We made a Thanksgiving-night run to Meijer for milk and bread; while we were there, I saw that they had a Thanksgiving-only special on the Syntax Olevia LT27HVX, a 27″ flat-panel LCD television with good specs (1280 x 720, with 480p, 720p, and 1080i support). For $499, I jumped on it– that ended up being my anniversary present from Arlene. On Friday, BestBuy had a sale on their DirecTV HD receivers: $199 with a $199 mail-in rebate. Matthew, Thomas, and I headed out to BestBuy about 0830 and it was jam-packed– talk about crowd-fighting! It was worth it, though, as we eventually emerged with a shiny new H10. Its OTA tuner isn’t as sensitive as the one in the living room HR10-250, so I ended up having to put an inline 10dB amplifier on its cable run, but now it works really well. It’s a treat to be able to watch HD under an electric blanket 🙂
Wonderful Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was especially good this year.
I took half a day off on Wednesday and ran errands with the kids, then had a blissful and uninterrupted four days of only occasional computer use. No work. No articles, no papers, no competitive work, no nothing. It was great. (I wasn’t even distracted by the Xbox 360). On Thanksgiving Day, we had leftover red beans and rice because Mom was still down in New Orleans; I got plenty of time to play with the kids, and I even managed to take a nap– something that virtually never happens.
Friday Arlene and I got up early and stuffed a 20-lb turkey with cornbread dressing made the previous night. I’m not normally a big fan of dressing– I prefer rice– but this stuff was so good that I kept eating it out of the bowl. Arlene really outdid herself. We had a big traditional dinner with Mom, Dad, Tim, and the five of us. (the leftovers were good, too!) How wonderful it was to have everyone together! We went around the table talking about what we’re thankful for, and not surprisingly, family and health were among the top items.
Saturday Dad, Tim, and I took the boys to our annual fall pilgramage to Cabela’s. Matthew and Thomas love the fish and animals, and David tries to pretend he’s too cool for them but only partly succeeds. Oddly, we didn’t buy any of our usual Cabela’s candy; in fact, I don’t even remember seeing it out. Sunday was a quiet day; Arlene had to teach in Relief Society, and I went with our elders’ quorum president to give blessings to a couple of people who were sick. Speaking of thankfulness: I’m thankful to be able to hold the priesthood so that I can do things like this.
To really kick off the holiday season, we put up our two Christmas trees, although we only had time to decorate one (mostly because we let the boys do it!) Yesterday, alas, was back to normal; David had his regular 8a school-play rehearsal, basketball practice, homework, and so on.
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Filed under Musings
Xbox 360 dilemma
Thanks to a 0430 wakeup call and an 0510 arrival at our local Sam’s Club, I have a brand new Xbox 360. I’m trying to decide if I should keep it or sell it. Each has its pros and cons. In favor of keeping it, if I sell it now I may not be able to get another one until next year. On the other hand, people are selling NIB 360s for crazy prices on eBay, and it’s hard to ignore the notion of an instant profit– I could make enough to pay for a replacement and some games. Complicating things is the demand factor: demand is high now, so I could get a good price. Will demand go up or down as we get closer to Christmas? Only the shadow knows.
Update: I put it on eBay with a ridiculously high “buy it now” price at about 6:20p last night. I then went out with the missionaries to visit a family in our ward. By the time I got back in the car– less than two hours later– someone had bought it.
Filed under Musings
Google Ads as comedy
Need a good laugh? Go to this article and check out the targeted ads. Obviously Google is channeling the feelings of people who’ve worked with OCS.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
And back again!
I didn’t make it to the Seattle temple, sad to say, but I got a lot of lesser tasks accomplished during the 25 hours I was on the ground there! I managed to get my new Windows Mobile device resurrected, I finished a couple of projects that have been hanging over my head; I ate Dungeness crab macaroni and cheese (pretty good, on the whole; John dragged me to Hector’s), and I was treated to a glorious sunset on our landing approach over the Great Salt Lake—an infinite number of shades of pink, orange, and gold limning the mountains and reflected in the water. Plus, I thought I’d get home at a semi-reasonable time. Unfortunately, when I got to DTW, National didn’t have a car for me.
After a 45-minute wait, they scraped up a Tahoe, and off I went. I finally stumbled in to my bedroom at about 0245. Not my favorite by any stretch, but it was good to get home sooner than the typical redeye allows. My flight SLC-DTW was delightful again: friendly crew, comfy seats, shiny clean airplane.
