2010-02-21 · 15:22

A review of our cruise on the Disney Wonder

One of the unusual things about California that we’ve had to adapt to is the presence of two school vacation breaks: one in the usual April timeframe and one in mid-February. The kids call it “ski week” because lots of folks use it to go to Yosemite, Tahoe, or other places. For instance, our Scout troop traditionally goes snow camping at Yosemite during this time.

This year, we took advantage of the off week to give my mom a Christmas present: we took her on a four-day Disney cruise, followed by three days at Walt Disney World, with four of her five grandsons. (The fifth is only 17 months old, so he wasn’t really invited.) Ski week was the perfect time for us to combine the two, so we started making plans just after Thanksgiving and had everything squared away by early January. This was no small feat, given that we had to coordinate travel and activities for people from California, Vermont, and Louisiana.

Logistics I started by contacting Vacations to Go, the cruise agency we used for our previous Princess cruise. They do an excellent job of handholding, which in this case was warranted by the complexity of our plan. Their agents are all home-based, and the one we drew (Judy Hastings) did a terrific job. They’re like Amazon in that you get mostly-automated communications from them at major milestones, telling you what to do (or what’s ben done.) We reserved category 12 staterooms, the least expensive (and least fancy) kind– but more on that in a minute.

Disney offers web-based booking for all the shore activities. We used their booking system for a couple of activities and found others by using the web. Our particular cruise stopped for a day in Nassau, a day at Disney’s Castaway Cay, and spent the final day at sea.

For air travel, we were pretty much stuck. We wanted to leave the 13th, so we’d have a day of buffer in case of travel delays. Julie and Mom both had much shorter travel legs than we did, so to maximize our time with them we wanted early flights. That left us stuck with US Airways, which I hadn’t flown in at least 12 years. Service was perfunctory; everything except soda costs extra (want a blanket? that’ll be $7), and we spent an extra hour in Phoenix because one of our FMS computers needed replacement. The fare was outrageous, but at least we got the times and dates we wanted. Enough said about that.

When we arrived, we took the shuttle to the Embassy Suites near MCO. This enabled us to gather and have a little together time before heading to the ship the next morning. We had considered staying at the Hyatt at MCO itself, which would have made the process of getting to the ship a little simpler. However, they were full. Oops. The Embassy Suites was plenty nice for a one-night stay, and we all love their breakfasts.

The next morning, Tiffany Town Cars picked us up exactly on schedule and drove us from Orlando to Port Canaveral. They came recommended on one of the Disney-themed forums I’d been haunting. For $125 for a party of 8, it was a pretty good deal. Disney offers transport too ($35/person each way), but only from MCO to the port.

When we arrived at the port, things were in a bit of a rumpus. The Disney Magic was late in arriving due to high seas during its prior-day stop at Castaway Cay. Our area was filled with frazzled people who had just gotten off the Magic, plus frazzled people who wanted to get on it but didn’t realize they were in the wrong place. We arrived at about 9:30 am. Disney usually opens the terminal for arrivals at about 10am, so we didn’t have too long to wait– it just seemed like a long time because of the unseasonably cold weather.

The check-in process was smooth, as you’d expect. We showed our passports to the nice trainee behind the counter, turned in our cruise contracts, got our pictures taken for our “Key to the World” cards, and settled down to wait for boarding to begin. Arlene spent nearly 90 minutes in line to register Matt and Charlie for the kids’ activities aboard, but some kind of computer problem kept registration from working until later when we were aboard.

All aboard! Protip: get on the ship as early as possible on your departure day. You can swim, play on the sports courts, eat, and explore (all of which we did… well, except for the swimming; it was about 50* and windy.) We boarded as soon as they’d let us and went to Parrot Cay, one of the four onboard restaurants, for lunch. (There are also several places to get fast food, but I don’t count those as restaurants.)

The lunch buffet was a solid “OK”– I thought the quality and range of choices were better on Princess, but this was by no means bad stuff. Arlene got a piece of truly vile gluten-free cheesecake– we’re not sure, but we think it might have been made lactose-, sugar-, and gluten-free, meaning it was probably made with goat’s milk and Windex.

