wicked way dat ali natters. now i too can be wicked, just dig im. (courtesy of the Ali G translator) Betty and Julie, please use your new powers responsibly.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Think you’re tough?
No matter how tough you think you are, I bet you’re a puff compared to this guy.
Update: It’s worse than I thought; turns out the guy took three days to complete his amputation. Wow.
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Filed under Musings
On the road with cached mode
So, this is my first real opportunity to test Outlook 2003’s cached mode on a real road trip; I’m in Seattle for an Exchange 2003 airlift. I use Outlook 2003 for three accounts: my home account, my work account, and my Microsoft account. The first two are homed on the same server (for the time being), fronted by ISA Server so I can access them without a VPN. The third requires me to VPN in to Microsoft; at least, it did before I enabled RPC over HTTP yesterday.
I made sure to let Outlook catch up my MS mailbox before I left, with the happy result that I could plow through the 2500+ unread messages in it while flying to Seattle, but I ignored the other two to give cached mode a fair trial. When I arrived at the hotel, I plugged in my laptop, signed on to the in-room broadband connection ,and ttweaked my HOSTS file to point to the external IP of the mail server. While unpacking, I let my personal account sync; while brushing my teeth and sleeping, I let the work account catch up. When I awoke, I had a full inbox, which for me is the equivalent of having the morning paper waiting on the front step when I get up. I was able to blitz through the accumulated mail and get right to work. I left the hotel and went over to the convention center for breakfast and registration. After registering, I was able to plug in to a network drop, quickly pick up new mail in all three accounts, and enter the keynote session. Throughout the day, I could pop in and out to send queued replies and pick up new messages with a minimum of disruption. If only synchronizing offline files worked as well as this does! Big kudos to the Outlook team for building something that “just works”.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Public display of affection
So, this morning I was thinking about my sister. She and I are about as different as two people in the same family can be. She is socially and politically liberal, and I’m not. I am religious, and she’s not. I tend to be more technical, and she’s twice the people person I’ll ever be, not to mention that she unfairly got all the artistic and creative talent. (OTOH Tim and I can use power tools, so I suppose it evens out.) Despite our differences, and despite the fact that I unmercifully teased and persecuted her when we were younger, I love her, and I just wanted to make that fact widely known among the seven or eight people who read this blog. So, props to you, younger sister.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Free client-side anti-spam plugin
Steve Bass sent out an email alerting me to the fact that Amazon is giving away an anti-spam plugin for Outlook. I haven’t used it myself, but Steve’s endorsement is good enough for me to recommend it, especially since the $19.99 product carries a $20 mail-in rebate. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Update: Sunbelt was described as a spammer by John Levine, among others; it looks like the world-famous rhyolist spam list contains several entries related to Sunbelt or Stu Sjouwerman, the owner. Stu is also a Scientologist.
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Filed under General Stuff
Apple’s new music store
This is really cool: a useful, well-implemented, legal, reasonably priced way to buy and download music. It supports mobile devices, CD burning, and lots of other stuff. At $0.99/song or $9.99/album, I’m planning on fleshing out my collection. bbum has some good technical details on how the system works. Windows users, eat your heart out. Wait… I’m a Windows user too. Curses! Cognitive dissonance!
Update: Actually, this might turn out to be a problem. I normally listen to my music in three ways: on my desktop Mac, on my Windows XP laptop, or in the car. The Mac and car are no problem, but music from the Apple Store is encoded with AAC, not MPEG-3. There’s no AAC codec for Windows, and apparently burning AAC to CD and re-ripping to MP3 produces crappy quality. This might be a problem, at least until Apple ships an AAC codec for Windows.
Update again: I’ve bought a half-dozen or so tracks from the store. The experience has been flawless so far, and it’s nice to be able to fill in some of the holes in my collection.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
TechEd’s just around the corner…
TechEd is just around the corner, and I’ve been invited to give a security session.
SEC306 Secure Messaging and Communications with Exchange Server
This session delivers the critical information that Exchange administrators, security architects, and messaging designers need to understand to protect their Exchange systems. Protecting your organization from malicious content, and misuse of messaging communications is becoming ever more critical as we depend on our messaging systems to provide anytime, anywhere access from a wide variety of devices. If you are serious about secure messaging and communications, you must attend this session. This session will focus on security updates in Exchange 2003 including relay restrictions, OWA security improvements, authenticated and restricted DLs, improved AV & Anti-spam features, and RPC-over-HTTP. Key security concepts for Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5 will also be summarized. Come in, sit down, and hold on tight for this fast-paced and demo-packed presentation.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Need a movie?
Ever had one of those times when Blockbuster or Netflix just don’t have anything you want to watch? Now there’s a solution. I may have to rent “Fundamentals of Machine Lathe Operations”; I hear it’s boffo.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Habitat
I spent the morning helping to build a house for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. I had a blast! By the time I left, the outside walls were up (save for one) and most of the inside walls were in place, except for a few that hadn’t been delivered yet. We had quite a crew: two or three Pakistani and Indian guys, a nice Jewish lady (and her dad, visiting from England), and a bunch of white male retirees of various degrees of grumpiness. Everyone worked together well, though, and it was really humbling to realize what this house means to the family that will be living in it. I’m looking forward to my next work shift.
