If you’re having an office, church, or family party, you may be struggling with what to give people– especially if you have a white elephant gift exchange. Allow me to offer this excellent list of suggestions. Lots of potential here!
“White elephant” gift exchange suggestions
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Raphael T. “Tim” Bloch, 1919-2007
(n.b. Julie has written a wonderful tribute to our grandfather– see here.)
Tim Bloch was born in Alexandria on January 30, 1919, the son of Raphael Bloch and Alix Kilpatrick,
and died on December 3, 2007. He was graduated from Jonesboro-Hodge High School and subsequently attended Louisiana State University until he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He also served in the South Pacific as a B-17 pilot and in the Italian theater as a squadron commander. He was highly decorated for his service. In May of 1943 he married Phyllis Gibson Barton of Napoleonville.
His business interests were many and varied. He served as state president of the Louisiana Realtors Association, and was proud that Tim Bloch Real Estate served the community for 50 years.
Tim was known as an affable, capable, responsible civic leader. His wit and humor were a delight to his family and friends.
He is survived by his wife, Phyllis Bloch; his brother, Samuel Wheadon Bloch of Kansas City, Missouri; his first cousin, Virginia Wheadon de Gravelles of Lafayette, Louisiana; two daughters, Ann Bloch Robichaux of Perrysburg, Ohio, and Betty Barton Bloch of Metairie, Louisiana; two sons, Ray Beasley Bloch and Daniel Timothy Bloch of Alexandria, Louisiana; and grandchildren Paul Robichaux, Julie Robichaux, Tim Robichaux, Christopher Bloch, Clayton Bloch, Ashley Bloch, and Melissa Bloch.
The funeral was held at St. James Episcopal Church on Wednesday, December 5. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to the Rapides Parish Library, 411 Washington St., Alexandria, Louisiana, 71301, or to the charity of your choice.
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Rocking the roadshow in Atlanta
Well, OK; I’m not rocking it yet, but I have big plans. The Ravens-Pats game is on TV; my dinner’s on the way, and I got to ride MARTA from the airport to my hotel. I’m ready to bring my A game to the session tomorrow!
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Notes client won’t run with Vista UAC
Now, this is just plain wrong. The two most recent versions of the Lotus Notes clients won’t run when Vista User Account Control is enabled. This is despite the fact that IBM claims that Notes 8 is fully compatible with Vista. IBM recommends turning off UAC, which means you actually have to make your desktop less secure to run it.
Upon further investigation, it looks like nsd.exe is the actual component that doesn’t work when UAC is enabled. It looks like the only necessary change would be for NSD to ship with a manifest that uses the requireAdministrator flag to signal that the executable needs to run with elevated privileges. This is pretty straightforward, so I wonder if there’s some other issue that makes NSD, or another Notes component, fail under UAC. UAC support is required to get Vista logo certification, but I don’t have a Notes box handy to see whether IBM is claiming the logo or not.
So, shame on IBM for missing this elementary requirement– VIsta was out far enough in advance of Notes 8’s release for IBM to have sufficient time to support UAC. Shame on Microsoft, too, for not taking proactive action to make sure that such a widely used application would work properly with UAC.
(Bonus vuln: this buffer overflow in the Notes client viewer for 1-2-3 files. It requires a patch, which you must get from IBM support. Too bad IBM doesn’t make its patches freely downloadable.)
Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications
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A fun date: gun defense class
I’d signed up for a Krav Maga-based gun defense class at our martial arts school. It sounded like a fun way to spend an afternoon, and indeed it was– all the more so because, at the last minute, Arlene decided to join me! Instead of a typical date, we spent four hours pointing training guns at each other, then taking them away with a variety of strikes, blocks, and pins. She was definitely better at most of the techniques than I was, as we found out during the stress-based testing. It was definitely a different way to spend time together (and sorry about accidentally hitting you in the nose, honey!)
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Alexandria
This is the first time in a long time (like, nearly 15 years) that I’ve been to Alexandria twice in one year. We were there earlier this year for a great family reunion; this time, sad to say, I was visiting my seriously ill grandfather in the hospital. Despite the reason for the visit, it was great to see everyone– Ray, Dan, Ashley, Melissa, Grandmaw, Betty, Clayton, Laura, and Chris were all there. Ashley is only a few months away from graduating from high school; Melissa and I had fun learning how to balance chemical equations (OK, not really; I don’t think she enjoyed it much); I watched Oprah with Betty (cracking wise all the way) and Chris cooked two splendid meals. Last night, I had the first fried trout I’ve had in at least 20 years, and as a bonus he cooked the best hush puppies I’ve ever tasted. Tim arrived last night, so we got to visit for a bit (and he told me about his new blog, which has some hysterical pictures so far.)
BTW, the Alexandria airport is terrific! The terminal is beautiful (although there are no concessions in the gate area), and there’s free WiFi. I only wish the Toledo airport were as attractive, clean, or well-maintained.
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Exchange 2007 SP1: November 30
Get ready, folks. Exchange 2007 SP1 ships on the 30th.
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Rock Band!
