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Grr… no one told me the feed from the Asia Albums site was broken. How dare you… all of you 
P.S. Now that I’ve developed a miniature script that fixes iWeb permissions after publishing to this server, you can bet I’ll do more work with iWeb and that site in the future. That was the one big thing that was holding me from playing with it more.
It’s pretty sad when you title a blog post just so you can jog your memory about what you’re going to say, just in case you go onto a long-winded schpeal (sp).
Okie, if you’re an Exchange admin – particularly an Exchange admin – even more particular an Exchange admin of a large enterprise – if you’ve not been paying attention to the disaster that Satan doth bring upon you known as Daylight Saving Time 2007, you should be fired from your job. You should be setting expectations of your users right now. Their calendars are toast, friends. Toast. Those three weeks during the delta period, they are toast.
The past few weeks, we’ve seen Microsoft absolutely scrambling to fix code that has been implemented in two or three different ways, depending on the product or platform, in order to fix DST 2007. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you’d realize the following:
WHY?
By now, I’ve pointed out enough to give you my take:
There’s a fundamental problem with email users today and this issue is making all the more evident. Your users… yes… your users… think that you are responsible for their data. Yes, you. If they make a calendar entry and it screws up for some reason, they will blame the server – and consequently, the Exchange admin. It’s not their fault that Congress enacted DST and they mucked around with it to result in an hour difference. It’s your fault.
It’s time that your users wake up and take responsibility for their own data. If your users are spoiled brats to the point where they cannot pay enough attention to decide when a meeting is off by an hour for three weeks, you have a serious customer management problem. Your job is to install the patches to make sure the server is ready. Your job is NOT to run a half-ass, quickly cobbled wrapper for a utility that was released practically seconds before the nuke goes off to move meetings back an hour. We all know what will happen – your users will bitch and moan, file tickets with your helpdesk about the meeting shifting… oh, and hey, wasn’t that meeting at that time last week? What happened to it this week? Call the Exchange admins!
All too often I’ve seen admins in various jobs fail Customer Service 101. If you cannot manage a customer… smile… give them a warm fuzzy… and calmly convince them of your point of view to make both of your lives better… go back to Customer Service 101. Quite being the proverbial smelly geek who doesn’t like to help people. Help people – converse with them – make them like you. It will work in your favor. Trust me.
My recommendation: use the subject line of the event to note the real time of the event and call it a day. It’s going to be three weeks of hell. Get over it. If you don’t like it, take note of the morons that voted this into law and get rid of them the next time you’re at the polls. I should also say, take note of the morons that coded this disaster – and the disaster to fix the disaster. Talk to your users. Get the word out that they should absolutely distrust their calendars during the delta period of DST 2007 and be aware that the calendar could be off.
If they absolutely must run some kind of utility – deploy the client side utility to your desktops and let your users run it. Run away from the server-side wrapper. Run… away.
Lastly… if they’re not paying attention and the calendar is screwed up – it’s their fault, not yours. Period.
It would be really neat if the girl that plays Christina on Grey’s Anatomy could hear this, but she won’t. Too bad.
You are hands-down the best actress on that show. You hold it together for me. Meredith Grey – too bad you lived to self-pity your way through another episode. I was really hoping we were finished with your whiny, no shape ass. Oh, wait. The show is named for your character. Suck.
I’ve got a few ideas about how I plan to re-engage myself on the creativity front. Some of them involve this very website. You will see more things coming out of here in the near future. I’ve already started talking to some people to gauge their interest in participation. So far, it seems that interest is good.
That does mean that when iLife ’07 comes out, this site may stop being WordPress if iWeb draws my fancy. I’ll try to archive this. We’ll see. But, there will be some kind of change in about a month or two. Probably two. It involves spending money. Yeah, two.
When I switched the server to Linux/Wordpress, I had lost the ability to serve it up under the galaxycow.com (minus the www). This is because I was stupid. I was unaware of a ServerAlias directive in apache2′s config file that would allow me to alias the site appropriately. I bet the search engines are now having a ball with finding stuff all over again. There were 404′s all over the place. Next up: fixing up a custom 404 page that will redirect to /blogs.
Told you this would be a lost post. Good thing I titled it appropriately.
I’m going to have to agree with Herman on tonight’s Lost. It just wasn’t all there. I’m not sure – maybe I just wasn’t paying the right amount of attention. Maybe I just wasn’t “in” to it tonight. I don’t know. I like to think that it’s rare that they produce a weak episode, but it seems like they actually did this time. It was disjointed. It had bad edits. It was a little too elusive and symbolic. For a show that billed itself as revealing three of the greatest mysteries of the show… it just didn’t deliver.
Maybe I need to go read the forums and find out what I missed.
I’ve caught up on a lot of things with work and whatnot, so maybe I should go to bed at a decent hour tonight.