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
The great spam-off, part 3: Enter the Praetor
The next product on my evaluation list is CMS’ Praetor. My initial impression is that this is a complex, full-featured product, and it’s expensive, too. (The fact that CMS is offering a 30% discount if you’re using a competing product helps reduce the sting somewhat.) It supports X- headers for filtering and has a range of quarantine options. However, I’m not crazy about three aspects of the product:
- it doesn’t use the Windows Installer, and its custom installer doesn’t bother to check for existing SMTP services on a machine
- it has its own separate administration program (which apparently can’t be installed on any machine other than the one running Praetor– so much for remote administration)
- it doesn’t integrate directly with Exchange. Although CMS says you can run it on your Exchange server, they seem to recommend running it on a separate box, so that’s what I’m doing. It didn’t coexist well with ISA in my very limited testing, so for now it’s on a separate machine.
I’m also not too impressed with the documentation; while it is complete, it’s formatted using the old “ransom note” style template, and it’s a reference. For a product this complex, a task-oriented doc would be much more useful.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
The great spam-off, part 2
MailEssentials has been running for the last week or so. After a little experimentation, I discovered that it wasn’t catching spam because I’m an idiot. I hadn’t specified any SMTP domains as inbound, so ME was looking for spam sent to *@robichaux.local– since robichaux.net and 3sharp.com are the domains I use, it wasn’t catching anything. After I fixed that, it began behaving as expected. However, its lack of a way to add subject tags to indicate spam means that I have to route all suspected spam to a public folder– where E2K turns it into an IPM.Post item, so it loses its original addressee information. Redirecting all the spam to a single mailbox works, but that raises the question of how to redirect it; the only way I can see to do it is with a script that adds a spam tag to the subject and redirects the message. That’s more trouble than I’m willing to go to for this product. In GFI’s favor, their product installs and uninstalls cleanly, it’s stable, and it has good documentation. However, it’s time to try something else.
UPDATE: GFI support confirms that their product doesn’t allow subject rewriting, and they’re not likely to add it.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Home theater Perrysburg-style
The Sony home theater-in-a-box that I bought last week worked well, but it only had two digital audio inputs. Since Buckeye is about to start their HD beta test, and since a little bird told me that my odds of being selected were quite good, I wanted a receiver that could accomodate the Xbox, DVD player, and an HD settop box, so it was back to Best Buy. I found a good deal on a open-box Pioneer VSX-D811S, a much nicer receiver than I would otherwise have bought. It has component video switching and some other nifty features, along with support for 7.1 surround. I also picked up some open-box Sony speakers. Everything works great… but that’s not my point.
Yesterday, I got a real dose of home theater. From my chair on the back deck, I could hear: David and Thomas playing baseball next door (complete with the occasional ping of the aluminum bat when somebody got a hit), a couple of lawn mowers, an F-16 flying overhead, a train, one each lawn mower and weed eater, lots of birds, the occasional Harley ripping past on River Road, Matthew squealing with delight as he climbed through the deck railing to get a golf ball, and my neighbor’s dog. That’s my kind of home theater: live, glorious, surround sound; full-motion, high-definition video, and Scent-O-Vision.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Derailed (James Siegel)
I first saw Derailed at Sam’s, but it didn’t look quite good enough to merit buying, so I waited until the library had it. Boy, was I wrong. Siegel has produced a sucker-punch of a novel. Charlie Schine is a Manhattan adman with a strained marriage and a diabetic teenage daughter. In a slow progression of bad judgment, he flirts with, then has an affair with, a beautiful woman he meets on the commuter train, but when their liason is interrupted by an armed rapist-turned-blackmailer, his life goes to hell at amazing speed. Pretty soon, he’s separated from his wife, estranged from his daughter, broke, and unemployed, but then things start looking up again. This book surprised me at several key plot points, even though I’m an inveterate thriller reader and am rarely surprised. The only real quibble I have is with a blatant deus ex machina escape about three quarters of the way through the book, but all in all, I’m able to forgive Siegel this flaw because of the velocity and force of the rest of the book. Highly recommended.
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Filed under Reviews
In the balance
So, some reader mail:
What struck me about your editorial was that you were spending time with your family and still checking email. Is your family really that unimportant that you have to check email when you are having family time? This is a prime example of work/family balance having gone all wrong.
There are too many examples of people not knowing how to relax that they eventually succumb to a stress attack that prevents them from working again – or worse, their family loses them permanently. Perhaps it is worthwhile learning that email is like postal mail. You CAN leave it until you have finished the family time. You can also switch off the mobile phone!
Nothing – especially work – should interrupt family time. No wonder the divorce rate is so high.
Now, of course, there’s nothing I like better than reader mail, even when it’s nosy and presumptuous. In this case, I reassured the writer that my work/life balance was just fine, and that the divorce rate here in the Robichaux family is holding steady at 0% after 11 years. I also pointed out that checking email while the kids are napping hardly constitutes vacation abuse. I didn’t bother to explain that checking email regularly is one of those quaint business practices that allows me to make it so my family can eat regularly, and that an IT support manager for a company specializing in HR communications might not understand that so well.
So, the executive summary: I love hearing from y’all, but let’s leave my family out of it, ‘kay? Otherwise I shall have to improve my work/life balance by sending my three noisy, energetic young sons to your house.
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Filed under General Stuff
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