We spent time ranging around the ship and discovered our staterooms a little after 1:30p, the time when Disney releases them from housekeeping. Despite their small size, the rooms we had were nicely appointed with a queen bed, a fold-out futon-style sofa, a (very) small desk, and a 27″ flatscreen TV showing unlimited Disney programming. (Boo hiss: no Olympics, as they’re carried this year on rival network NBC.) Our bags arrived later, as did some terrific cruise gift baskets that Julie had ordered for us.

Our first night’s dinner was at Animator’s Palette. You can probably guess the décor theme; if not, this might help. Our dinner was superb, and our table staff (Faisal and Kevin) did a great job of taking care of us. On Disney, you dine in a different restaurant each night, but you keep the same table staff. We filled a table for eight all by ourselves. The ship had several kinds of gluten-free bread for Arlene (though they would always bring her at least three pieces of it at each meal, more than she could eat), and they were always able to adapt entrées for her without any difficulty.

There are lots of odd angles in this particular restaurant, which I think contributed to Matt and Tom both complaining of seasickness during dinner. They ended up going to bed semi-early while the rest of us went to see the “Golden Mickeys” musical. As you would expect, this was superbly produced and performed, and those of us who saw it loved it. We put some anti-nausea wristbands on the kids and that (along with a good night’s sleep) helped a lot. The two anti-nausea drugs they sell aboard ship aren’t safe for asthma sufferers, so keep that in mind if you’re going to sea.

Nassau We got into Nassau about 9am and promptly split up: Mom, David, Tom and I hit the port while Julie, Charlie, Matt, and Arlene went on a dolphin visit. I’ll leave it to Arlene to describe that (and show off the tons of pictures she took). As for the port: meh. It was pleasant to walk around in the sun, but other than that it was pretty bland. Mom and Tom went off to their snorkeling outing, so David and I had time for a quick lunch together before our own snorkel trip. Mom and Tom got the better end of the deal; their expedition went to an area with a crashed Cessna, and they baited the water to attract fish instead of selling little baggies of fish food. I took a ton of pictures and video using the underwater camera case that Julie and Paul gave me for Christmas, but the results were a bit disappointing (I’ll upload them once I have more bandwidth than this airport offers); the camera’s autofocus system had a hard time coping with fast-moving fish.

Everyone made it back to the ship with stories to tell, so we had a lively dinner at Parrot Cay. This dinner featured their “island menu”, which was uniformly excellent. Everyone loved everything, which might be a first. Either we were all unusually hungry or the food was unusually good.

Castaway Cay The next morning we arrived early at Castaway Cay. The weather was poor: 25-30 kt winds, rain, and low clouds. Disney cancelled most of the shore-based activities; Julie and I had Jet Ski time booked, and Arlene and Charlie were headed for the glass-bottomed boat tour. Too bad! The weather did eventually improve, and we were able to spend some time on the actual beach in the sun. Stingrays cruise very close in to shore, which was fun for the kids. There’s also a simulated fossil dig located in and around a real whale skeleton; this was very popular with Matt and Charlie. David spent the whole day with a pack of teens in a structured group activity and delighted in being away from his family (OK, maybe not, but he did have lots of fun!)

Lunch was a barbecue buffet that was pretty good. We spent time doing nothing much in particular; although we would have all preferred to be able to enjoy our scheduled activities, having a day off wasn’t so bad either! We sailed early, about 5pm, to get ready for the “Pirates IN the Caribbean” theme of the evening. Mom had laid on pirate clothes for all of us, so I was sporting a do rag, an earring, and an eyepatch when we went to dinner, which was again excellent.

The party itself was clearly oriented at the 5- to 12-year-old set: it was noisy, featuring a non-stop stream of Disney hits [sic]. The redeeming part in my mind was the shipboard fireworks. Disney makes much of the fact that they’re the only cruise line that can launch fireworks at sea, and these were beautiful (although nothing compared to the displays at WDW.)

