2009-01-01 · 19:03

How I joined the Marine Corps

@ihenpecked on Twitter just said he wasn’t sure if the Marines would have been right for him. I didn’t think they were right for me, either.

Flashback: it’s 1986. The Cold War is happening, big time. I wanted nothing more than to fly jets, pretty much for whoever would have me, but I certainly didn’t work hard for it. I made a desultory effort to be nominated to the Air Force Academy or Annapolis, but my heart wasn’t in it (and neither were my grades, sadly). More or less as a lark, I took the ASVAB and did pretty well on it. That resulted in a flood of calls from recruiters. All the Air Force guys could talk about was missile maintenance, and the Navy recruiters kept talking about subs and nuclear power, neither one of which I wanted any part of; I was firm on going to college and couldn’t see putting that aside for active-duty service.

I had no interest in the Army or Marines, and told their recruiters that. The Army guy took me at my word, but the Marine recruiter, bless his heart, was made of sterner stuff. He kept calling me every few weeks, and it seemed like he always knew when we were sitting down to dinner. I finally agreed to go to his office to talk to him, and that was my downfall: he totally sold me. He convinced me of the benefits of serving in the Marine Corps Reserve, and that it was better to “test-drive” military service before making the commitment to get a commission and the obligations that come with it. (Advice that I took, having heard it from my grandfather, a WW II vet and retired USAF pilot.)

I left for boot camp about four months later, two days after graduating from high school. Then the real fun started 🙂

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2009-01-01 · 18:48

Awesome customer service from CafĂ© Press

I ordered Arlene three things from CafePress: two Twilight-themed T-shirts and a Twilight calendar. They arrived on time, as promised, but she wasn’t crazy about any of them (Tim and Julie got Arlene a nicer calendar, and the T-shirts were a bit too small). I e-mailed CafePress to get an RMA. On New Year’s Day, they responded in less than 4 hours and told me that they would issue a credit– and to keep the merchandise! I was amazed at the speed of the response and the lack of overall hassle. I’ll definitely do business with them again.

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2008-12-23 · 19:52

Surprise! It’s a fish!

As Christmas approaches, we’ve had a steady feed of packages arriving at the hacienda. This is normal around this time of year; with Mom, Tim, us, and Julie all in different states there’s a fair amount of interstate commerce goin’ on. This afternoon, though, I was surprised to find a large white box outside my door.

The return address said “Seattle Fish Co.” That was my first clue. The second clue was the overpowering odor of fish that filled the kitchen when I opened the inner styrofoam cooler. Wrapped in paper was a plastic bag containing (wait for it)… a whole fish, head included. I immediately moved it out to the garage (which is cold enough, luckily, to store fish), then called the sender to figure out where this fish came from.

“Hi. Someone sent me a whole fish,” I said. “I think it’s a salmon.”

“Well, we don’t ship whole salmon,” said the lady on the other end. “Does it have a head?”

“Yes, it does, with an eye and everything.”

“Oh, that makes sense then. Someone just called me about this– there was a shipping mistake. You got a rock cod.”

After a bit of research, they called me back. A business associate had ordered some smoked salmon to be sent to us. Somehow, this order was transmuted into an order for a whole rock cod, which they promptly shipped. We thus received a fresh, yet unexpected, Christmas surprise. The good news: I’m going to take it to the market tomorrow and have it filleted and cleaned, then we can have some Boxing Day cod fillets. (Better news: the salmon is on the way and will arrive on New Years’ Eve!)

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2008-12-17 · 14:38

Great idea for Santa letters

From Peter Shankman‘s HARO newsletter:

So, the General Post Office at 34th St. and 8th Avenue is the one that gets all the letters addressed to “Santa – North Pole, Earth” every year. Well, did you know you can go and pick up as many as you want? I did! Meagan’s job this morning was to go to Toys R Us and buy a “Baby Alive,” a “My Little Pony,” a giant Teddy Bear, Play-Doh, Batman Indoor RC Racers, a Remote Control Helicopter, and right now, she’s struggling to figure out how to wrap all this stuff when NASA is constantly jumping in the wrapping. It’s a pretty decent feeling today here at HARO Central.

