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Updating Exchange 2003 and BlackBerry Server the Daylight Savings Time Change

There are two updates that must be completed to update Exchange 2003.  Three if you haven’t already upgraded to Service Pack 2.

The first is the cumulative time zone update for Windows 2003 Server which can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931836/.

The second is the Update for daylight saving time changes in 2007 for Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 which is at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=926666.

If you have a Blackberry Server there are no specific patches that are required by RIM on the server itself.  There is a patch that needs to be run on the handhelds which can be pushed to the devices from the server.  More information is available directly from Blackberry at:

 http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/resolutions/enterpriseserver/exchange.

Here’s the PDF that explains how to cofigure the software push to the BlackBerry handhelds from the BlackBerry Server:

http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/Deploying_DST_2007_Update.pdf

It works.  I just pushed to my unit as a test.

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Internet Explorer 7 – No more duplicate “home” tabs

I’ve started using IE7 instead of Firefox. Why commit such blasphemy? Because the tabbed browsing is functionally better. For a long time I’ve been setting multiple tabs as my “home” page. Long before IE7 I disliked the way Firefox opened all of the tabs set as the home pages as duplicates (except for the currently selected tab) when the “home” button is pressed.

IE7 did away with this nonsense while I can’t find much reference of it as an acknowledged problem or future enhancement by Mozilla. Now when you press the home button in IE, while the first tab to the left is selected, it will only refresh, not re-open, all of the pages you have set as the home page tabs. To me this is a critical function that I think has been long overlooked by Mozilla. Strange that I can find no reference to it bothering anyone else.  I don’t think I’m being too picky.  It bothered someone at Microsoft.

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How do you feel about Global Warming?

Personally I’ve felt guilty about the amount of energy I waste long before it became a media spectacle and a consensus of international scientist confirming we’re responsible for killing our own atmosphere. Amazingly there are still Neocons who swear the the problem doesn’t exist much less that humans cause it. My own father falls directly into this category. But like the majority of Americans I hear about it and think it’s terrible but do absolutely nothing to change my personal behavior.

I’m not paying extra for recycled paper towels, my company isn’t going to give me $3000 for buying a hybrid vehicle (the Timberland shoe company does) and I’m not going around the house unplugging all of my power supplies and battery chargers. In fact, if I had to turn off my desktop PC when I’m not using it you wouldn’t be reading this and I’d be paying a monthly fee for web hosting. In short, there’s no incentive.

I admit there’s a problem but I’m too selfish to sacrifice my personal desires and routines for universal positive gain. Welcome to America. This is precisely why our government is lax on the environment. There’s no monetary or political benefit to requiring corporations to implement expensive environmental controls. One suggestion I heard an environmental consultant recommend on a news program was “stop flying so much, use video and web conferences”. I’m sure the airline industry loves that idea. Again, where’s the national economic incentive? We don’t see where saving the atmosphere is going to provide anyone with a commission check. The only thing that governs America is money.

Until there are financial or personal incentives for individual Americans and corporations to cut back on greenhouse emissions it’s simply not going to happen. There’s not even social or cultural incentive. You’re stereotyped a “tree hugger” if you drive a hybrid or anything less than a 4-door SUV. The only reason Americans buy fuel efficient vehicles is to save money at the pump, not to stop emitting carbon atoms. It would be completely deceptive for us to tell the rest of the world we’re going to do our part to help when we have no intention of doing any such thing. It’s perceived to be too inconvenient, time consuming, expensive and socially embarrassing to be environmentally concerned in America. Yet we will give awards to the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, which is now required viewing in several European countries. Please enjoy American hypocrisy at it’s finest.

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Fine Art. Finally.

Where would we be without the Internet? Still strolling through antiquated “modern” art museums looking at “interpretive” crap that could be mistaken for the homework of a 4-year-old, that’s where. Thanks to the web we can be introduced to art that would be worth traveling to see. Like the sidewalk chalk drawings of Julian Beever. “Striking” is my new word for the week and this art is the definition. Julian’s images can be over 30 feet long on the sidewalk but appear to be only three or four feet high in perspective. Crazy.
http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

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My six minutes on Iraq and no more.

Last night, during a 60 minutes interview, Bush used the word “succeed” again when there has never been a true definition of “success” in Iraq presented by Rebuplicans or Democrats. Is it defined as a stable Iraq? Clearly there won’t be a Wal-Mart ribbon cutting ceremony in downtown Baghdad any time soon. So at this point what exactly is our mission? Too keep Sunni’s and Shia from killing each other? This is something they’ve wanted to do for hundreds of years and we removed the only thing stopping it: A “strong man” who basically said if there’s any killing that’s gonna be done in these parts, I’m the one who’s gonna be a doin’ it. Anyone with any knowledge of the middle east could have predicted this outcome. Many did and their warnings were ignored.

So now we stand in the middle and try to break up the fight using the lives of Americans and tax payer dollars. If we stay 100 years the minute we leave these people will try to kill each other. They are driven by religious, sectarian ideologies we cannot deter. Neither Republicans or Democrats want to present their idea as anything but the path to stability. When will it be admitted that we cannot “give” freedom and stability? We might as well get out of the way and let them settle it. As for those who argue this course would jeopardize western security I would like to ask how? How will it put us in harms way to call our troops back for national defense (novel idea) and let the Sunnis and Shia have it out? Tragic, yes. Our problem? – I don’t see it that way.