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SearchExchange serializes my DR ebook
The folks at SearchExchange have been kind enough to turn chapter 2 of my current ebook, The Definitive Guide to Exchange Disaster Recovery and Availability, into a short “10 tips in 10 minutes” article. Check it out here, or get the entire book (well, the first 6 chapters; I just turned in the final chapter yesterday) here.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Jasjar update
My Jasjar wasn’t really dead, it was just playing dead. I let the battery run down completely, then plugged it in to my Thinkpad and tried the firmware update again. This time, it worked like it’s supposed to. John and I had fun playing around with it at the office; it flawlessly plays video that was encoded for his iPaq hw6315. I have several TiVo-to-Go shows on my laptop that I want to transcode to watch on the device, but WMP10 obstinately refuses to recognize the Jasjar, and since I’m on an airplane I can’t check the Internets to see what the likely problem is.
I’m also having problems with ActiveSync 4.0, but that’s nothing new. Every version of ActiveSync I’ve ever used has been troublesome. Come to think of it, so has every version of the Palm OS sync software (man, the stories I could tell about their Mac products…) Maybe that helps explain why Nokia just dropped US$430 million on IntelliSync.
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Jim McBee’s slides
Jim McBee has posted the slides for his (excellent) presentations at Exchange Connections. Get them here. Now, maybe I should do the same…
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Filed under General Stuff
Happy birthday to me
So, yesterday I turned 37. I had a great birthday weekend nonetheless.
It started Friday morning, when the first words I heard from my dear wife upon awakening were “We really need to wash that gray off your temples.” Hmm. Maybe not. I earned this gray, dontcha know. Anyway, we had dinner plans with our friends Matt and Anita to celebrate my birthday and Anita’s (a week early, but who’s counting?), after which we planned to watch a movie on the projector.Mom and Dad agreed to keep the boys overnight so we could make an early-morning trip to the Detroit temple. We had a great dinner at Biaggi’s, but I noticed that Arlene was acting a little oddly– before we left the house, she closed all the blinds, and at dinner, she jumped up from the table and (almost literally) ran off to the ladies’ room at one point, and I saw her fiddling with her phone under the table– usually I’m the one doing that as I check mail or my calendar _ When we got back to our house, I walked into the kitchen and heard an odd sound accompanied by a bright flash of light– followed immediately by shouts of “Surprise!” I just about fell over; I never in a million years would have expected Arlene to throw me (or, more properly, “us” since it was Anita’s party too) a surprise party. I suppose that’s what makes it surprising! We had a delightful time with our friends (thanks to everyone who came!) and hit the rack for a 5am wake-up the next morning.
Our temple trip was wonderful. I always enjoy going to the temple, but this time I’d taken the time to prepare better through prayer and scripture study. What a wonderful learning experience! Since we accepted President Hinckley’s challenge to try to read the entire Book of Mormon before the end of the year, I’ve definitely noticed that I have been more attuned to spiritual experiences, and this has made attending the temple much more rewarding. I’ll make an extra effort to go to the Seattle temple when I’m there this week.
To top things off, we were able to stop off at the Whole Foods in Troy and load up with gluten-free goodies (plus some more of my favorite potato chips), followed by a delicious in-car breakfast (organic banana, a bottle of some kind of smoothie, and a really tasty raspberry cream cheese croissant). Matt and Anita are wonderful conversationalists, so the trip passed quickly in both directions.
Saturday night we had the Rotary auction, which is always fun. There weren’t any good electronics (apart from the ones I donated), but I got some Mud Hens tickets, a year of lawn treatments, and a few other cool odds and ends. The highlight of my evening came when I beat Cory Eckel (our bishop, a former BYU football player who has more athletic talent in his pinky than I do in my whole body) in two games of mini-basketball 🙂
After two late nights, Sunday was best of all– we didn’t do much of anything, in keeping with it being a day of rest and all. Matt and David were both sick, so it was a fairly low-intensity day.
Monday was my actual birthday; the boys got me some sweatpants and a new bicycle pump (since they broke the old one), and Arlene gave me a much-needed Books-a-Million gift card and a big pot of chicken and sausage gumbo. We also got our outdoor Christmas lights put up. It may seem early to those who live in more temperate areas, but while we were hanging the lights it was about 45 degrees, overcast, with a steady 10-15kt wind. That’s as good as it’s going to get until April or so.
