Southern Ohio Exchange Users

I’m sorry, Chris:  I’ve been sitting on your request for too long.

If you’re in Southwest Ohio, and interested in Microsoft Exchange, check out the first meeting of the Southern Ohio Exchange Users Group.  The first meeting will be September 12th, at the Cincinnati area Microsoft office.  Chris Haaker organized the group so check out his blog and ask him any questions you have about the meeting or the group.

Cabling prices are weird

Wow. I’ve been extremely lax in posting lately.

I’m not going to go on a rant about Monster Cable’s ridiculous prices because that would be beating a dead horse. Plenty of others have gone on and on about it.

I was looking for additional optical audio cables about a week and a half ago. When I bought most of my home entertainment center stuff two years ago I was able to find some 6 ft. GE brand cables at Circuit City for under $10. This was great because almost every other brand I found was well over $20. Some were over $40.

Since I had such luck at Circuit City last time, I decided to try them again. No dice. They had GE cables but no optical audio. Their other brands were $20 – $40+ for 3 ft cables. I went on to Microcenter and found both 12 and 24 ft. cables for about $25. I don’t need cables that long so I decided to continue looking for cheaper, shorter cables. I then went to Best Buy. At first, it looked like I was going to have the same problem as at Circuit City. The cheapest 3 ft. cables I found were about $25. The cheapest 6ft. cables were about $30.

Disgusted, I just about gave up hope. I then remembered the optical output on my Xbox and Xbox 360. It was a standard optical output as I was able to use one of the cables I bought 2 years ago on either of them. I decided to head over to the video games section to see if they had any cables. I ended up finding 9 ft. optical audio cables branded as being for the Xbox 360.  $15.  I doublechecked to make sure they looked like standard optical cables and sure enough, they were.  Craziness, I tell you.

Spammers have a sense of humor

One of the clients I work for has several brand-name products that are fairly well-known in many parts of the world.  Today, I did some investigation of some spammers trading on one of their brand names.  I checked the WhoIs information of the spammer domains I found while Googling.  The address information of one of them was listed as:

1060 W Addison
Chicago, IL 60618
US

If you don’t see the humor in that, check out the address in Google Maps then go rent The Blues Brothers.

Office Space Moment

I had today, what I’m calling an “Office Space” moment.  For the second time in the last two months, someone got to my blog by typing “easiest cars to steal” into a search engine.  The reason my blog comes up when these words are entered into a search engine is because of a post I made in the first half of May.  In this post, I comment on a C|Net story about how the RFID remote starters from expensive cars make them easier to steal.

The first time I saw this, I thought it rather odd.  It could be a budding criminal.  It could also have been someone doing some harmless research for a paper, news story, or figuring out what cars not to buy.  When I saw this today, I flashed to a scene in “Office Space.”  The scene I thought of is where they’re trying to look up money laundering in the dictionary.  The guys are so straight laced that they don’t have the first clue as to what it means to launder money.  The point:  you’re not going to learn how to successfully boost cars by Googling the topic.  You might as well just turn yourself in to the nearest police station on the charge of stupidity.

The RIAA is No Fun

 I was visiting the Sunblet Blog and came across a link to this:

The RIAA is apparently sending out cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users who dare to put up videos of things such as themselves dancing to music they haven’t licensed.

If this is true, then wow, RIAA:  way to be a wet blanket.  YouTube users aren’t making money off of their posts.  The sound quality of a lot of them are fairly poor.

In fairness, I clicked through the various links that led back to the original story.  It doesn’t provide any hard proof this is going on.  There’s no scanned image of a cease-and-desist and no link to a story at a major news outlet.  However, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the (vile) RIAA were doing this.

Boston cabbies

My experience with taxi cabs in Boston while I was at Tech Ed was really rather pleasant.  I've only ridden in taxis twice before so I don't have much experience with them.  All of the drivers I got spoke great English.

My favorite ride was from the airport to the hotel.  The driver was this gentleman that was at least well into his 60's and cursed like a sailor.  There was a long line of cars to get through a toll plaza.  The driver shot to the outside and sped up the line.  The best part was when he said "Hold on boys!" (two other co-workers were in the cab with me).  At that point, he found an opening and darted into it.  It wasn't really much of an opening, though, as we still  had to force our way in.

Dude got a good tip from us. 

I’m done with retail systems

I bought my first computer (one I actually paid for with my own money) in 1994. It was an IBM I bought from Circuit City. I followed it up with a Gateway in 1995 which I purchased through the employee purchase plan at my Dad's employer. Since then, I've pretty much built my own computers: the exceptions being a couple Dell servers I bought for myself.

In September of 2004 I decided I wanted a media center computer. Instead of taking the time of putting it together myself, I decided to try retail again. Big mistake. I went with a SONY media center computer. For a little less than a year and a half it was pretty good. A couple months ago, the hard drive died. I bought a new hard drive since it was out of warranty and rebuilt the system. For some reason, the actual media center portion of Windows doesn't want to work anymore.