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Holidays be gone.

After at least five Christmas celebrations our holidays are thankfully over. I took the last of the decorations down yesterday. We do four family Christmas celebrations each year, three of which are all out gift giving extravaganzas. It becomes quite tiring and old after about the second or third time.

Connor got a battery powered 4-Wheeler and now we will never have another living flower in the yard again.  It rained on Christmas day so he spent the morning crashing it into the walls.  It was a good but busy holiday season.

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2006 Roundup.

Holy crap life has gotten routine lately. Hold on, I’ve got to go kill a spider for Amy. Okay, now that I’ve killed it she’s mad at me for not putting it in a cup and letting it go outside. What are we Buddhist now?

Where was I? The same ‘ol day to day going into 2007. I go to work, get harassed to solve other peoples problems, make 50 phone calls and come home to spin Connor around in the living room for 20-30 minutes before cooking and bed time. That’s it, every week day of my life. We do have the baby coming in a few months and Amy and I are real happy with everything. Bored but happy.

Despite managing the IT deployment of 21 new franchise and corporate facilities this year for 1-800-Pack-Rat I wanna do something that has a bigger impact with more personal satisfaction. So I decided to get my Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute. If I could eliminate the amount of “dead time” I spend during my work week supporting end users through routine tasks and providing basic PC instruction I could be designing some serious wide area networks, back-end server architectures (farms) and negotiating major telco contracts through agency.

That may not sound like fun to most people but it would mean a sense of accomplishment and money to me. The accomplishment part would come from acting as the agent for unsuspecting corporate primes who are routinely getting ripped off by integrators, telco vendors and even unskilled internal staff who allocate money for the wrong technology. I see it happen all the time and Executives are unable to determine right from wrong in the midst of disenting opinions. There are CEO’s of SMB’s out there who need unbiased assessments and I’d like to be the impartial voice helping to determine what will really take their company in the right direction, not boost the Integrators profit margins.

It’s easy to see why I got out of being a Consultant for a VAR relatively quickly back in 2000. As hard as I tried I couldn’t stomach proving unnecessary recommendations to clients on behalf of a sales rep knowing the same technologies could be implemented faster, more securely and cheaper (or free).

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Now this is interesting…

For some reason this fact from Gullible Info really intrigued me once I thought about it for a minute:

“Due mostly to increasing life spans, the number of living people is set to overtake the number of people who have ever died by 2008.”

Brings to mind lots of questions for the next two hundred years like mandatory cremation?

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Register.com sucks. Transferring a domain from them sucks even more.

Register.com requires $35.00 for me to renew toddsingleton.net with them for one year. For those of you not familiar with domain registration, that’s a ransom right now. For example GoDaddy.com charges $6.99 for a new registration and usually less for a renewal. So tonight I went to transfer my domain to GoDaddy. Part of the transfer process requires providing GoDaddy with a domain “Authorization Code”. I went to Register.com to get this as required. I was told I would have to “speak to a special customer service representative to handle that request” who is only available from 8am to 6pm EST. Funny, every other registrar I know of will send the authorization code to the administrative email on record for the domain (mine).

Well, here’s the problem: this domain expires at exactly midnight tonight. See the situation that’s forming? I called GoDaddy for help since I already paid them $7.99 for the transfer (which coincidentally includes a FREE one year domain registration extension). The rep laughed at the notion that I had to speak to a “special customer service rep” for an authorization number from Register.com. He then offered to refund the transfer fee if I ‘d like. I said no. I’ll have to pay the freakin’ ransom to Register.com and then I’ll move this domain straight to GoDaddy to get my free one year extension giving me the domain for 2 years. Register.com offered two years for $49.95. Wow, do their prices suck or what?

In the meantime I have another domain currently registered through Register.com, southeasternrea.com. I will begin the process of transferring that domain to GoDaddy immediately for $7.99 so I won’t have to pay over FOUR TIMES as much to renew it for one year. And what does this accelerated pricing buy you? Limited domain management tools in the web interface requiring you to have to call a “special customer service rep” to manage your own domain. That’s about as weak as it gets.

If you have a domain about to expire with Register.com here’s my advice: Transfer it to GoDaddy for $7.99 at least 10 days before the expiration date and get yourself a free one year renewal. This is the best way to let Register.com know their prices bite ass. And for those of you who are wondering why I don’t just let the domain expire and then renew it with GoDaddy for $6.99 I will detail the lifecycle of an expired domain.

  • Once a domain expires the previous registrant has 12 days to renew the domain at the regular price (DNS is disabled).
  • After 12 days the registrant can renew the domain for the regular price plus a surcharge of $80 for up to 30 days.
  • After 30 days the domain is put up for auction for 30 days.
  • After 60 days the domain is returned to the previous registrar (Register.com in this case) who can put it back into the public registry as available. I don’t know if there’s a time frame in which they’re required to do this.
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