This is a great idea– I wonder if there’s a Toledo (or Seattle?) equivalent. Kudos to Peter for thinking of it!

Update: looks like the USPS has stopped Operation Santa for the time being. That stinks.

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2008-12-10 · 23:48

Skillz: Tim haz them

Congratulations to my brother Tim on the publication of his first book work: the Linux chapter in Next Generation SSH2 Implementation. Devin has a chapter in there too– it’s like old home week. (Personal to our sister: it’s your turn now!)

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2008-12-10 · 13:10

StackSafe survey: get a SBUX card or win an iPod

StackSafe just sent me a request; they’re doing a survey of Exchange administrators (hosted by SurveyMonkey). The first 50 respondents get a Starbucks’ gift card, and they’ll draw someone at random to win an iPod Touch. It’s not a sales survey, and they’ve promised not to spam anyone. They’ve also promised to make the survey data available to me, and I’ll post it here once I get it. Take the survey here if you’re interested.

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2008-12-06 · 18:18

U-Verse first impressions

So, I’ve had U-Verse for all of five days so far. Herewith a few first impressions after having used it a bit.

First, my installer gets an A+++++. He did a great job of setting everything up, putting wires where I wanted them, and cleaning up after himself. I am very well pleased with how the install went; I don’t know if he’s typical of AT&T’s field installer force but if he is that bodes well for them.

Second, Internet speed has generally been excellent, with speeds far closer to the rated limit. As an example, I got a measured 9.3Mbps the other day, which is pretty darn good. Jitter has overall been low, but I am still having occasional burps on my Mitel phone (haven’t tested the Tanjay yet). I had some difficulties getting all 3 of my wireless access points to work together; I ended up turning off two of them, because AT&T’s box integrates 802.11g and has enough range to cover the entire first floor. Problem solved.

TV: channel selection is OK. We don’t get the Toledo CW affiliate, or any other, nor do we get the digital subchannels for local broadcasters, both of which I miss. I’m glad to get BYU-TV again, and there are a few HD channels like Smithsonian that Buckeye doesn’t have. U-Verse HD picture quality is fair-to-good; I’d say it’s on a par with DirecTV but not as good (at least for the local channels) as Buckeye. I like getting STARZ and the other low-end movie channels as part of the bundle, but they only have about five different movies between them.

DVR: this is kind of a sore point with me right now. U-Verse touts its “Total Home DVR”, which puts a single disk-based DVR in one room and satellite units that can stream video from the “real” DVR in others. Great idea, and perfect for our house. There are some drawbacks, though. The satellite units cannot pause live TV, nor can they schedule recordings. That’s one strike. The second strike is that, for some reason, the unit in our bedroom keeps telling us that there are no DVRs on the network, so we can’t watch anything. (An AT&T tech is on his way over right now to see if he can fix it, though.) So, I’ll call that a foul ball… strike two. This morning, after rebooting both DVR units to try to fix that problem, all of the recorded programs were gone. That’s definitely a strike. (Arlene told me that the programs actually disappeared sometime yesterday, because they were already gone at 1630 when she and the boys tried to watch something.)

As long as I’m talking about the DVR functionality: I miss wishlists and suggestions, neither of which the U-Verse boxes implement. Search-by-name works well, and seems quite a bit faster than the TiVo. Series recording works well, as evidenced by the episodes of stuff I recorded before they got wiped out.

Interactive features: AT&T touts their U-Bar interface, which puts your TV picture in a frame that displays weather, sports, or other information. Unfortunately, all we get for weather is the name of our city, the forecast high/low for the next 24 hours, and a little weather icon– that’s it. This is pretty useless, especially compared to getting “weather on the 8s” with the local Weather Channel broadcast on Buckeye. Local weather is an oft-requested feature on the U-Verse support forums so maybe we’ll get it some day.

Miscellaneous grace notes: the TiVo allows you to see what happened to each show that was recorded or removed, which would have come in very handy in tracing where all my programs went.

My installer just left after verifying that the interior cable run is OK. We’ll see if things improve, but for now it’s back to the Alabama-Georgia game.