When I got home from Boston last week the computer was off. This was odd because I always leave it on. I tried to power it on and nothing. I'm guessing something's wrong with the motherboard but I'm not sure. It's difficult to troubleshoot because some of the parts aren't exactly "standard" and it's all packed in rather tight.  This is a bit of a pisser because this system has my media card readers.  I haven't given the set up a good look yet, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to easily transfer the reader block to another computer.  This means it might be a little bit before I get my pictures from Boston up since I haven't been able to find my camera's data cable.

From now on, I build everything myself. No more crap at retail and definitely no more SONY.

Tech Ed 2006: Recap

OK… So I didn't blog from Tech Ed like I was originally gooing to. A lot of it came down to time and a crappy battery in by notebook computer. The hotel I was in only offered in-room Internet access for a surcharge. I had to go down to the lobby to use the "free" wi-fi for guests. I mainly used my time on the wi-fi forkeeping up with work e-mails and checking out news sites. I was pretty much only in the hotel to sleep. During the rest of the day, I was either at Tech Ed or out doing something else.

On Monday, the Expo floor was open so I was at the convention center late. On Tuesday, we took a client out to dinner then checked out Cheers with them. On Wednesday, I turned in early. On Thursday, wehad the attendee party at Fenway. I went nuts taking pictures there. I guess I'll have to get a flickr account and put them up but that might be a while — I'll get to that on my next post.

While I was there, I attended a number of good sessions. I already posted about Longhorn. Also, let me just say it's looking like Exchange 2007 is going to be absolutely awesome.

I was able to pass 3 exams while on site. I hadn't really planned to take any. After talking with my colleagues I went with, I decided I would be stupid not to at least give one a try. They were offering the exams at 1/2 price for the first 700 taken and Microsoft is currently offering the 2nd Shot promotion (you get a free second try at an exam if you fail it the first time). I passed 70-350 on Tuesday. After I passed that, I used the same reasoning to give 70-298 a shot on Wednesday and 70-285 on Thursday. By Friday morning, my brain was mush.  But I came away with three new passed exams so I was satisfied.

One more thing:  I gained 5 lbs during the trip.  Tons of food at Tech Ed. 

Tech Ed 2006: Sustenance

I have to say, I've been rather impressed with whoever Microsoft put in charge of feeding the Tech Ed attendees.  I think I clogged an artery at breakfast on Monday but overall, the food options have been pretty good.  I'm not fond of the soft drink selection but that's not a huge deal.  The snacks have been varied and plentiful.  Snacks and drink stations are everywhere.  Bravo:  Tech Ed planners.

Tech Ed Day 1: Longhorn Chalk Talk

These are the main points I noted from the Longhorn "Chalk Talk."  These points are not organized and are little more than a transcription of the notes I took.  Keep in mind they are talking about beta software so everything is subject to change at final release.

 

Longhorn Chalk Talk

 

• Beta 3 available 1^st half of calendar year 2007
• 17 roles available in add role wizard so far – Longhorn is not feature complete yet
• The Longhorn codebase branched from Vista at Longhorn Beta 2
  • When Longhorn is released, the codebase will be re-merged
  • So… the codebase in the released Longhorn will be Vista SP1
• Longhorn R2 is slated for 2009
• Long horn is Windows Server 200x – the x will be determined at release.  It depends on which fiscal year it’s released.
• There will be an option for a read-only DC (they’re calling it a “really cool BDC”)
• It will have advancements for ADFS
  • Federated SharePoint and federated Rights Management Services planned so far
• ADAM is being called Lightweight Directory Services
• New feature:  Terminal Services Gateway à RDP over HTTPS
  • New RDP client:  RDP 6.0
• Terminal Services Remote programs – like Citrix published  applications
• Drag and Drop coming to terminal services in Beta 3
• There are no server roles installed by default with Longhorn (Beta 2 installs File Server role, though)
• A new type of installation:  Server Core
  • At this time, only includes DNS, DHAP, AD, File server services
  • No GUI
  • No .NET framework
  • 500 MB footprint
  • Being called the “perfect branch office DC”
• Longhorn will be their last server OS with a 32-bit version (they’ll also have a 64-bit version
  • Longhorn R2 will be 64-bit only
• Hypervision – this wasn’t clear to me.  It has something to do with Virtual Server
• Windows Deployment Services replaces RIS
  • Being added to Server 2003 SP2
  • SP2 for 2003 is also adding Group Policy support for WPA2
• Restartable AD –Stop AD services, repair, restart – no rebooting in another mode
• Features of Storage Server will be in Longhorn – it sounded like not until R2 of Longhorn
  • Feature like Single Instance Storage of files
• Sysvol replication will use Remote Differential Compression – like what DFS uses
• There will be USB device redirection in RDP
• Adm files will be stored as XML files and called admx files
  • You will be able to add comments to group polices and search for policies based on these comments
• Longhorn will support Exchange 2003 and SQL 2005.  It will not support SQL 2000
• Network Access protection.  It’s kind of like VPN quarantine.  You can perform a “System Health Check” to determine whether a system can have access to the network
• They’re claiming rootkits should be a thing of the past