A day at sea The weather was nicer on our last day than it had been on the preceding days, so we all got some sun, and the kids got to swim. Apart from that, it was a low-stress day, capped off by a French dinner at Triton’s, the poshest of the onboard restaurants. Arlene had duck; several of us had an excellent duck confit appetizer, and David and Tom both had (and loved!) escargot. I was really pleased by how well we all did at trying new foods, something that’s easy when you know the wait staff will just bring you something else if you dislike whatever you ordered. (Kids: don’t try that it home. It won’t work.)

A side note on kids’ programs Our day at sea good segue for me to talk about the onboard programs. We had kids aged 5, 8, 11, and 15, so we covered all the bases except the nursery. The 5- and 8-year-olds spent time in the Oceaneer Lab and Oceaneer Club, a big open space located on deck 5. Each kid gets a wristband with a small RFID tag, and each parent gets a pager. That way it’s easy for each party to keep track of, or contact, the other. The Oceaneer activities tended to be science-themed. Matt made Flubber, researched sharks, and so on. Charlie’s program was more activity-themed, and Tom’s (aptly named the “Out and About” club) was a nice mix. For example, one day they played dodgeball, then had a big trivia contest, then made their own pizzas for lunch.

David spent as much time as we’d let him in “Aloft”, the teen club on deck 11. Here the main attraction was the presence of other teens, plus lots and lots of food and games.

There was enough adult supervision for all of the programs that we felt comfortable letting the kids spend time there, and they enjoyed it immensely. This made it possible for us to have quiet adult time when we needed it. This is one of the major distinctions that Disney offers, and they deliver exactly what they promised. The kids clamored for more time in the programs, and we were happy to be able to mix that in with our other family activities.

Debarkation Disney wants the ship unloaded as fast as possible, so you pack your luggage and put it out in the hall the night before you arrive and they put it ashore for you. This worked quite well for us because we’d done it before, but in the morning I heard other families complaining about things they’d forgotten or mispacked. We had a sit-down breakfast at Triton’s, then a few minutes later we were off the ship, through customs, and ready to take the bus to Walt Disney World… but more on that another time.

Table scraps A few miscellaneous notes and observations:

  • There’s cell phone connectivity aboard, but it’s crazy expensive. Don’t plan on roaming in the Bahamas, either: $2.99/minute for voice and an extortionate $19.99/Mb for data. (The shipboard rates are lower but I was too afraid to turn on my phone to find out what they were.)
  • Shipboard Internet service is slow and high-latency. Disney blocks outbound VPN connections, too. At least it’s expensive! I bought a 100-minute block for $40 and used about 75% of it checking mail and dispatching work on Wednesday, so that means I went two whole days without e-mail. Sigh.
  • Attention Anita: unlike Princess, Disney ships have ice cream from 0800-2300.
  • Julie recommended packing a power strip of some kind because each stateroom has only two outlets. I grabbed two of these and they were splendid– just what we needed.
  • Don’t bother taking your own snacks aboard. You’ll have plenty to eat.
  • I think the four adults, combined, read maybe 50 pages during the entire voyage. There were just too many other things to do to spend time reading.
  • Our stateroom was on deck 2, just below the dance club. We never heard a thing; the interior soundproofing is excellent, although you can hear hallway noise. We could also hear the ship’s thrusters loud and clear because we were so far forward. However, Disney doesn’t schedule port arrivals at 0700 like Princess does, so no one’s sleep was disturbed.
  • Don’t let the small square footage of the cheapest staterooms fool you– it was fine for three people.
  • The Disney cruise message boards talk about upgrades a lot. In theory, you can buy them before you board; you can ask for them at check-in, or you can attempt to buy one after setting sail. In reality, at most time periods Disney sells out. The purser told us that the only time they’ve recently had cabins available for upgrades was during the recent East Coast snowstorms.

Bottom line: a great trip, one we would definitely consider doing again.

