Recently I ran across an issue that it seems lots of folks have, hidden user mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange. Imagine my surprise when I got that call, “We have hidden users on a server! We must be relaying Spam or something!!” Not knowing more at that moment, I got a little nervous, as I was the idiot who installed the server. Can you see me with an idiot hat on? Read the complete article »
Moving can be so fun! Thats a load of crap!
Moving is exciting, stressful, tiring, and cleansing. ‘Exciting because a new beginning is about to start. A new beginning because you are about to embark upon an exciting new adventure. An adventure that will be unlike any other. What Star Trek calls the “Final Frontier!” 
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You run into laziness all over the place. Especially amongst IT folks and gas station attendants. Lynn Marie Sager wrote in A River Worth Riding
A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life, author Lynn Marie Sager, publisher Aventine Press, Copyright 2005, www.navigatinglife.org
#1: We become lazy when we have low self-esteem. We become lazy when we can’t see ourselves as capable of success. After all, why should we want to take action if we believe that our actions are a waste of effort?
#2: And, strangely enough, we even become lazy when we are satisfied with our lives and want everything to remain exactly the same. After all, when we are happy with things as they are, we are not motivated to change them.
A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life, author Lynn Marie Sager, publisher Aventine Press, Copyright 2005, www.navigatinglife.org
I suspect that the attendant that I ran into today was fully into #1. The IT guys are definitely #2. The problem is that these folks don’t want to do anything to rock the boat. It comes off as if they are lazy. The thing that causes all this is fear. Fear of change. Fear of rejection. Fear of be made fun off, and more.
Go read the book. Its enjoyable and worth the time to read it.
I’ve said it before here, that Microsoft should just leave the EU. They won’t be happy until Microsoft’s competitiveness is gone, and some half baked software company is out peddling alpha-ware to businesses. Not that Microsoft is clean in that aspect. Vista is proving that!
My real question is, who are they targeting after Microsoft?
It has been just over two years since I last wrote about Software as a Service (SaaS). Some of my points then are still valid but like anything, my opinions have changed a bit.
I use several SaaS products and during 2006, they had uptimes amongst the high 90s in availability. The only time they were down was during a storm and I lost my internet, something I could hardly blame on them. The investment in infrastructure among the vendors is one of the main reasons this has been the case. Including the vendor of a service we use here for business purposes. Since my last article in December 2005, there haven’t been any unforeseen outages. Read the complete article »
Welcome to my blog! I am transitioning from Mambo/Joomla as what I write is more effectively covered in blog format than article formats. I am transitioning all my old stuff overhere then I’m moving out!
I will try to maintain the dates on the articles so they will be popping in earlier than this one. Otherwise, it just won’t make sense.
Bill has RTMed his latest assault vying for world domination. After being asked what I thought about it, as if someone really cares what I think, I thought I would put a few comments here.
Vista is pretty. I don’t like it. I am a command line guy mostly. I can work faster with the CLI than I can with the GUI. Will I switch to Vista? Probably. Why? Well supporting Bill’s messes keeps the lights on around here. Read the complete article »
How good are your backups? If you were like me, I would have said outstanding last week. I mean, our local computer systems have system state backups. The all-important data is backed up locally and remotely nightly. Our servers get either a weekly or daily incremental (depending on its functionality) continuously. Our hosted web pages and their underlying databases have nightly backups as well. Everything was running so smoothly that a wrinkle, caused by me, went unnoticed for months. Then disaster struck. Not money making, or more importantly, money losing, but still a disaster. Our sites run off four databases clusters. This site was moved to a new cluster in May. That is the wrinkle. New database, need to add it to the backup sets. As I look back at the checklist (self created), that item is on the checklist, right after creating and doing initial tests on it. Read the complete article »
Email.
You love it, hate it, or just use it. Most people just use it as it was designed, a tool to communicate. Some people just hate it. They may even have an account, but do do not use it all. Those people that love it, they are a growing bunch, and they can be fanatical about it. These people swear that if email is down, they cannot work at all. They preach fire and damnation in front of the helpdesk swearing about how they should just go home since they cannot work. The funny thing is that most of those people receive a light amount of business related email daily. Some important things are communicated via email, but it isn’t the core of their work. Read the complete article »
Why? Not just the fine they are about to impose. Not that Microsoft already gave them the source code in question. (That was a great move by Microsoft BTW.) Not that they haven’t been unfair in how competitors are stifled to the point of bankruptcy. It is all about arrogance.
Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft has enough arrogance to go around plenty. But the prevailing attitude in Europe, at least Germany, France, and Belgium where I have done business, is that they are superior in all things. So be it. We will take our inferior American products and just leave. What would the EU say about that? Read the complete article »