Exchange 14 – Service First, Server 2nd

I’m thinking that Microsoft is finally starting to realize that the hosted model ‘works’. Seeing this article on cnet is starting to make me feel a lot better about the future of Exchange. As a hosted exchange provider, I can tell you that making Exchange a multi tenant environment is not the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of thing that Microsoft has had to hack in in order to get things to work properly. From the sounds of this article, they’re taking a different approach with 14. Thinking about the service providers first which then easily integrates with the Enterprise. This way, it doesn’t matter if you have 50 organizations on the platform or 1, it simply works.

Safari 4 – focus issues

Like a lot of Mac users out there, I took the plunge and tried out Safari 4 Beta.. Unfortunately, I’m rolling back to Safari 3. Its not that I really want to, its that I have found a very annoying issue. You see, my company uses IM like it is going out of style. It is one of the main ways that we communicate. Ever since installing Safari 4, I have come across an issue that drives me up the freaking wall. The issue is, when I am typing a message in the Mac Messenger client and hit send, the cursor no longer keeps focus for me to type another message. It goes somewhere else magically and never comes back until I click. So if I am in a discussion with someone, it is type, click, type click, type click. Very freaking annoying!!! The solution, according to this guy, is to remove Safari 4.

Marketing Campaigns

Two days ago, I received a call wanting to take 40 seconds of my time to tell me about a great movie and that this was not a sales call.

Several things pissed me off about this one.

  1. If you are taking the time to focus marketing at me, you’re selling to me. Just cut the BS and move on.
  2. This was my cell phone which is used for work. My company pays for it, its a business line. Luckily, the poor schmuck on the other end of the line decided to end the call after I stated it was a business line. Because I was going to state after that, “This is a business line and you’re 5 seconds away from an ass chewing.” At which point I would teach him words he had never heard of while threatening to do things that I’m pretty sure are illegal in this country as well as most of the Northern Hemisphere.
  3. Do you honestly think I’m going to go to your movie after this “marketing” tactic? I used to fight email spam, the last thing I’m going to do is go to a movie that is promoted through phone spamming.
  4. What the heck happened to the do not call list? My cell number IS on there. Yes, yes, I need to report it for it to do anything, but why haven’t others so these assholes get shutdown

Luckily, Verizon is laying the legal smack down on these jackasses. Thank you Verizon!!!

Safari 4 Beta – First Impressions

I’ve been messing around with the new Safari 4 Beta release and so far I’m pretty pleased with the browser. There is a bit getting use to some of the new features but overall, I think that they have made some changes for the better.

Here is a run down of the big features:

Top Sites – This is a nice feature that gives you a nice display of the top sites that you visit on a regular basis. You can easily make this your home page by setting your home page preference to

7 things you didn’t know you could do with OpenOffice 3

Recently, PC Mag ran an article titled OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do. I’ve always been a big fan of Open Office and have found it a nice alternative to shelling out the major bucks for the Office suite from Microsoft.

Here’s the run down of the list.

  1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
  2. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
  3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
  4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
  5. Save files in Office formats by default.
  6. Automate actions easily.
  7. Fix those single quotes.

Looking through the list, #1 seems like a good one, #2 is very useful when digging through old files, #3 wait…what the f*ck?!?