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2010-02-18 · 08:27

Changing the length for Exchange 2010 voice mail transcription

Sometimes I get voice mail messages for which Exchange 2010 refuses to provide a voice mail preview. It says “oh, bother; the message was too long.” Wouldn’t it be great to set the threshold for “too long” in Voice Mail Preview?
Too bad; you can’t.
Well, OK. Let me elaborate: you can change the maximum length used when you use a transcription partner. (Wait, what? You didn’t know that you can outsource transcription? Yep. I’ll write more about that later.)
However, there’s no supported way to change the length threshold for messages transcribed on your own system. There’s a good reason for this, though.
All speech recognition systems rely on statistical models to help them “understand” what the speaker’s saying. These models help the speech engine predict what sounds are likely to come next given what’s being said right now, and improved models are a big part of why speaker-independent continuous speech recognition has finally reached the point of actually being useful.
There’s a problem with this approach, though: messages that don’t match the model are really, really hard to recognize. When a speaker says “My phone number is four”, if the next phrase is “syzygy exploding potato” it’s going to be hard for the model to keep up since it’s expecting a few more numbers, not random crapola. The more the message diverges from the model’s expectation, the worse accuracy gets.
This ties into long messages how? Glad you asked. The longer a message is, the more likely it is to be a specialized message– in other words, one that doesn’t match the model well. Consider the difference between a short message (say, “Hi, honey, it’s me. Don’t forget to pick up some milk on the way home.”) and a speaker reading this blog post to your Exchange UM server!
To avoid this situation, Exchange won’t transcribe any message longer than about 75 seconds. That’s not a big deal, given that something like 99% of all voice mail messages are shorter than 75 seconds, but it’s still a bit of a hassle if you need transcription for longer messages. Of course, then you could always use a transcription service, about which more later.

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2010-02-16 · 08:00

Exchange 2010 management tools and domains

One of the coolest things about Exchange 2010 is that it’s designed from the ground up to deal with multiple Exchange organizations. There are all sorts of features that take this into account, like the ability to designate equivalent dial plans, set up federation trusts, and so on.
One feature you may have missed is that the Exchange Management Console can be used to manage any Exchange organization, not just the one associated with the domain you’re logged into. This comes in especially handy if you’re using Exchange Online, or if you need to manage more than one Exchange organization from the same machine.
Turns out, though, that you can only install the Exchange 2010 management tools if your machine is joined to a domain. It doesn’t matter which domain; any one will do.
This seems odd at first glance. After all, lots of other management applications allow single-seat management across Windows domains. In fact, the Exchange 2010 control panel (ECP) does this. There actually is a good reason for the restriction, though. The Exchange 2010 EMC uses Kerberos to authenticate and encrypt the data channel used for remote PowerShell. This is simpler to deploy and manage than dealing with yet another set of SSL certificates for HTTPS… but the use of Kerb requires that the management workstation be joined to a domain. There you have it.

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2010-02-15 · 08:00

get-help and remote PowerShell

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but lately I’ve been doing a lot more work with the Exchange 2010 management shell, and this has really been getting on my nerves.
In Exchange 2007, you could use tab completion to figure out which cmdlets existed for a given task. Need to do something with public folders, but not sure what cmdlets are there? Just type “get-pu” and hit Tab, and voila! you start seeing public folder-related commands.
Exchange 2010 breaks this!
The reason is simple: tab completion doesn’t work in remote PowerShell. Every time you launch EMS, you’re making a remote PS connection, even on the same machine. Therefore: no tab completion for you.
Worse, the get-help cmdlet won’t accept wildcards any longer. The same issue is to blame.
There’s a partial workaround for this issue, which is to use get-command (or just “gcm”) instead of get-help. gcm will give you the list of cmdlets, and then you can use get-help to get help on an individual cmdlet.
I don’t think this is a great situation. In fact, it stinks. I learned PowerShell in large measure by trying to tab-complete various things to figure out what existed, and as I’m now trying to train a few other folks on basic PowerShell, the lack of this feature is a big pain in the butt.
However, complaining to the Exchange team won’t help much because this is a PowerShell issue. So, if you find this bug annoying, you can let the PowerShell team know on their blog (or here; I’ll forward a link to them). Maybe this will be fixed in a future release… hopefully not a far-future one.

