Illuminatea

Stupid website, but it gives me a chance to taunt my co-worker Kevin. This morning I got a puzzled e-mail from him, asking me why this picture of me in Sydney from February (yes, that's Sydney, Australia; we were there for training for work) was the most-viewed picture in his online galleries (warning, probably not a worksafe gallery). I have no ...

For the record, Aly & AJ's Potential Breakup Song is one hell of an earworm, but it sounds really good on my work desktop's speaker/subwoofer. I've got it cranked up loud before anyone else gets here.I have finally found out what is more annoying than getting your ass kicked online by a nine year-old kid -- getting your ass kicked by an ...

Chilling at the conference.The lovely brownie-tart thingies they fed us today.My work blogs posts.   

The speaker just said, and I quote, ''regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward.'' That's, um, well, interesting. And wrong.

So, I'm in Sydney for a training conference that I'm talking about in my work blog if you're interested. There's a lot of interesting small differences that have more of a mental impact to me than the big ones:The exit signs inside buildings are green with white letters. I'm used to the opposite.Didn't find a single country radio station. Of ...

In just a few more hours, I'll be on my way to do something I've never done before -- cross the equator. I'm just going to kayak down to the big black line floating on top of the ocean, nip across, spin around counter-clockwise, then nip back home. No, seriously -- I'm heading to Sydney, Australia with my cow-orker Kevin to a week-long training ...

Four 3-day trips in four weeks:Apr 2-4, Orlando, to present 3 hours of sessions at Exchange Connections.Apr 8-10, Denver, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.Apr 18-20, Anaheim, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.Apr 23-25, Dallas, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 ...

Big conference, lots of geeks. With two laptops and a Windows Mobile cellphone, I'm not at all unusual here. The conference organizers have wisely established free Wi-Fi for us all. Well, guys, that's a great start, but how about you give us some bandwidth? I've had faster connections over my old 300 baud modem.  

First, I would like it to be known that I am only doing this under protest. I don't usually participate in blog memes, because most of them are damned silly. However, I got tagged on this one by Paul in what looks like a fairly typical spree of spreading the love, so I'll go ahead and do it. So here's the meme, in Paul's words: ...

Oy vey. We've been Slashdotted. Let's see if our T-1 and web server can hold up. 

Today, my company released a report comparing several anti-phishing technologies, including a beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. I note this because I was one of the researchers and authors of the report. Needless to say, we're already catching a lot of flack in the press because we scored IE7 the highest of the various ...

Not fond of Mondays in theory or in practice. Even with all the things that have gone right today, I'm still pretty cheesed off about today: Getting up at 5:20 so I could be on the road before rush hour and into the office early: good. Having to shift back into the office: enh. We'll call this a draw. Forgetting the box with my laptops, ...

The current project I'm on at work? I've decided it needs a new name. I'm henceforth calling it Operation Zeno's Paradox. You know you're in trouble when you've finally found a solution to a roadblock that is keeping you from finishing a major portion of your project, serendipity has dropped a convenient piece of hardware in your lap with ...

I hate putting in long hours to compensate for fucked-up technology. Even before my laptops bit the big one, I was having problems with one of them. Since then, they've gotten a lot more flaky because I haven't had the time to migrate all of my data, pare down the cruft and crap, and perform fresh clean installs. So instead, I get to put up with ...

I'm home from Europe a couple of days early; I was originally supposed to be in Oslo today, doing a second presentation, but I got really sick once I got to London and my bosses couldn't take the chance I wouldn't be better (sorry, Jim, for making you go to Oslo!). Lisbon was interesting. Paul talks about it a bit and relates some of the ...

I've not been blogging much lately because I've been buried under a ton of work. One of the things I've been busy with has been developing a full day of content on Exchange 2007 to present in Lisbon (May 30th) and Oslo (June 8th). Astu Are thte readers will have noticed the timestamp of this entry, done some math, and realized that I'm probably ...

I have to acquire some Microsoft certifications in a short amount of time. Not a full MCSE, although that's always been in the gameplan, but at least one passed exam (and thus Microsoft Certified Professional status) from a specific list of exams, Real Soon Now. And hey, if I'm going to go into MCSE Study Monkey Mode (MSMM), I might as well do ...

Today was a day of mileposts. It was my first working day of 2006. Because Paul and I got our various projects wrapped up before vacation, I went into the 3Sharp offices and spent a good part of my day doing something I've never done before -- pack up my office. No, we're not moving locations, and yes, I'm still with 3Sharp. However, we're ...

Chapter 3 of my DCAR ebook is now online, details on my work blog. If you need to read about these things, enjoy.

If you're wondering what I'm going to be up to this spring, wonder no more! Get thee hence to the Looking forward to Exchange Connections Spring 2006 post on my work blog and find out!

This last week (Monday through Thursday), I was in San Diego for the Windows/Exchange Connections conference. It was my first Connections conference as well as my first trip to San Diego. San Diego was a nice town; it reminded me somewhat of Honolulu with enough elbow room. Mind you, I didn't see too much of the city; we were at the Hyatt down ...

Both kids woke up with an excess of phlegm, so we kept them home from school today. Sounds like a good day for them to work on updating their web sites and blogs, especially since I just handed out the URLs to the members of my family. In other news, Microsoft has produced printed versions of one of the solutions I worked on in 2004, the Windows ...

It's a Monday. With a vengeance. Work has been better, the car needs $1K+ in repairs soonish, some personal projects have been hit with unfortunate and untimely delays that I really didn't need right now, oh no, and I'm stressed beyond all belief. I really just want to stop coping and have a full-scale meltdown. Preferably in front of the idiot ...

DCAR (Discovery, Compliance, Archival, and Retention) is a big topic these days. I've done some work with 3Sharp in this space, and I have been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to write an ebook for Windows IT Pro on the topic. The first chapter is now available for free download with registration; the remaining chapters will be ...

I just got off of a weekly conference call for a biggish project we've been working on. We've had some unfortunate changes lately that have impacted the scope of the project in a fashion that would not be exaggeration to call ''dramatic''. One of those changes dumped a fairly involved and possibly gnarly piece of work square in my lap, which of ...

Up: Community Server 1.1 is out and I've got it installed on my laptop so I can play with it before upgrading here and at work. I've even got it installed as source code and built it myself; I've got some ideas on functionality I'd like to add in. A good chance to work on my fledgling .NET developer skills, along with another project for a ...

I'm staying up late to get a paper done for work. While I'd rather not pull late nights and long days, in reality I have an extremely high amount of flexibility and self-determination in the day-to-day details of my job. The flip side of that coin, however, is that I keep that freedom as long as I produce the deliverables I have been assigned by ...

I laid down to take a nap yesterday at around 3:30pm. I woke up around midnight as Steph came to bed. After the hijinks of the last week, combined with the stress of the consecration/reception on Saturday and the annual meeting on Sunday, my body had enough. The good part about this is that I was able to lay back down and sleep until 5am, when I ...

I just shipped the first draft of Chapter 7 “Routing, Transport, and SMTP“ of The Exchange Cookbook to my editor and co-authors. I wrote this chapter entirely by myself. It started off with 47 recipes (including the introduction); final size was 27 recipes. Many of the missing 20 were duplicates of either recipes in other chapters, belonged better ...

Put Steph to bed a couple of hours ago and came back downstairs to finish up a recipe or two for the Exchange Cookbook, which I am co-writing with some awesome co-workers, and which is way behind schedule. When researching one particular twist got me frustrated, I dropped over to Yahoo!'s Launch website and fired up some streaming music videos in ...