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2008-12-05 · 10:58

Helicopter ground resonance

This one’s for you, Jim. Air & Space has a great article on ground resonance in helicopters. Basically, if you get the blade system to vibrate at just the right frequency, the helicopter tears itself apart. A couple of related videos: here’s one of a US Army Chinook from the rear, and another from the side.

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Filed under General Stuff, General Tech Stuff

2008-12-04 · 11:25

HOWTO buy additional Microsoft CRM licenses

Suppose you want to buy an additional license for your existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscription. This sounds like it should be easy, and it is– once you know the trick.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just do a web search for “buy dynamics CRM license“. That way lies madness, not to mention a big steaming pile of fail.

In related news, don’t think that because the Microsoft Online Services page says you can buy a Dynamics CRM Online subscription there that you can buy licenses for an existing subscription. You can’t.

You might think that the sales chat window that opens on several of the Dynamics CRM pages would help. The sales chat person suggested calling 877-276-2464, option 2. I did, and the phone rang and rang and rang without answering for about 90 seconds. Tom then answered and gave me the magic solution, which I include here so you won’t have to go through this same process:

  1. Log in to your existing CRM page.
  2. Click “Settings” in the lower-left corner of the page.
  3. Click “Organization Notifications and Status”.
  4. In the right-hand section of that page, click “Buy Licenses”.

Now for a brief editorial: this is a great case of an application that makes it needlessly hard to do something simple. Why not have a “buy licenses” link on the page where you add new users? Does “Organization Notifications and Status” sound like the solution to “I want to add a license”? Not to me it doesn’t. This is an area where the Business Productivity Online team at MS has far outdone the Dynamics crew. I sure hope that as these two services are unified that the BPO approach and design win out.

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2008-12-03 · 09:38

Amazon: $5 of free MP3 when you buy $25

Amazon just e-mailed me an announcement: if you buy a minimum of $25 worth of stuff from their Music CD, Audio/Video, Camera, Photo & Video, Office Products, PC or Wireless stores in a single order, you get an instant $5 credit at AmazonMP3. This is particularly cool because AmazonMP3 has a long list of albums priced at $5 and under.

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2008-12-01 · 10:04

U-Verse vs Buckeye Express

I’ve been having frustrating problems with my Buckeye Express Internet service. Overall, Buckeye has done a good job. Their service has been pretty reliable (except that outages often kill phone and Internet service at the same time), and I like buying from a locally-owned company. Unfortunately, the Internet connection’s quality has been pretty variable. I’m supposed to get 12Mbps down and 1 Mbps down; in practice, I rarely see more than 7Mbps down and about 900Kbps up. The bigger problem is illustrated here:graph.gif

Notice that one peak around the 5000ms mark– that’s where something is inserting arbitrary TCP pauses. These pauses don’t follow any pattern that I can tell, but they wreak havoc both on my Mitel 5340/Teleworker and my Communicator Phone Experience devices. Every time one of these pauses hits, I get a noise on my phone like someone dropping 5lbs of lead shot into a galvanized trash can; it happens often enough to render that connection unusable.

The upstream jitter graph shows a similarly sad tale. It’s bad enough that I have 142ms of jitter, but it’s worse that it’s so variable. Most VoIP systems can compensate for jitter, but only if it remains predictable.

graph-1.gif

I called Buckeye to come out and fix it, but I don’t think the problem is something that can be resolved with a truck roll (although my local pedestal is out of spec, so they’re fixing it.) When AT&T announced that they were coming to Toledo, I eagerly hit their web site to find out if they offer service in Perrysburg… and they do. Their offering doesn’t yet include voice, but they have 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up Internet service and a really slick-looking DVR setup that provides centralized DVR service for the whole house. I got in touch with Amanda Harris, the general manager for U-Verse in Ohio, and asked her some questions about the service; I’ll blog more about her answers later.

Perhaps more importantly, they offer free installation and a money-back service guarantee, so I scheduled them for an install. The installer came by this morning, did a quick walkthrough of the house to see what connections need to go where, and is now hooking our signal up at the VDSL pedestal. By day’s end, I should be in a position to do a back-to-back shootout of U-Verse vs Buckeye on the Internet front.