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2010-02-10 · 20:44

Great blog post on Exchange 2010 DAS vs SAN

Fellow MVP Devin Ganger wrote a great post on his blog (where “great” means “long and packed with technical detail”) on Exchange 2010 storage configurations. I was going to cite it, but it wasn’t in my RSS reader. I knew his blog was named “Devin on Earth” so I told my browser to go to http://devinonearth.blogspot.com/. Surprise! That’s not his blog; it belongs to a brunette named Devin who lives in San Francisco.

So, for MVP-Devin’s blog post, go here instead. Update your blog list while you’re at it.

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2010-02-10 · 20:04

A Cajun in hell

From my friend Shelley:

A Cajun who died went to hell. The devil assigned him the usual punishment…put him in the mass pit where the heat was melting others. The devil came back sometime later surprised to find the Cajun just sitting around not even misting much less sweating. “How come you’re not so much as sweating here where everyone else is screaming for relief from the heat?”

The Cajun laughed and said “Man I was raised in the bayous of Sout Looziana.. Dis ain’t nothin’ but May in Morgan City to me!”

The devil decided to really put the Cajun through it. He put him in a sealed off cave in the pit with open blazes and four extra furnaces blasting. When he came back days later the Cajun was sitting pretty had barely begun to bead up with sweat. The devil was outraged.”How is this possible!? You should be melted to a shrieking puddle in these conditions!”

The Cajun laughed even harder than before. “Hey man! I done tole you I was raised in Sout Looziana. You tink dis is heat?! Dis ain’t nothin’ but August in Cow Island !”

So the devil thought “All right, a little reverse ought to do the trick.” He put the Cajun into a corner of hell where no heat ever reached. It was freezing and to add to the Cajun’s misery he added massive icebergs and blasting frozen air. When he returned the Cajun was shivering ice hung from every part of him but he was grinning like it was Christmas. Exasperated, the devil asked “HOW!? How is it possible?! You’re impervious to heat and here you sit in conditions you can’t be used to…freezing cold and yet you’re happier than if you were in heaven. WHY?!”

The Cajun kept grinning and replied “Don’t dis mean de Saints won da Super Bowl?”

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2010-02-03 · 16:39

Hurricane on the way to Miami

WhoDat

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2010-01-19 · 15:33

More on Group Metrics and MailTips

Last month I wrote a bit about MailTips and Group Metrics processing that happens on Exchange 2010 mailbox servers. Now for some deeper follow-up.

First, E.J. Dyksen has a good post on general MailTips troubleshooting on the Exchange team blog. Go read it. (Don’t worry; I’ll wait for you to come back.)

Back already? Great. Now let’s get to it.

Group Metrics creation is on by default; it’s controlled by the organizational GroupMetricsGenerationEnabled setting. Every mailbox server that generates an OAB will also generate Group Metric data for the entire organization. Other mailbox servers will not generate any GM data, unless and until you enable them to do so.

Clients ask the CAS for Group Metric data. A given CAS server will assemble a list of Group Metrics servers, then use AD sites and site link definitions to find the "best" server for getting a copy of the Group Metrics data. The list contains servers that generate OABs for that CAS, plus mailbox servers that are explicitly enabled for Group Metrics generation. (Note that this means that CAS servers that don’t host any OABs also won’t host any Group Metrics data.)

When does all this happen? By default, Group Metric generation happens at midnight, plus or minus three hours. You can change that time using the GroupMetricsGenerationTime parameter, in which case the +/- 3-hour offset doesn’t apply. Also, after you change the time, you’ll notice that the next Group Metrics generation follows the old schedule, then the new schedule kicks in.

