Illuminatea

I don't remember which day it was two weeks ago that I discovered that my web server was no longer accepting queries, but I do remember the distinct annoyance I felt when I got home from work, made my way through the back room to the computer rack, logged on to the management console, and saw that the server was powered off. That's nothing to the ...

WOrking on my latest book, Mastering System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, was a long process. However, Monday I got to experience my favorite part of the writing process -- getting the box from the publisher with the author's copies. There's just something cool about seeing the final physical product; I don't think I'll get tired of that ...

Dear IT Marketing people; You are required to immediately cease and desist from using the phrase ''perfect storm'' (example: ''the current regulatory environment creates a perfect storm for compliance vendors'') in any subsequent communications or materials. You may be under the delusion that it shows that you are hip and trendy, but all it ...

We had a nice even grey cloud cover with light rain this morning, providing a relief from the big nasty bright glowing ball of superheated plasma. I love this weather; it's why I live in Seattle. I've been having recurring headaches and back trouble, traceable to my chair at work. I picked up a new one last night; it is quite tasty. My back is ...

Apple sells gift cards that can be redeemed online or in their physical stores. So far, so good. Apple sells gift certificates for iTunes -- both phsycial and email versions. So far, so good. A friend got me a $50 Apple Gift Card for Christmas. So far, awesome. Apple won't allow my to use my Gift Card to buy songs off iTunes. ...

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.  

...in my last post when I said this was the year of the outage. About the time Steph and I tried to get the domain controller back online, we had a completely unrelated bit of breakage take down the blog server for another several weeks. Finally tracked it down and fixed it this weekend, and in the process fixed more of the cruft on the ...

It's been an awfully long time since I last posted, hasn't it? As you may have guessed by now, it is because of, yet again, another computer outage at home. In this case, my Windows domain controller hard drive died. Dead. Kaput. Spins No More. Dances With Boat Anchors. It's an old IBM Deskstar hard drive, which I'd somehow ...

Whoa! I just now saw that folks on the LJ feed (possibly on the RSS feed) got to see the Firefly review I did all over again. Sorry about that; it wasn't intentional! (I was just fixing a couple of transcription errors that kept the hyperlink to Nick's blog from working...)

There are a couple of glitches on the site relating to the upgrade. One of them is extremely annoying and I'm trying to track it down, the others are just minor pains in the butt:In the ugprade from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0, your old cookies may not carry over. You'll have to delete any cookies you have from blogs.thecabal.org and ...