I’ve been at my current job for 5 years. We got bought by a big company a couple of years ago, and (with the uncertainty ahead) I started looking for another place to work. Then I got sick of looking and decided when the right job came along, I’d know. I still got my regular spam from monster.com, but for the most part, I quit paying any attention to the job market.

Then my friend Aaron called me several weeks ago. That’s not really out of the ordinary…we talk all the time. This call was different. He wanted to talk with me about going to work for him. I said we could talk it over.

So we talked. We talked about where I am in my career now, and we talked about what I could do to help his company going forward. We got all of the details worked out earlier this week, and I’ll be officially a part of SafeBrowse.com in about 10 days.

I’m excited about the move. And I’m not just saying that because half of SafeBrowse.com reads my blog. It will be good to work closely with some great friends I’ve known for 10 years now. (10 years?! wow!)

I’ll get to do a lot of stuff I’m currently very familiar with: Active Directory, server management, firewalls, routers, flesh-eating robots, etc. And then I’ll get to stretch my skills a bit getting into supporting the infrastructure for their products. It’s all geek stuff, yes, but I like that sort of thing.

Last night as I was getting ready to turn off the TV and go to bed, I saw that the “Supersize Me” movie was coming on.  I watched for a few minutes and quickly decided that I could do without 2 hours of sleep.

It wasn’t really a good movie.  It wasn’t really a movie.  Basically, a guy decides to live on McDonald’s food (3 meals a day) for 30 days.  He had 3 doctors checking him out along the way, measuring his progress through the month.

In the end, he gained about 20 pounds and went from very healthy to extremely unhealthy.  Sorry I spoiled that for you. (In my defense, who would expect anything different from somebody who eats fast food for 30 days straight?)

I’m glad I saw it.  It was eye opening, that’s for sure.  I may never eat at McDonald’s again…but those fries are so, so good.

I’ve been intrigued by the Wordpress permalink system for quite some time.  I knew it used Apache’s mod_rewrite module, but I never understood it - not even a little bit.

I’ve been working on an update for my church’s podcast site.  Last year I wanted to know how podcasting worked, so I setup a podcast for our church’s sermons.  It worked, and it gained a little popularity at the church, so I decided it was time for a face lift on the site.

One of the things I wanted to incorporate into the site was a “permalink” type of structure, allowing a dynamically-built info page about each sermon.  This is, as you might suspect, one of my Google experiments, and using permalinks like that makes the site “bigger” when viewed through the eyes of a search bot.

So I found this tutorial on mod_rewrite, spent about an hour reading and playing with it, and got the mod_rewrite capabilities working fairly quickly.  Using RewriteRule lines in a .htaccess file is complex, but it’s not too much of a stretch for somebody with a little programming background.  If you’ve got a web server to experiment on, it’s a neat thing to know how to do.
Anyway, this post has 3 main purposes:

1. Help me remember where that tutorial was, so I can figure out other mod_rewrite stuff at a later time.
2. Pimp our church’s podcast site.
3. Provide content here, since it’s been a long week, and I haven’t had time to post anything else.

Have a good Saturday.

A few nights ago, in a frustrated rage, I posted some not-so-nice things about Microsoft and IE7. I still agree with what I wrote, but I’ve learned a little bit about customer service.

My blog ranks well in search engines. I’m no SEO guru, but if I post something, there is usually somebody who will find it through Google. I know that, and quite honestly, it’s why I get up on my soap box most of the time. This time, my plan backfired.

Typically, this user who would find me would find my frustrations with IE7 would post something negative about IE7 (or about me) and move on, continuing his search for an answer to his problem. Microsoft ruined my scheme.

Dean (who works for Microsoft [he has a @microsoft.com email address]), does regular searches on Technorati for people who are blogging about IE7. My blog showed up, and he helped me find the solution to my problem.

Microsoft has succeeded in 3 areas:

1. A customer who didn’t ask for help got the help he needed. This is huge, because (typically) a company can only help people who ask for help. Now Microsoft is listening to customers and responding to what they say.
2. All of the people who find that post (while searching about trouble with unsigned ActiveX controls) will see my frustrations, will see Microsoft’s proactive response, and will have a solution to their problem. Microsoft comes away looking like the superhero. And, in this case, they are.
3. They fixed my problem without getting into the “better browser” war with me. I’m certainly not going to change my stance on the awesomeness that is Firefox, and Dean would have just added to my frustration if he had tried to argue for IE7. Instead, he just offered a solution.

This led me to realize how easy it is for companies to listen for chatter about their products:

1. Do a search on Technorati.
2. Click the RSS link.
3. *Poof* now it’s in Google Reader, and can be easily monitored by the support staff.

Kudos to Microsoft on this one. This is excellent customer service.

[And, for the record, Firefox is still the better browser.]

This is an upgrade weekend at the office. They’re migrating from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. The upgrade went fine, but there was an error with Reporting Services 2005 that said:

SQL Server setup has encountered the following problem: [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server] Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.ConfigurationInfo’ with unique index ‘IX_ConfigurationInfo’.. To continue, correct the problem, and then run SQL Server setup again.

Um, yeah. I have no idea what that means.

A guy I work with was here with our DBA, but he had to leave. So I came up to the office, and we started searching for a resolution to this error. Unfortunately, it’s not documented by anybody except this guy, who said the problem had something to do with EnableClientPrinting. Whatever that means. Here’s the quote (in case that link goes bad):

Turns out we got this because we had added an EnableClientPrinting entry to disable the print button in SQL 2000 after the SP2 bug that broke printing. Removing this entry prior to runing the upgrade made everything run smoothly.

