Chasing Sound

One of the pioneer’s of modern music. Well worth the couple of hours to sit down and take this in.

Another Goal

I’ve already stated my main 5 goals for 2010. But this morning I realized that I have developed a very bad habit since getting my iPhone a few years back. This is kind of related to goal #1 of work less. But I think it needs to be separated out on its one.

My iPhone serves several functions for me in the morning. Its my alarm, weather station and unfortunately, its my email client. Yup, one of the first things I do in the morning is check my email. Am I getting called by our 24/7 NOC? If there was something wrong, they would call! So why in the world am I checking first thing in the morning. I don’t need to know that right away. There are more important things to do like eat breakfast, take the dog for a walk, etc. Unless I have an early morning meeting (not recommended for programmers and admins), email just doesn’t need to be in the mix until I get into the office. At the very least it can wait until I have some Cherrios in my belly.

Bing!

Recently we had a pretty funny conversation with our Microsoft premier support tech. It was clear that a memo had gone out from up above and he was doing his part to push bing out to everyone that he could. Unfortunately, he forgot he was talking to engineers. We’re smart ass bastards and he should know better.

The conversation went something like this.

Tech: Have you guys tried Bing yet?

Us: Yeah, but I don’t see us switching anytime soon. Google is still the better search engine.

HMC Resource Management

Today I’m going to talk about the wonderful thing that is the Resource Manger for HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration), the wondering framework from Microsoft for provisioning users for Exchange, OCS and SharePoint automagically.

Now, we tend to do things a bit differently at my current job. For example, I’m pretty sure I’m the only developer in the US that is hitting HMC (again, a Microsoft product) with PHP hosted on our linux based customer portal. That’s right, the Unix guys is the lead developer hitting a very Microsoft-centric product. Normally this would be done by a .Net developer.