average admins

Have any of you started planning, tried, or considered a Vista rollout.  I know it is still early in the game and I personally will wait about another year before doing it in my company since I am still a one man IT department, and with that said R&D time is hard to find, also. I’ve seen a few local businesses here in Huntsville/ North Alabama try to use Vista in a tech support roll to much frustration on their own part.  I’ve had a 3rd party technician try to help me trouble shoot e-mail trouble on his Vista staion and he finally gave up and RDP’ed my XP station so he could help effectively.  I’m mostly wanting to hear a voice from a group of intligent people that I know I can trust an opinion from since the internet is full of opinions of questionable value.  I hope to scrape up enough budget to buy one Vista Business station for testing purposes, but I work for a small company and I don’t konw when that will be.

Here’s the deal…my wife and I have maintained a site (blog) for my son since he was born. Now that he just turned a year old, I would like to go back and make a book out of the first year’s worth of posts. I would like an actual hard bound book, capable of having pictures.

I found a piece of software called BookSmart, made by the folks from Blurb. It looks like it might do what I want, but it has a limited number of templates and options. It does however have support for “Slurping”…basically if your blog is hosted at Wordpress.com, or a few other blogsites, it will go out and pull down all the posts/comments and automatically (if you choose) populate the book for you. However in practice, this didn’t work quite so well. I temporarily made a copy of our blog at Wordpress.com just for this feature. It ended up only getting the first couple months of posts, and no comments.

I have been looking for other options to do what I want, and the only other thing I have found is some Mac software (iLife I believe)…but alas, I don’t have a Mac.

Has anybody else done this, or heard of it being done? I wouldn’t be opposed to manually copying all the posts/comments myself if I HAVE to, but that would be a lot of work…and there may be a better option.

I’ve been a tech now for about 8 years. That being said, my focus was being told to make something work, and I made it work. I didn’t have to worry if it was licensed because there was a wonderful supervisor/manager to worry about that.

I’ve not been saying to much because I hate to sound boastful, but I’ve been a IT manager now for about about a month. I’ve signed on with a large machine shop in Madison, AL as their first IT employee and as IT manager, among other duties (www.falcianimachine.com). The network was set up by the book keeper a couple of years ago, and she has done a fine job, but now its time to go to the next level. It is a 2k3 domain, and everything is done in one server: DHCP, routing, file server, DNS, DC, … My questions are in the realm of Licensing. I hold in my hand CALs that have been purchased that correspond to the number of licenses that seem to show in the licensing MMC on the server, but something looks like it is wrong, and I don’t have the MS licensing experience to pull it all together, and I have been drowning in TechNet and MS knowledge base. Let me post the screen caps and someone please tell me if something is licensed wrong. It looks to me like it is.

Click on an image below for a larger view.

I found a machine in my organization a few days ago that never recieved the local admin password that is standard in my organization after taking it off the domain.  I paniced a little then went to the Google altar to save my tail.  The computer was very important to the business process.  Here is what Google turned up for me:  http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/.   Nice little ethical (or non-ethical) hacking tool if I ever did see one.  Enjoy.

So, I’ve been invited to a “rollout party” for Verizon Broadband here in Huntsville.  It was implemented yesterday for public use, but it is still being tested and configured, so it isn’t fully reliable yet.  The official rollout is next week sometime.  Verizon is inviting businesses to the Space and Rocket Center for a show and tell.  Below is a topic schedule.  If any of you want any specific info for the future in Texarkana let me know and I’ll post what I find out.  I think I’ve heard it is coming to T’town in the next year, right?  I’ve used it down the Birmingham area not too long ago and it was great (fast and reliable even when driving down the interstate).

EVENT SCHEDULE 

Registration & Breakfast
7:30am - 8:00am 

Announcement
8:00am - 8:30am 

Technology Demonstrations
8:30am - 8:45am 

Vertical Market Solutions
8:45am - 9:15am 

BroadbandAccess - You Drive!
Hands-on demonstrations
9:15am - 10:00am

I recently purchased a Nokia E61 and love it. However, I have a little issue now.

When I originally purchased the phone I was using a Motorola HS850 Bluetooth headset. Voice dialing worked great. Press the button, wait for the nifty little tones and speak the contacts name.

Well, that headset died and now I am using the Plantronics Voyager 510. I activate the voice dialing feature on that headset (hold down the call button for 2 seconds) and the Speak Now message appears on the screen but after saying a name it just returns to the standby screen.

I have disconnected from the headset and tried holding down the record button. Same results… I get the nifty tones but after speaking the contacts name it just returns me to the standby screen.

Any ideas on why voice dialing is no longer working or where I can look to see if something is disabled?

Thanks in advance!

Jeff

If you have been burdened by crappy name resolution thanks to Windstream, change to OpenDNS.org. Luke recommended this to me today in response to my recent cry for help. I just made the change on my Linksys router, and WOW are things faster. Thanks Luke, and thanks OpenDNS.org!

Josh

Okay Windstream, I want my DNS back, and I want it back NOW.

Ever since The Big Switch, my internet has been slow. REAL slow. While I am tempted to blame Bush, the signs lead me to think that DNS is at fault. Here is a typical evening at home for me:

Josh types: www.google.com

Google pops up. Good.

Josh enters a search term. “Teens” and “fisting” sound good, but might oughta stick with something a little more family-friendly.

Click on link to interesting website. Wait.

Firefox: Looking up www.someinterestingwebsite.com…

Josh: Wait more.

Firefox: Still looking…

CPU: Can’t we just get on with it?

Firefox: I’m still looking, dammit…

So what’s going on? Has anyone else noticed this?

I recently purchased the M-Audio FireWire 410 and everywhere I read, i.e. during the installation, in the printed manual that came with the device, and on their web site, it says not to hotplug (to plug in or unplug while the machine is on) the device because it could render the device or the FireWire interface unusable. If you would like to read more on this from M-Audio, try the below article:

Caution: Do Not Hot-Plug FireWire Devices

I have never heard this about FireWire devices. I figured FireWire was like USB in that you can plug a device in and unplug the device while the machine us up and running. I know that you should “Safely Remove Devices” by stopping the USB service or whatever for the device before unplugging it (although I have never personally had any data lost by not doing this with storage devices… knock on wood) but still, USB is hotpluggable.

Does anyone out there have any experience with FireWire devices and can you confirm that this will indeed cause harm to the device or to the FireWire port? Is this just specific to this device? This is my first FireWire device and I don’t want to take any chances with the FireWire 410 or my MacBook.

Jeff

The Technology division End Boss came to me yesterday and asked me to find a device for him, and I’m going to cheat and use you guys as a resource. I have to find a computing device that is Windows OS driven, rigid in that the monitor isn’t hinged, smaller than a laptop, and more practical than a PDA. He is looking for something that is ultra portable and ultra usable without having to fumble with parts and folding. It will need a PCMCIA port for our Verizon G3 cards, which if you Texarkansans are wondering, works frickin’ awesome. I don’t know if such a device even exists, but I’m going to try and impress The Man. Any input would be appreciated