We had our large pine tree cut down this morning, here is the video of it.
Last week was the big debut of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and while I am not sure what the critics are saying of it, I think the show is going to be huge, and will end up being one of those Viral shows that everyone talks about, at least in those in the target demographic.
Fallon made his big debut with a line up of super celebrities and musicians, but I do not think that is what is going to make the show huge. Much like on the web, it is the content. Lets start with the house band, The Roots. They are a really good, dynamic group, technically classified as Hip Hop, but I don’t think that you can classify guys who play instruments as Hip Hop. Regardless, they have a tremendous range in their abilities that fits in nicely between music appealing to an 18 year old, and 40 year old.
Another example of the great content are his “bits”, such as “Lick it for 10″. In this bit Jimmy pulls some random people out of the crowd brings them up on stage, brings out a random household product or item ala The Price is Right, and pays them $10 to lick it. Surely it is not the most intelligent bit, some would classify this as toilet humor, but you cannot help but laugh out loud when watching it. You might say this is no different than Stupid Pet Tricks, but I can assure you it is much more entertaining, and less gimmicky.
The final reason why this show is going to be huge, is that they are going after the tech/social media/smart crowd. This is shown by the fact that they have a blog front and center on the the Late Night website, they are using the show to demo tech gadgets like the upcoming Palm Pre, and Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht were on the show in the first two weeks. Fallon even debuted a sort of social experiment to try and make one Twitterer have more followers than Obama.This group will most likely demand a higher level of comedy, more intelligent toilet humor, which Fallon appears intent on delivering.
With all of these reasons, plus the guy is actually funny, and comes across as just an ordinary guy hanging out with his friends on the show, I have no doubt that Fallon will find success easily. Lets just hope the NBC execs are smart enough to realize that it is a good show, unlike what they did with the West Wing, and Studio 60.
According to a CNet article The City of Tucson, Nissan, and battery charging equipment manufacturer Ecotality are planning on rolling out a city-wide Electric car charging network next year. Ecotality is going to be working with the city on planning, policies, and charging locations to coincide with Nissan’s effort to make it’s plugin electric vehicles available to local municipalities and organizations.
While it sounds like Tucson is just a test market at this time, this is huge. Too bad this is not being made available in the Phoenix Area like the old GM EV1 was, as I know that there are still many charging stations left around the valley left over from that effort. My only question about this is will these charging stations support other electric vehicles like the Tesla.
It is no wonder GM is hurting right now, when the foreign car companies are doing things like this I have little hope for the American Car industry.
Many companies spend money on IT projects to fufill their need to have the latest and greatest toys and systems. However most do not evaluate how these projects impact their productivity. Often there is a direct relationship between Tech Spending and Productivity enhancements, however it is not the only thing that can enhance productivity.
The below presentation I have given on this very topic. It is somewhat incomplete, as it is meant to be narrated, but you will get the idea.
Maximize Productivity Using Information Technology Spending
One of the common problems that IT Staff run into is transferring Windows users’ desktop profiles from one computer to another while mainataining all of their customizations, files, settings, favorites, emails, and whatever else. One would think that Microsoft would give IT Pros the tools to transfer this kind of data since they made it so critical with the advent of Windows NT & 2000.
Fortunately there is a tool put out by ForensIT that makes this a relatively trivial task. You can download it here. After you download it, follow these directions to use it to transfer your profiles seamlessly.
After following those steps you should have a fully migrated user profile. Keep in mind this dows not migrate programs, Windows is still incapable of doing this.
Enjoy!
Phoenix’s new light rail line opens this coming Saturday (12/27), but there is already talk and plenty of plans underway to look at where to take the line next. An Article on AZcentral.com today talks about how they are looking at how to integrate the light rail with bus service and where buses should be used instead of light rail. It also talks about getting residents to use the light rail and switch to buses when needed to get to a destination instead of taking their car.
In my opinion the idea of integrating the buses with the rail line are good, but I think that they are looking at it from the wrong angle. They are looking at the light rail as method of augmenting the bus lines, when they should be looking at it as though the light rail is (or will be) the dominant method of transportation and build bus service, roads, and freeways around this service. For me, I will never set foot on one of Phoenix’s buses again. I have been on one a few times in my life, and each time was a bad experience. I was subject to the same traffic jams as the rest of the traffic, they were dirty, and they simply stopped to often to be efficient for me.
I really think that we need to sit down and look at all of our transportation and see how it could be made to serve the light rail better. Three cities that are doing a great job of this are Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Getting anywhere in Portland, OR is easy using the MAX and through the Portland Street Car. They use these two services complementary and give each priority over traffic to ensure efficiency. San Francisco uses the Bart, Cal Train, and Muni to get people effectively around the entire region. Finally Los Angeles is using their Metro service to connect this massively spreadout car country. What do these areas all have in common they are designing their entire transportation network around their real mass transit, not buses.
Some areas where Phoenix is going off the tracks is by building car pool lanes where they used to have some spare room for trains in the middle of the freeways, Los Angeles realized that it was cheaper to expand their Metro line down the center of their freeways to get it started than to plow through their streets on the first go. Don’t get me wrong, eventually they will need to do this, but they needed to get a big Rail network in a hurry to get people to even consider it. Scottsdale needs to stop considering “Express Bus Service” as an effective alternative to placing Rail down the center of Scottsdale Road. This is not an alternative, it is a joke. Finally, Phoenix needs to get the Light Rail really connected to the Airport. Right now they are planning to use Bus service to connect the light rail to the Airport. If you want people to choose rail over their cars then you need to make it seemless.