There’s no way to force regeneration from the UI, although you can stop and restart the Microsoft Exchange Service Host service on any server to force an update. However, updating the Group Metrics data won’t force the CAS servers to pull the new update; for that, you have to restart the Microsoft Exchange File Distribution service.

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2010-01-19 · 13:50

Contact pictures, whether you want them or not

I am an early adopter (but then if you’ve been reading this blog for more than 10 minutes, you knew that already). Recently, two fairly new pieces of technology have been working together in a, shall we say, unexpected way.

First is Outlook 2010, which I’ve been running for some time. Overall I like it a lot; it performs well, it supports multiple Exchange accounts, and it has lots of grace notes (like the configurable "Quick Steps" feature) that make using it both easier and more pleasant than earlier versions.

Second is the newest release (3.1) of the Facebook client for the iPhone. It has the option to automatically sync Facebook data (including profile links and pictures) for contacts it finds in your iPhone address book.

Put these two together, and what do you get? Pictures of people you don’t really know showing up in Outlook, like this:

image

Yes, that’s right: any time I exchange mail with someone whose e-mail address is registered with Facebook, I get their picture! In this case, a college student bought a book I had listed on Amazon, and she was writing to ask whether I’d shipped it or not. Imagine my surprise to see a picture of her and her two BFFs (at least that’s who I assume the other two girls are.)

What’s making that happen? Outlook 2010 has a feature called "Suggested Contacts" that automatically adds the e-mail addresses of people you correspond with to a new "Suggested Contacts" folder. This replaces the old .nk2 file that earlier versions used for nickname autocompletion. Unfortunately, Suggested Contacts appears to most applications (well, the ones that aren’t Outlook 2010) as a regular Contacts folder. On the iPhone (and in Mail.app) that means that people you’ve exchanged e-mail with show up in your contact list until you manually purge them.

The Facebook app on the iPhone is trying to be helpful, so it looks for people in your address book—which now includes the contents of Suggested Contacts—and downloads their pictures. Ta da! Instant confusion.

The contact-picture feature is one of my favorite Outlook 2010 enhancements, so I’m not going to turn it off. Likewise, having up-to-date pictures of my actual Facebook friends is a neat feature, so i"m leaving it on as well. For now, that means that I’m stuck occasionally seeing pictures of people I don’t know—part of the price for being an early adopter, I guess.

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2010-01-10 · 21:11

Tag cloud now working

Good news: I have tag clouds working on my blog, about five years after the rest of the Internet got them working.

Bad news: now I have to go back and retag a thousand-plus posts if I want the cloud to be useful.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2010-01-05 · 17:38

SecureDoc full-volume encryption for Mac OS X

Windows users have more security options, and that’s just the way it is. Or is it?

Let’s start with the obvious: I love BitLocker and I cannot lie. Despite its faults, it remains a great example of a real-world security feature that delivers immediate value. It’s fully supported by the OS manufacturer, meets government security standards, and doesn’t have to rely on skanky hacks to work its magic.

Windows laptop users can also take advantage of Seagate’s Momentus FDE line of disk drives. These disks, sometimes called self-encrypting disks or just SEDs, perform hardware encryption, and they are qualified by the US National Security Agency as meeting NSTISSP #11. Unfortunately, these drives require support in the BIOS. Since Apple’s laptops all use EFI instead of the standard x86/x64 BIOS, you can’t just plop a Momentus FDE into your Mac and expect it to work.

The only solution I’ve found to get an SED to work in a modern Mac laptop is from WinMagic. Their SecureDoc product is essentially a full-volume encryption tool that competes directly with BitLocker, as well as with other FVE products from PGP, PointSec, and so on. The big difference: the Mac version of SecureDoc supports Momentus FDE disks. Naturally I had to try it.

Installation is simple: you run an installer, which adds a couple of kernel drivers and modifies the boot loader. If (and only if) it detects an unlocked Momentus FDE as the boot volume, it will ask whether you want to use hardware or software encryption. (The installer also tells you that it will change the system’s hibernation mode, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet…)

When you’re done, you must reboot, at which point you see the new (and quite ugly) SecureDoc login screen. When you log in here, the SecureDoc bootloader unlocks the FDE disk and the normal Mac OS X boot cycle proceeds.

