ksagarsee

Testing out the Pics

Some days you just have to break away from the routine. This evening instead of going to church like I normally do, I snuck out and came to Martins. I’m sitting upstairs in their cafe and sipping my Strawberries and Cream from starbucks.

It’s been a long week for me. The guys have been gone so I’ve been holding down the fort. Everything went pretty well until yesterday and today.

Yesterday I had to reboot a switch, and today I had to reboot it again… I’m no networking genius, but switches shouldn’t have to be rebooted on a daily basis… The first time a user just couldn’t get an IP and you couldn’t even access the switch through the web thingy (see how non-network genius I am?) and then today I had a user who had an IP address but couldn’t receive packets! She was sending fine, but not receiving… so weird. Repairing the connection didn’t fix it, restarting didn’t fix it… had I been at ND still I would have said tough luck and called Network engineering and let her wait for them to get around to fixing her problem. Luckily restarting the switch did the trick because beyond that… I was stumped.

This afternoon I got a call from J-Mill (one of the worship leaders… way cool guy) saying that when he emailed someone outside of our domain he got an error saying that he didn’t have permission to email them! I told him to try again of course, but then 2 minutes later someone called with the same issue. Luckily I caught Ed on his cell while he was in the Houston Airport terminal and he advised me to restart the email server. So I logged in and restarted the back end server (after emailing the users to let them know what was going on)… No change when it came back up. So I went to the logs. By the GRACE OF GOD I found a Kerberos Error saying that the clock on the front end server was skewed from the back end server significantly and that’s what caused the problem. It looked like the front end server never updated for DST or something… which makes no sense, especially since we didn’t see this until now, so that’s probably not it but… I dunno. Point is I know VERY little about server management at this point, and there’s nothing more confusing in the world to me than digging through Event Logs. God totally showed me how to find it.

Aren’t techie praises the weirdest? I mean, who thanks God for helping them find something in the Event Monitor?

… Guess I do.

As we move forward toward making the move from 2k3 to 2k7 Jason has tasked me with finding some training materials. A quick Google search found tons of hits for it. However most of it I’d have to pay for and I’m a bigger fan of free than I am of paying for things… I’m weird I guess. So I found stuff on M$’s site that looked promising. Like 14 .wmv files teaching you about the new features in 2k7. “Hey!”, he said ignorantly “These are made by Microsoft! They’ve gotta be great!” so he downloaded 4 of them and started watching them.

Awesome they were not:

• Powerpoint presentations with a guy with a thick hispanic accent narrating in the background.
• VERY BORING
• He demo’s 2k7 with a BETA 2 RELEASE. Not the full release, not even an RC. a BETA 2.
• Did I mention it was boring?

Luckily I have 2 monitors, so I was able to put it to the side and listen for a while while I did other things. I knew it probably wouldn’t work entirely for our needs, but at least I should be able to get a feel for what M$ thinks is important… then he said he was showing us a beta release. (For those of you who didn’t follow the release path much for 2k7 there were HUGE changes between beta and RC and they even did a “Technical Refresh” of the RC (that means they made RC2 but didn’t want to call it RC2). If they’re not even gonna demo the thing on an active version of Office, I’m not using it.

When I was at ND, some of us in OIT went to Signal Learning (a local IT training place) to see what they were doing for Vista training. We showed up and sat down in a room that was boiling hot that had an industrial size fan in it to cool it, Machines with poor specs running a beta version of Vista in a Virtual Machine. This was AFTER vista was released to the public. I’d been running the full version for about a month on my machine and they still had it in a VM.

“Why the rant Kyle? What’s your friggin beef?”

It all comes back to Bill and Ted “Be Excellent to each other.” If you’re gonna put something out there and claim to be experts on it. You BETTER present it WELL. Don’t waste my time with excuses about infrastructure… I want a product and I want a GOOD product. It’s a consumer society - if you won’t do it well, someone else will.

/End Rant

That last bit applies to your church as well. If you’re in IT you are a HUGE part of the infrastructure. Make your infrastructure excellent so that people don’t get blocked from something great.

So a question to those of you out there that may or may not use WP… How the heck do you post from your mobile device? I have a Motorola Q that has Windows Mobile 5.0 and I can’t find anything that will work on it! I tried Diarist, but I get errors with .NET when I even try to launch it… I think I tried another one, but can’t remember what it was called. I’m a little jealous of all those typepad kids out there who are provided a sweet program to post from.

Jason and Ed are down in Houston right now at the Church IT Round Table so I’m flying this baby solo right now. I have some stuff to do this week that should keep me busy, but any help you guys can offer would be awesome!

I recently read about StrokeIt on Lifehacker and thought I’d give it a try. If you’re at all familiar with the Mouse Gestures extension in Firefox, you’ll be right at home with this.

Stroke it lets you use mouse gestures for pretty much anything in Windows. By holding down the Right Mouse Button and drawing an “M” Outlook opens, draw a “W” and your default web browser opens - “C” closes a window… The list goes on and on. But the coolest part is that you can make your own commands. I noticed that of all the programs Firefox was blatantly missing. In about 5 minutes I was able to add commands for firefox to create a new Tab and to switch between tabs. Very Nice.

You really don’t realize how much time you use moving your mouse up and down across the screen so you can click on things until you can avoid it with something as simple as a mouse gesture. Give Stroke it a try and you’ll see what I mean.

Get StrokeIt Here