Finally, now that Phoenix has a light rail starter line, we need to start looking beyond light rail and look at Heavy Commuter Rail that could serve the long runs in the valley like taking a train from Anthem to Chandler with minimal stops. On an even larger scale Tucson to Flagstaff with only a handfull of stops. Finally Arizona needs to get into talks with California about extending their High Speed Rail to Phoenix and Tucson.
With Phoenix getting ready to roll out their new Light Rail Starter Line on 12/27, running from Mesa to West Phoenix, through Tempe and Downtown Phoenix, one begs to ask, “where can I get a beer along the starter line?” The Answer to this is very simple, use the web to tell you. One of my talented co-workers at Off Madison Ave took it upon himself to create a website to solve this very important question.
Using Google Maps he created a mashup that shows you bars that are within walking distance of the light rail.
Check it out at http://www.lightrailbeer.com/
In only a matter of a few days I am leaving on a cruise. This will be my second cruise, and we are once again going to try and bring our own alcohol on board the cruise. You may be asking yourself, why would you want to do such a thing? The answer is simple… For Sport. Yes, we can afford to buy our own booze on the ship, even though they gouge you at the on ship bars, but it is more fun if you can make it past the rent-a-cops that run security. Last November when we went on a cruise, we brought a bottle of Vodka, a bottle of Rum, and a “sack” of wine, and here is how we did it.
For the Rum and Vodka we used two empty water bottles and filled them with up with each liquor and put them in the side pockets of my laptop bag, in plain sight, and walked right through security without a hitch. Now the sack of wine was a different story. The “sack” was really the internal bag from a Target-branded cube/box of wine. Yes, we could have got better wine, but remember this is for sport, and drinking it is just a bonus. We removed the bag from the box and put the bag in with our clothes, in the checked baggage.
No that sounds simple, right? It was. What we discovered was that the policies listed when you register for the cruise is simply a deterrent, and only rarely do you actually see the cruise lines enforce the rules. However, if you do get busted doing this you usually only have to forfeit the booze.
A few words of caution on this:
1) If you do you get busted bringing your own booze on board, be cool, let them take it if they want. You may or may not get it back at the end of the cruise, but it beats the alternative which is not being allowed to board. When you paid for your cruise you agreeed to abide by their terms and conditions, one of which is no personal alcohol. The terms also say that if you are caught bringing booze on board, you may not be allowed to board. While it usually never comes to this, they will do it if you are not cool about it and/or get irate or rude if they confiscate your liquor. So if you do get caught, be cool to security, they are just doing their job, and play dumb so that if you are lucky you will get your liquor back at the end of the cruise.
2) Pack your bag so that your bottles or sacks of liquor do not break, and put them in a bag of your clothes that you could live without on the cruise in the event that they do break. Otherwise you will smell like you bathed in rum for the duration of your cruise.
3) Don’t over do it. Do not try and take a whole bar with you, take only a few select choices of liquor. You will be less likely to get caught and less likely to break the liquor in your bag.
Recently I deployed my first Exchange 2007 server on Windows 2008 for one of the companies I work with. During the process of deploying the server we found out that the new Windows Server Backup that is included in Windows Server 2008 does not have the capability to backup the Exchange Information Stores in the same fashion that the old NTBackup from Windows 2003 did.
After doing some research I discovered that Microsoft did this by design, and recommends that those who previously using NTBackup to backup Exchange move to their System Center Data Protection Manager product. While this did not make me happy, it clearly did not make the Exchange Admin community jump for joy. There was a big outcry, complaining at Microsoft for taking such core functionality out of Windows. In June of this year, Microsoft relented and promised to deliver an update to Windows Server Backup to add this functionality back in. It is now November, and it has not happened yet.
In the mad scramble to find an alternative way to make a simple backup of the Exchange Info Stores I stumbled upon a post on the Exchange Team Blog, by a poster named “Phil Carter” that details a method of using the old NTBackup from Windows Server 2003 on Server 2008 without a hitch. This sounded too good to be true, it could not possibly work, why would Microsoft not simply distribute the old backup utility to solve this problem. However, after considering the alternatives of buying and expensive 3rd party backup utility, or deploying DPM (and the required, dedicated Windows server to go with it) I decided to give it a go.
Here is what I did:
1) Load up a Windows 2003 x64 system. The x64 part is important, as you should be running Exchange on a x64 platform (unless you are using an Itanium), and you must use matching binaries for this. I used a Virtual Machine for this.
2) Copy the ntbackup.exe, ntmsapi.dll, and vssapi.dll from C:\windows\system32 into a new folder.
3) Burn the new folder you created containing the copied files to a CD, or copy it to USB drive. You can also copy it over the network to your Windows 2008/Exchange 2007 Server to skip the next step.
4) Copy the folder from the CD or USB drive to your Windows 2008/Exchange2007 server.
5) Launch Ntbackup.exe. Select the Information Stores as you would normally under NTBackup and start your backup.
After it completes you should have a quick and easy Exchange 2007 Backup on Windows 2008. This method even purges your transaction logs properly. I have even verified this method works properly, by attempting to restore from the backup. It works without a hitch.
This method is great for small shops that happen to be running Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008, and do not have the need or resources for yet another Windows server just to run backups as DPM requires. For larger shops, I actually do recommend DPM over other 3rd party tools, as its method of doing replication works really well.