Arlene just returned from Best Buy with a brand-new box of win: Rock Band Deluxe Edition. It’s a Christmas present for the boys, but I wonder if they believe in early Christmas? It seems a shame to leave it boxed up given the upcoming four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe I can sneakily rock out after they go to bed tonight…
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The history of Tabasco
Wow, this is neat– NewsGator just alerted me to a book review of a book called McIlhenny’s Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire
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Filed under General Stuff
HOWTO: Find a RoundTable case
I’m still really enamored of the Microsoft RoundTable conferencing camera. IMHO it’s a real breakthrough, and I can’t wait until we can get one of our own and start using it regularly for the meetings I have to attend. We faced a problem for the roadshows, though: the RoundTable is an odd shape and doesn’t disassemble for transport. I couldn’t see shipping a $3000 device in a cardboard box, so I did some digging. As far as I can tell, there’s only one company that makes RoundTable-specific cases. Titan Cases of Seattle. We ordered one, and it wasn’t cheap (about $335). However, just look at the darn thing. It’s practically indestructible. In fact, it should say “CRAFTSMAN” on the front.
Titan offers two models: one with wheels and one without. We took the wheel-less one in hopes that it would be easier to take aboard airplanes. It’s done an admirable job so far, but we’ll be ordering the next one in 3Sharp green.
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Extending OCS programmatically
It turns out that there are at least two ways you can build custom applications that take advantage of OCS 2007’s capabilities for presence, IM, conferencing, and voice. First, you can use the Communicator SDK to do client-side stuff, like asking Communicator to initiate a voice call or change your presence status in response to some action. (I need to find out if Communicator is smart enough to set your status to “away” when you lock your workstation; if not that will probably be my first project.)
Second, you can use the OCS SDK to write server-side code for things like IM content filters. This is also a handy way to write server-side response bots. You can also integrate presence and IM with SharePoint using a fairly simple web part; I’ll write more about that later.
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Devin is MVP of the month
Super cool: Devin is this month’s MVP of the Month! Congratulations!
Technorati Tags: 3sharp
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HOWTO: Disable voice mail journaling in Exchange 2007
One common question (or family of questions, I guess) that I get concerns how voice mail messages are handled in the Exchange 2007 transport engine. In particular, a couple of people at the “It’s Time to Deploy” events have had questions about how voice messages are journaled. Depending on your organization’s records management requirements, you may want to make sure that VMs are journaled, or you may want to affirmatively block them from journaling. It turns out that you can easily do this with the Set-TransportConfig task in EMS. A quick
Set-TransportConfig -VoiceMailJournalingEnabled:$false
will do the trick; the flag is set to enable VM journaling by default, and this command just turns it out.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
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Returning home
A few notes gathered during my trip, now that I’m on the way home (yay!) I got up early, finished packing, and ran into my friend Rick Taylor at breakfast. We had a great chat about the perils of raising kids (he has two girls and a boy about the same ages as our three boys). He also told me that Joel Oleson got to go to a sacrament meeting in Barcelona, and I confess to being a bit jealous.
First, airport security in Barcelona is a far cry from what we see in the US. My boarding pass underwent a cursory check, but no one checked my passport. At the screening point, no one asked me to take off my shoes or remove my laptop (though I did have to go back through the metal detector because my watch and class ring together were enough to set it off.) There were no shouting uniformed bullies, and no screening for liquids. This might be because of a casual attitude towards security at this one airport (security at Amsterdam is much more US-like), or it might be a more realistic assessment of the actual threat.
Second: my KLM flight BCN-AMS was delayed by about 45 minutes, but no one at BCN seemed to care. I thought I could call Northwest to get protected for my AMS-DTW leg, but once you check in, only the airline operating your first segment can modify the ticket. No one ever made announcements about the flight status or delay time, and two of the three gate agents I spoke to didn’t know how long the BCN-AMS flight was supposed to take. I guess that’s better than getting bogus announcements every 15 minutes, as sometimes happens on Comair. I just barely caught my AMS-DTW flight. Good thing AMS is uncrowded and easy to navigate. I never would have made a 30-minute connection at CDG, for example.
Third, intra-Europe business class isn’t what you think. I was seated in seat 2C, in what would be “domestic first” in the US. The seat pitch and size are identical to the coach seats, and seating on the 737 is 3-3, just like in coach. The difference? One, there are no complimentary upgrades (at least as far as I can tell) so it’s only about half-full. Second, they serve your choice of two hot entrees, plus hot bread. I had a grilled chicken breast with mango and pepper coulis, trout tartare, and a small square of chocolate-banana cake. All were delicious, way better than domestic US first-class food– and all this on a two-hour flight. (Extra bonus: KLM 737s have in-seat power using regular outlets.)
Fourth, the video-on-demand system on NWA’s A330 is really slick. I watched the Simpsons Movie (laughing my butt off the whole time) and was able to start and pause it when I wanted– almost as nice as being in my living room with ye olde Tivo.
Finally, I’m looking forward to having a couple of weeks without any air travel.
Birthday bonus: NW lost my bags. Thanks, guys. (The FA did offer me a birthday bottle of champagne, though, so I guess that outweighs the temporary hassle of being bag-free).
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Barcelona: 7 Portes
For dinner, I went out with a group of MS folks to a local restaurant called 7 Portes. It’s been here since 1837, if that tells you anything. Wow, it was good! Our table of about a dozen people shared four or five different appetizers, including jamon iberico (which I put on Catalan tomato bread to make a tasty open-faced sandwich), fried salt cod balls, and anchovies (skipped those!) I ordered something that was described as crayfish– turns out their web site menu has it right in saying langoustines. I was mildly surprised to see giant non-crawfish on my plate, but they sure did taste good. The food overall was excellent– everything I had was top-notch. I am now a huge admirer of jamon, which is illegal to import into the US. More’s the pity; I know lots of people whom I think would enjoy it.
As always, I have more stuff now than I did when I left home, so I’m in the midst of packing it all for my return tomorrow. BCN-AMS on KL, followed by AMS-DTW on NW, followed by a quiet evening with my family– I can’t wait!
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