The docs ask that you turn off pagefile encryption by unchecking the "Use secure virtual memory" option in the General pane of the Security preferences tool. This makes sense: there’s no reason to ask the OS to encrypt the page file if the disk on which it lives is already encrypted. You must also turn off the "Put hard drive to sleep whenever possible" checkbox, as the OS doesn’t deal well with having the disk go to sleep (and thus get locked) while you’re using it.

In my test install, I ran into an odd problem: the machine would freeze when waking from sleep. The cursor and keyboard would work normally, but I’d get the spinning rainbow pizza of death. After doing some digging, and with the help of WinMagic’s tech support folks, I determined that the system’s hibernation mode wasn’t properly set by the installer. (Page 4 of this document is the only place I’ve found the different hibernation mode codes explained.) Uninstalling the SecureDoc software, manually setting the hibernation mode with the pmset tool, and reinstalling it fixed the problem and it has worked flawlessly since.

The standalone version of SecureDoc doesn’t have the same set of management or control features that BitLocker does. Of course, that’s because WinMagic wants you to buy their server-based toolset, which uses a group policy-like mechanism to enforce whatever encryption policies you choose. Without having tested either the server tool or the Windows version, I’m not ready to pick a winner between BitLocker and SecureDoc, but for the Mac it’s a low-impact solution that does what it says, and I’m happy with it so far.

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2010-01-03 · 00:28

How I got into the writing business, part 2

In part 1, I started talking about how I got into the writing business. Part 1 ended with me having written a couple of non-Windows-related books (including this) and contributing to several Windows-oriented books (like this). I began to wonder if it made sense for me to get an agent, so I started talking to David Rogelberg, the owner of StudioB. He offered me the tempting possibility of being able to write for O’Reilly, something I had always wanted to do. I signed on as a StudioB client and, true to his word, David got me in touch with O’Reilly about writing a book on programming for the Palm Pilot.

Of course, I didn’t know anything about programming for the Pilot, but I wasn’t about to let a minor technicality stop me.

What did stop me was a communications mixup between Robert Denn, my editor at O’Reilly, and another ORA editor who shall remain nameless. This other editor had signed Rhodes and McKeehan– the experts who had written a book on Newton development too– to write a Palm programming book. That left them in the position of having two PalmOS books under contract, only one of which would be written by, y’know, people who knew what they were doing.

Robert offered to let me write a book on another topic. In fact, he even gave me my pick of topics. I wish I could say that I jumped at the chance to write about Exchange, but I didn’t. I had to be more-or-less bullied into it my my agent, who realized the long-term potential of working in the Exchange market. I didn’t know anything about Exchange either, but I was quickly determined to learn, given that I had just signed a contract to write about it. I started joining every Exchange-related mailing list in sight, printed out all the product documentation, and set up Exchange using Virtual PC on my Powerbook. (Yes, that’s right; my O’Reilly Exchange book was written on a Mac– a trend which continues to this day).

I learned sooooo much from the folks on the swynk Exchange list. Not only were there rock stars like Andy Webb, Missy Koslosky, and Ed Crowley there; there were also a ton of Exchange developers. Just to cite one example, one of the primary perpetrators of the Exchange 5.5 MTA was on the list, as was Laurion Burchall, one of the key ESE developers. Everyone on the list was super generous with their time and knowledge, and it didn’t take me long to get up to speed. (My first “live” exposure to the community, though, was attending the 1998 MEC. I was there when Tony Redmond made his famous “I’ll pass on the clap” remark, and I heard Pierre Bijaoui explain that the average human has one breast and one testicle!)

Coincidentally, at about the same time I got a call from O’Reilly: Windows NT Pro magazine was looking for someone to write a regular Exchange column. Was I interested? You bet I was! I started writing it in September of 1998 and it’s been in print ever since, although it’s morphed into a few different forms.