Our DBA sat on hold with Microsoft - on hold, before talking to a technician - for 5 hours. That’s 300 minutes, if you’re keeping score. That would be bad if it was free, but it wasn’t. This is after she gave them a credit card number for a $500 per-incident support case. It only breaks out to $100/hour, so maybe that’s not so bad.

Anyway, things are looking up. I’ve gotten some routine maintenance taken care of, and she’s got some guy on the phone who seems to be pretty helpful. They’re working through the Report Server configuration now. Hopefully this means we’ll be out of here soon.

Lesson learned: when you need Microsoft’s per-incident support, be ready to wait. Next time I’ll just request a callback to my cell phone, and we’ll go up the road for food until the call comes. The people on the other end of the line seem helpful, but getting them on the phone isn’t as easy as it should be - especially at $500 per call.

I’m a Firefox user. I’m proud to say that. I’m enlightened enough in my internet experience that I’ve migrated from the seventh circle of hell to a little slice of heaven. I made the change a while back and I haven’t missed the torture for even a second. My life is better because of Firefox.

There are still web sites, however, that require the Internet Explorer browser. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Tonight I was trying to use one of these sites for the first time since I got my new Vista laptop.

Since it’s Windows Vista, there’s no choice on keeping IE6. (Version 6, though completely evil in all its ways, is still not as much of a burden as the 7.0 version.) You’re given IE7 at the start, and you just have to deal with it.

So I go to this site that needs to install an Active X control. Granted, installing Active X controls is usually about as wise as letting your children play with rattlesnakes, but this is an internal server at the office that I administer, so it’s not such a big deal.

IE determines that the control is from an “Unknown Publisher” and won’t install. That makes sense.

Let’s see…security settings….where are they?…oh…there…

So I turned off protected mode, and I set the security on IE to “medium” (there’s not a “low” now…it’s medium, medium-high, or high…they don’t admit to low security on anything, which just cracks me up.)

I tried to add the site to the trusted sites list, but you can only trust https sites, because (apparently) there is no unencrypted content on the internet (or any intranet) worth trusting. I’m glad to know that…

The Active X control wouldn’t install.

So I decide I’ll try Firefox, which has a nifty extension installed called “IE Tab.” It lets me view any web page with IE’s engine but within the awesomeness of Firefox. It, however, still won’t let this control install.

I understand Microsoft’s approach to protecting users from themselves. It makes sense. But come on. There has to be a check box somewhere that reads “I know what I’m doing, and I really am not just saying that, and I know that if I mess up my computer by doing something stupid, I’m not allowed to blame Microsoft for their poor product development.” I’m so sick of dealing with these products.

At this point, I’m ready to stop using web sites that require IE. I’m ready to ditch the whole operating system. I’d even drop Office (which I actually like) and pick up something like Open Office. I’d even refrain from doing business with Redmond-based companies simply on a matter of principal.

There wasn’t much of a world of computing before Microsoft, but I’m willing to bet that a world without Microsoft would be a more secure, less stressful, and more user-friendly world.

How many different ways are there to misspell “Britney Spears”?

Let’s see…Brittany, Britany, Brittney… those are the only ones I could come up with (without thinking too hard). If you search Google for a misspelling of Britney’s name, the Google spelling correction engine will show you the correct spelling.

Google published a list of ways Google users had misspelled Britney’s name. I would think there would be maybe 10 or 15 ways somebody could butcher the spelling of that name. But no. Try 593. 593! (Here’s the link).

This, of course, means that a large percentage of her fan base is actually as stupid as she is.

I got this email from a guy I work with:

From a guy’s blog:

“Windows Vista introduced a new feature in the newest build called User Account Protection and one of the side effects is that it can intercept software from writing files back into the %windir% or %progfiles% directories and silently redirect the file to a different location.”

This means all Lotus Notes installations on Vista machines must be put in C:\Lotus (or some other folder off the root). The Windows and Program Files directories have the weird protection mechanism, and Notes isn’t designed to deal with Vista’s trickery.

So, the symptom is, when the Domino administrator issues changes that modifies the user’s ID file (ie. a certificate update), Windows won’t let the Notes client Modify the real ID file, it points it to the Virtual-machine-like temp directory for programs running from the Program Files or Windows directories, not the real file.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  It’s certainly good to know, but are there any developers out there with some insight?

I saw Brad Avery in Wal-Mart today.  I’m not really (read: at all) a Third Day fan, but it was still kind of cool.  I used to have his daughter in my Awana games group at church a few years back.  They’re really nice people.

Have you had any recent “celebrity sightings”?

I was getting ready to go to bed last night when I noticed that the Harrison Ford movie “Firewall” was coming on.  All I knew about the movie is that he was in an IT group.  I decided to watch a few minutes and see if it was worth my time.  It was (or at least it kept me interested) and I ended up watching the whole thing.

Basically, it’s “Air Force One” but not in a plane.  I work in IT, so believing that Harrison Ford could do anything more with a Cisco firewall than plugging it in takes stretching the imagination a bit.  Fortunately, they only had him geeking out in one scene.

It truly is the typical Ford movie.  You can predict what happens, but you may not predict all the twists and turns through the plot before you get to the end.

Overall, I’d give it about 3.5/5 stars…worth watching but not worth rushing to see.  It’s not Ford’s best movie, but it’s certainly not his worst.