My new blog space!!

Well thanks for finding me! As you can see, I have changed my blog provider to http://www.blogger.com, which allows me to combine my flickr photos and links with my blog.

Hope you enoy this new blog.

tour de france

tour de france
Originally uploaded by Yellow Park.

On the day the bombs went off near our ofice in London, I was in Nancy trying to catch the tour de france.

All one word

Why do people spell their email addresses and say "all one word". Like you've ever heard of a space in an email address.

People seem to think that they must explain to the address taker that their email address does in fact not have a space between two words.

I did a search on Wikipedia.org and turned up a blank.

Windows Vista

The Microsoft Gravy Train continues at full steam ahead with the arrival of the new Operating System to replace XP.

Windows Vista is the name, which replaces the Longhorn codename used by Microsoft throughout development.

A Beta version will be available from 3 August. Watch this space for feedback, as we will be trying this out as soon as we can get our hands on it.

Anyone interested in checking it out should visit the Vista page on the microsoft website:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.mspx

Microsoft Technical Support - doh

I don't like using this blog as a rant area, but today I am making an exception. We are putting together an Active/Passive cluster for our exchange server and have found documentation available for this to be sparse and conflicting. We haven't used any of our yearly Microsoft Technical Support pack, so today I thought I'd give it a go.

BIG MISTAKE

We basically want to check the SCSI configuration required for both servers in this set-up, which on the face of it, is not a difficult question to ask. So we call the Technical Support line at Microsoft, as we get a few free calls a year because we are Microsoft Certified Partners.

I explain what we are trying to check and the support guy tells us "You need to pay for a consultant". I was amazed. But in fact it gets worse. I receive a rambled excuse that he's not on-site, so he can't advise us on that, and we should check white papers.

Any suggestions for the white papers, I ask - "No you have to find those yourself".

I shudder to think how non Microsoft Certified Partners are treated. The guy seemed like he was having a bad day and couldn't be bothered. It was a simple question, all we wanted was a simple answer, not a drawn out excuse why that information couldn't be given to us.

Let me explain one thing Microsoft, dumb and cockey responses like this are not why we subscribed to the Microsoft Certified Partner Programme. On the positive side for Microsoft, they'll be making a saving, because we won't be calling the support line again.

One other thing Microsoft, rather than paying for a consultant, we will be paying for Merak Mailserver instead.

I am OK

My office is in Algate East in London, so when the terrible events of last thursday happened, alot of people were getting in touch.

Thankfully I was no where near London when the bombs went off. I was actually in France trying to beat Lance Armstrong to the Nancy finish line on the Tour de France. We made it with about an hour before they came through and managed to see the quick fly by.

But it was really odd to be away from London when all that was going on. James from our office wrote a piece which really summed it up well.