All this time I was still holding down a real job at LJL Enterprises, writing crypto code on the Mac. Eventually my agent brought me an offer that was too good to refuse: Ford Motor Company wanted someone to write a book about their CAD system. I gave my two weeks’ notice, set up my home office, and got ready to hang out my own shingle as a full-time author. That’s when the real adventures started…

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2010-01-02 · 20:10

300, 200, and the New Year

A thoughtful post from my pal Bo Williams on his decision that he wants to weigh less than 300 lbs. I am right there, except that 200 is my personal high-water mark (and one, frankly, that I’m already over). I was holding steady at about 190 for a good while, but not long after Dad died I put on around 10 lbs. Not for any reason, mind you; it just sort of happened. Since then I’ve hovered right around 205, which is a bit more of me to love than I think there should be.

In the back of my mind lurk two things. First is the shadow of Dad’s diabetes. At his funeral, I was sitting around a table with a first cousin, two aunts, and two uncles… all of whom are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. The last time I had my bloodwork done (in September), my glucose was 94; the cutoff for being considered pre-diabetic is 100. I have a huge weakness for sweets, and that’s something I need to really work on. Apart from that, my lipid levels are all pretty good, so I’m not immediately worried about them.

Second is what my kids see: they see me making essentially no daily effort to exercise. In the past I’ve been regular about running on our treadmill (which, sadly, is now gone), but with the dawn of a new year it’s time for me to get back in the groove. Accordingly, today I went and signed us up at the local Anytime Fitness. Arlene, David, and I now have 24/7/365 access to a really nicely-equipped gym less than 2 miles from our house.

I plan to couple that with a return to logging my food intake, which worked pretty well the last time I tried it. Seven years ago I said my target was 181, and this time I really mean it!

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2010-01-02 · 19:59

RSS feed for Exchange 2010 KB articles

I love using RSS to keep track of various information sources, and I just found out that there’s an RSS feed of KB articles for Exchange Server 2010. Use this feed along with your preferred aggregator to keep track of the latest support information for Exchange 2010. (If you don’t already know how to use an aggregator, try Google Reader for a quick, easy, and free introduction.)

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2009-12-30 · 21:56

End-of-the-year randomness

Wow, how did it get to be the end of the year already? I’ve fallen down on my blogging bigtime, but I have ambitious plans for 2010– mostly consisting of posting a batch of articles at once and letting MovableType publish them on a schedule. That way when I’m in the blogging mood I can write up a bunch of stuff and post it.

A few end-of-the-year notes:

  • Christmas was wonderful, even though (or perhaps because) we were here by ourselves. We gave Mom and our boys a Disney cruise, which means I’ll miss the MVP summit this year. I think it’s a reasonable tradeoff, though.
  • Julie and Paul gave me Cruise Ship Confidential, which was a real hoot. The author struck me as someone I’d love to sit down with over lunch. If you like true-confessions-style books, this one’s excellent.
  • Lego Rock Band is a ton of fun, especially with the boys. We also gave them Lips: #1 Hits, which is way more fun than I expected it would be. No surprise that the Lips wireless mic works with the Rock Band family, and having a wireless mic makes those games more fun (and easier for us to stage).
  • I bought a USMC license plate frame from the Stars and Stripes Shop. It was cheaper than any place else I found, I got it in two days, and they sent me a 10% off code to share: sssfrienddec09. Share and enjoy!
  • This year’s Aviation Week & Space Technology photo contest winners are even more awesome than usual. The little tiny online versions don’t really do the pictures justice; if you can find the print magazine, you’ll see what I mean.
  • One of my coworkers is an Iowa fan– the first one I’ve ever met in the flesh. Too bad his team is going down when they play the mighty Yellow Jackets.
  • Speaking of work, I’m really excited about some of the stuff we’re going to be doing. I can’t share any details yet but there are some exciting things coming up.

I probably won’t be posting again this year, so until next time, have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and get ready for a great 2010!

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