On the TV front, things are a little more complicated. The living room TiVo HD won’t work with U-Verse, so we’ll have to mothball it for the time being. However, the bedroom doesn’t have a DVR at all, so it will gain one. U-Verse in Ohio supports two simultaneous HD streams, so you can record two HD programs and watch up to 5 different HD or SD programs on 5 different TVs (not that we’ll ever have that many). We’ll also get some channels, like BYU-TV, that we don’t now get– at the cost of the familiar and easy-to-use TiVo interface. We’ll have to see how that plays off.

I’d write more, but the AT&T truck just pulled up again…

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Filed under General Tech Stuff, HDTV and Home Theater

2008-11-26 · 15:22

Cutting off e-mail for former employees

Say you’ve fired someone, or laid them off, or sadly waved goodbye as they left of their own volition. How can you effectively prevent them from accessing your Exchange servers once they’re gone?

Most connections to an Exchange server are persistent, in the sense that once the client’s authenticated the connection will remain open. This allows the client to continue to send and receive mail… the exact opposite of what you want. You might think that disabling the Active Directory account for the user would do the trick, and it will indeed prevent other logons from succeeding. However, for about two hours, existing logons will continue to work. Here’s what to do to instead:

  1. Disable the user’s mailbox. This prevents new logons to the mailbox.
  2. Set the Send Prohibit quota to 0. This prevents the user from sending new mail; the quota change takes effect immediately.
  3. Move the user’s mailbox to another database. This will immediately disconnect all open mailbox connections from any client.

VoilĂ ! Problem solved. (Hat tip: Scott Schnoll)

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2008-11-26 · 12:40

Free Christmas music from Oprah

I’m normally not a huge Oprah fan, but she’s giving away 8 MP3-format Christmas songs by different artists, including Faith Hill and Aretha Franklin. Visit http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahshow/20081118_tows_holiday/2 to download them.

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2008-11-26 · 10:16

PowerShell 101 event 11 December

I’m going to be doing a three-part “PowerShell 101” webcast for Windows IT Pro on 11 December. It’s pretty basic stuff, appropriate for those who are just getting started with PowerShell and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). However, I will be doing a longer, more in-depth series of webcasts starting in February. For more details, see this link.

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2008-11-24 · 16:59

Gift ideas for system administrators

Every year, I write an Exchange UPDATE column with gift suggestions for your Exchange administrator (here are the 2007 and 2006 editions). This year I decided to try something different; I hit up HelpAReporterOut to put my query in front of about 35,000 people. The responses started to arrive almost immediately.

First responder: the folks at PCWeenies sent me a blurb about custom-drawn comics featuring your favorite admin. Neat idea, and very timely response. This is definitely a contender: it’s unique, and it would make a nice keepsake.

Best comment: “The best gift you can give a SysAdmin is a Faraday Cage that blocks cell phones, pagers, and WiFi: it cuts off all connection to the outside world. It’s _very_ popular with their wives, too!” I bet it would be popular! Sadly this respondent didn’t give me a source to actually buy them. Time to break out the power tools!

Least likely to actually be given as a gift by anyone I’ll ever work for: plasma TVs from a very large consumer electronics company who shall remain nameless. Great idea, but probably violates whatever office-Christmas-gift price policy your company has. If your company thinks it’s OK to give its Exchange admins such expensive gifts, please contact me for a resume.

Least likely to actually be given, runner-up: a one-question “stocking stuffer” e-mail exchange with a Hollywood psychic.

Coolest suggestion I never would have expected: handmade stamped-metal keychains. Check them out.

Claim most in need of testing: “[IgnaFire chocolate] morsels are SO strong in flavor and texture, that a very small amount satisfies. No one can eat this chocolate by the handful.” We’ll just see about that; I ordered some for Arlene, whose expertise in the world of chocolate is known throughout the world.

Apart from these, I’ve gotten some very cool leads for potential gift ideas, and I’ll be going through them for the remainder of the week to come up with the best list for next week’s column.

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