This morning, we had a doctor’s appointment for Kiddo. Kiddo’s had a little issue that had us all a little scared for a while, but as it turns out, things are just fine. We’re quite relieved it wasn’t anything very serious.
If you go over to resellerratings.com (direct link here) and look up 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, you’ll discover that they had a really, really bad Valentine’s Day. The rating is an abysmal 0.70 out of 10 (that’s right, below 1 point!) and the pages are filled with irate customers who didn’t get their bundles of love delivered on time… or at all, really.
Really interesting reading – sometimes it makes me wonder how many folks can register a domain in a fly-by-night operation, get the hits to the website, promise things like this, take the money…
…then disappear.
I’m sure it would be all too easy. That’s the scary part. Let’s all take a moment to remind that company:
Insane.
A florist in a town near here had a heck of a time getting their flowers out… because the theatre next to them was destroyed by fire the night before… they had extensive water damage, no lights, no phone… and STILL they got almost all their deliveries done on time with the help of volunteers.
If *they* could do it, what the heck was 1800flowers’ excuse?
I’ve used 1-800-Flowers exactly ONCE. Order went into the ether. That’s all she wrote. And this was almost a decade ago, so I would certainly hope they get it right SOMETIMES…otherwise, we, as a society, are just too stupid to survive.
So I’m a little undecided on Office 2007. The ribbon thing is… well, cartoony. The blog posting is nice, especially if this one succeeds.
Is it just me, or did the iSight cameras (non-integrated) disappear from the Apple Store?
Could we be seeing an upgrade in the iSight line in the near future?
Today I became quite fascinated by the Twingley Blogosphere Screensaver (I lost the link and I’m too lazy to go look it up – Google it, gang). The Twingley Blogosphere Screensaver gives you that spooky feeling you used to get when you first hooked up a Hayes 300 baud Smartmodem to jack into the rest of the planet. It’s that feeling where the entire world was at your fingertips.
Tonight I’ve been listening to Macbreak Weekly and watching the screensaver roll. Interestingly enough, now that it’s nighttime in the states, you can see the activity blooming like mad. It’s beautiful to watch… and if you were able to watch the waves from space, I’d imagine it would look something like that.
I highly recommend it. It’s in beta, so it might crash. It crashed on me once. I’m fine with that.
In other news, we went out and spent money today. Lots of fun. Ate at Carrabba’s… just okie, nothing to fight for a table over.
So, just as soon as I spread my wings on Ubuntu one more time, it smacks me down like the bitch I am. For some odd reason, directories just began to disappear from the disks. Disappear! Can you believe that? I first noticed it when network mounts weren’t coming back and there were long, odd pauses on the desktop when it loaded.
Back to Windows again. Sigh.
I had a problem in Windows over the past two months – it was a problem so annoying that it drove me to try Ubuntu again. I had a problem where everytime the computer toked on the hard disks or the network, it would pause. The mouse would stop moving – just enough to annoy. On first glance, it’s easy to think… okie… my hard drives are messed up (especially after what Ubuntu did!) – but then, I rolled back to some ancient revisions of the SATA driver and the problem went away. We’re talking… ancient as in 2005.
Good thing I’m not trying to run Vista on this thing – those newer drivers would be required and I’d be in a world of hurt.
In other news, it’s cold – damn cold in our house.
We had a lovely dinner at Mikawa – a local Japanese joint that has quickly become one of our favorites. It was quite packed tonight, but they managed to find a table for us. The service was a bit slower than usual, but that’s because they really were pretty swamped and they do not have a huge wait staff. The wait was worth it – the food delivered was hot, steaming, tasty and lucious as always. Our son became quite the ham with other folks enjoying their Valentine’s Day. He was waving at everyone and everything.
I’ve wished a happy Valentine’s Day to my Taitai, BunBun and Kiddo – now I need to wish a Happy V-Day to all of my girlfriends out there: Morticia, ShinyHappyJen, Miss J, Jenny, Rosie, Vo0, Beth, Gingerr… and shit… since I’m naming names, hope I didn’t forget any. Love you all! Kisses.
Back atcha, lov. Mwah!! XXOO
Somehow, the garbage is still in my sinuses. (plural of that is sinii? uh, no)
My son has been sick the past few days – now I’m sick too. I don’t think the wifey feels all that great either.
And I get to spend the next two days in the data center! Hooray for dry air! Precisely where I want to be while I feel like garbage.
Okie, I took the plunge and threw Beryl onto Ubuntu… along with all the other goodies.
Now that is some bad-ass 3D desktop goodness. Well worth the effort.
I hadn’t ever heard of this before – I just googled it.
WOW.
It makes me want to install Ubuntu again just so I can play with it!
creth95 and 
Recce 3:52 pm on March 5, 2007 Permalink
There’s a website for that? Didn’t they only put out two or three albums before they broke up?