Well, I've been having fun (not!) wih an incredible crashing Exchange 2003 server. It's cost me a fair bit of sleep through its insistence on shutting down the mailbox stores - and on one occasion leaving them in a Dirty Shutdown state where Recover didn't work - so it was time to Repair, which needless to say takes some time and doesn't necessarily give any guarantee of success. Luckily it worked.

The error messages are annoyingly unhelpful, and it doesn't appear that there's much help out there.  I've been ruling out possible culprits - such as backup and antivirus- and hopefully will be on top of it soon. It would be nice to be more certain though.

Thus endeth the complaining !

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2007 will be a better year than 2006 was for me - but I hope it will be a great year for all of you!

So, did you all get the Christmas presents you wanted? A new JASJAM perhaps? Or one of those GPS units Fred is always talking about? Or perhaps just a few minutes peace and quiet from the kids!

How about New Year's resolutions? I don't really subscribe to them myself, but perhaps you have some you'd like to share?

Regardless, warmest wishes for the New Year, and may you and your family have a blast!

I took a moment to play with Beta 2 of Exchange Server 2007 recently; it's been out a while, but there's been so much going on that I haven't had a chance. In a word - awesome! I'm really enthusiastic about the improvements and new features - Unified Messaging should make a huge impact on many organisations ... voice access to mailboxes, and especially the voice recognition, is really a great inclusion. Voicemail and fax integration are also great and could really change organisations in a way that I think Live Communications Server also has potential to achieve.

There's a lot of good to be said about it, and I couldn't pretend to have familiarised myself with everything - I haven't even reached the stage of building an XP or Vista VM with Office 2007 to look at the client end. But there are a couple of concerns for me.

The first is that they have dropped support for the Active Directory Users & Computers add-in. There are stated ...

I've changed jobs after about 2 1/2 years. This is a significant shift back toward the old consultancy days, but I bring to it a very different attitude from before ... essentially that I've now seen both sides of the fence and therefore can emphathise more with the customer than previously possible.

It's interesting, and I'm still settling in, but the website might actually get some more time from me now - I've even managed to do some much needed software updates, with more to come.

As always, the mods and admins have been doing an awesome job regardless.

Anyway, apart from that, I'd like to highly recommend the Dell Latitude D420 which is my current notebook. I'm running a Centrino Duo model and it absolutely rocks. Except for the inbuilt Intel 3945ABG 802.11a/b/g card which is complete and utter crap - at least in terms of compatibility for the wireless router I currently use (and I believe some others). Luckily I have my trusty old Netge ...

Yes, I'm still doing the blog! I've been very busy (when aren't I) on a very critical project which has kept me very occupied. I'm also making an effort to spend more time with the wife and kids, but it's primarily work that's kept/keeping me away.

It really doesn't help that FredS gave me his copy of Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion for the XBox 360! On top of everything else, I've become addicted to that - admittedly I'm only succeeding in playing one or two hours late at night as a rule, but Fred: not helping mate!!! :-)

The project - well, I can't talk about what it is, but I've been working on the design for 2 years, and it's fairly nerve-wracking to see it all now taking shape (especially with various vendor delays and errors). It's an expensive project by our standards but will really benefit my work place in future.

Other things ... well, the site seems to be settling down with the new software. There are bugs, and I'm still trying to iron ...

It's nice in theory to divert your desk phone to your mobile, and most of the time it's convenient. However it becomes inconvenient, even troublesome, when you want to screen your calls against some vendor/telemarketer who keeps hassling you; the number doesn't get passed on to your mobile so you can't tell if it's someone you want to talk to or not.

Very annoying. So far the best option I have is to just ignore it and wait to see if they leave a message. Not particularly reliable.

What I need is a big red button to detect nuisance callers and obliterate them. Time for a Google search!

You know, if you're paying for a managed firewall and Internet service with a provider who also provides WAN services to you, and you decide to terminate the WAN services - stop and think when they ring to confirm disconnection of the managed firewall as well. We hadn't requested that to be disconnected, but although the obvious and correct answer is "No, that's not to be disconnected yet", you also need to consider that, for some reason, they will not consider the transport as included in that answer.

Such was the case yesterday, and when today our Internet (not to this site) suddenly disappeared without warning, I began to have some suspicions. Sure enough, although the firewall service had been left intact, the HDSL link had been disconnected. "We didn't realise you meant that too". Funny really, since they're billed together and are seperate from the WAN services.

Anyway, fortunately the disconnection was logical rather than physical, s ...

Took my eldest daughter to Scenicworld (err - that's what it's called now) and Echo Point at Katoomba today. I've been going there ever since I was a litte boy.

Not the first time I've been there since they upgraded it, but first time I've been on the new Skyway. It was the first time for my daughter going on the Scenic Railway. It was really great although pricey.

I do miss the charm of the old setup though. It was shoddy, bodgy, and sometimes smelly - but it was great fun for a young kid. I've been going there a long time.

Still, times move on and I don't think it's really any the worse for the upgrades.

Echo Point - well, the work there has just been great and I never cease to enjoy a short stop to take in the view.

All in all, a good day. I think a lot of people don't realise how much there is to see that's just a short drive away. Well worth investigating!

We went shopping for a new dining room table set today. What a nightmare!

It seems funny that virtually everyone has the same basic designs, and expect people to like them.

We want a fairly low budget, kid-friendly setting, and - well, perhaps furniture stores consider that kids are actually a figment of people's imagination. Or maybe they really do believe people want to be told what furniture to have.

So I guess we keep searching then!

Ya know ...

Sometimes people don't actually mean it when they ask what's on your mind. Especially when you answer that you were thinking of something particularly violent and nasty happening to that person.

No, I've never done that or had it done to me. But I just wanted to share that thought. I don't know why.