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Filed under Friends & Family, Musings
Off again
Off this morning to Redmond for some meetings (or, more properly, sales calls, since I’m trying to drum up some new business for my team). This time, I’m flying TOL-CVG-SLC-SEA-SLC-DTW; this is a little bit of an odd routing, but it combines a fairly early arrival in SEA (plus Chick-Fil-A for breakfast in CVG) with a good return time home. (Unfortunately, my SLC connection is too tight to have a Dick Clark’s pork chop. Oh well.) This morning at TOL, I was surprised to find that the TSA folks were requiring pax to take off their shoes. This is new, and unwelcome; TOL was one of the only airports I’ve encountered where de-shoe-ing wasn’t mandatory. Apparently they got a new memo or something.
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Filed under Travel
Exchange 12 to be 64-bit only
Breaking news: Exchange 12 will be 64-bit only. I have a lot more detail to post on this, but they’re about to close the forward boarding door– more when I land in Cincinnati in an hour or so. Here’s a link to the umbrella press release from IT Forum.
Why the change? x64 technology is already widely deployed, and using it with Exchange reduces the I/O count dramatically– by up to a factor of 4. This is huge, since IOPS are much more expensive than RAM or CPU. (If you don’t believe me, try pricing 16GB of DRAM and a dual Opteron server compared to an EMC SAN and get back to me).
One objection I anticipate hearing is that this will strand customers who aren’t on x64 hardware. I’m resistant to this argument, though, because even low-end servers now often include x64-capable CPUs, and this trend is only going to accelerate between now and the time Exchange 12 ships next year. Organizations that are planning to move to Exchange 12 after it ships can easily buy x64 hardware any time between now and the time they upgrade, usually without any increase in cost. Of course, I expect to hear criticism of this move because some customers won’t be prepared to move to x64, but the fact is that there will always be customers– for any product– who don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade when the manufacturer wants them to. Sure, there will be Exchange customers who will cling to their existing versions, but that has always been (and will always be) true for Exchange, Notes, Workplace, OCS, SAP, and any other software in this class.
The big news here, to me, is that Exchange is once again breaking ground in delivering a new technology– and in this case, it’s one that has the potential to radically alter the scalability and cost factors we’re used to working with. I can’t wait to get my hands on some E12 bits and start testing!
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
i-Mate JasJar non-review
I got my JasJar last week and was all set to take it on my trip to Redmond tomorrow. Unfortunately, I killed it while upgrading the firmware, so it won’t be going with me. Too bad; it was beginning to grow on me despite its considerable heft. (in the meantime, see this review to tide you over.)
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OCS user administration
I wish I had more time to write more, but I don’t. A few brief notes: user admin is still kind of a mishmash, because you have to create directory users and provision them through one tool, then manage their rights in each application through that application. If a component isn’t installed or running, you can’t provision it. For example, if you don’t start the mail service, when you create a user account, it won’t have any email attributes. (It’s simple to go back to oiddas and add that capability, but it stinks that you have to.)
Second, your first move ought to be to grant the orcladmin user email admin rights, then create a domain. This isn’t well described in Oracle’s documentation– the steps required to complete these tasks are, but not the fact that you have to do them in the first place. If you don’t do this, you’ll have all kinds of hassles.
My copy of the Burleson and Garmany book got here today, but I’ve been too busy to read any of it yet. Perhaps tonight.
Oh, and when you create a new user, don’t put in a FQDN for the email address. If you do, you’ll end up in a catch-22: you can’t create an email domain for the RHS of the address, but you can’t remove the existing email address (or log on to the OCS mail page) because… wait for it… the domain doesn’t exist.
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Filed under UC&C
“Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die”
A thought-provoking essay from Tony Long in Wired. I’m not sure if he’s a Luddite, a genius, or a hybrid of the two.
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Filed under Musings
Big Dead Place (Johnson)
Johnson has written an interesting and engaging memoir that combines trivia and historical facts about Antartica with a series of vignettes of his own experiences as a contract garbageman (yes, a garbageman) for Raytheon Polar Services. Johnson doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about the National Science Foundation or Raytheon, and he makes some fairly outrageous claims about how capricious Raytheon’s management of the polar workers are. He intermingles lyrical descriptions of the natural beauty of the area away from the actual polar stations with vivid commentary on how dirty, ugly, and noisy the stations themselves are. Since I’m not likely to ever go to Antarctica, this book will have to tide me over; at the end, I felt like I’d learned something, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to invite the author over for dinner.
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Paul's Down-Home Page 