Devin on Earth

I was looking back through my LiveJournal and found this piece from 2004 Jun 30. For some reason it struck me, so first I’m going to repost the content here, then I’ll add my additional thoughts after.

For the most part, this is still an accurate description of my feelings when watching this scene. It occurs to me to wonder why, in a world that is clearly designed with Good and Evil — and in which orcs and and trolls are clearly Evil — I still identify with one of the bad guys, at least in this way. It’s easy to understand with Gollum/Smeagol — during the narrative, we clearly see the duality within him, presenting as it does a mirror for the struggle going on within Frodo — because he’s meant to generate at least some sense of compassion.

So am I projecting, here, when I watch this scene and see the cave troll, or am I seeing hints that Jackson & company put in? The animators and special-effects crew clearly put a lot of time in to creating the cave troll model; for them, he’s not just a clear-cut case of evil foil, an obstacle to be vanquished. They put hours and hours of sweat and tears into him, even as they knew that his fate was to die on-screen.

How often do we see cave trolls in our own life? Like that asshole in the BMW on I-405 today who came across three lanes of traffic to zip into my lane just in front of me when there really wasn’t enough space, when he had 15 carlengths behind me — clearly, he is Evil. Needs an axe to the head. But when I get frustrated in traffic, see an opening and go for it, I’m the noble hero of the piece, only taking that which is my due.

Maybe not. Maybe it’s just my turn to be the asshole.

Four 3-day trips in four weeks:

• Apr 2-4, Orlando, to present 3 hours of sessions at Exchange Connections.


• Apr 8-10, Denver, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.


• Apr 18-20, Anaheim, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.


• Apr 23-25, Dallas, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.

For those of you keeping score at home, yes, it’s why my blogging has been very sporadic of late. And I’m particularly annoyed about the timing of the current trip; turns out John Scalzi was doing a signing in Seattle yesterday, and that would have been something I would have gone to had my travel schedule not prevented it.

Needless to say, I’m a bit burnt out. Travel always screws me up to begin with; this series has been particularly hard, because the last time I did this kind of back-to-back travel was several jobs ago (not that I cared for it then, either). And I’m not done yet: I still have one more Exchange 2007 roadshow date in Phoenix May 14-16, although at least for that one I’m flying into Tucson a couple of days early and meeting up with my parents and sister for the weekend.

Travel screws up my sleep schedule, big time. I finally got a decent night of sleep last night — I’m not sure how — but my body is repaying me now big time with massive insomnia. Partly it’s being away from home in a strange place and bed, partly it’s that the hotel beds are never quite right no matter how comfortable they may be (and since the roadshow has been putting me up in decent hotels, bed quality is actually pretty good). It screws up my eating, especially when I’m speaking — I hardly ever can eat lunch on a day I’m speaking, because I’m just too damn busy/nervous; even if I did find the time to eat and could find something suitable in whatever catered options we have at the events, I’d probably just throw it back up. It doesn’t help that I’ve made some recent big changes to my normal routine, and I’m trying to keep those changes in place and going even while traveling.

Plus, since I’m outside of my routines, I’m an insecure nervous wreck. I’ll take 15 minutes to lay out my clothes and various articles for the next day, then re-check them six times before I go to bed. I’m very precise about how I unpack and where I put stuff. I maintain a level of worry just below “freak out” over things like getting to the venue/airport on time, and obsessively check and verify addresses and route maps. Not that this level of preparation is a bad thing, mind you; I hardly ever have to hurry in the morning (which is good because I’m usually groggier than crap), I hardly ever forget to take stuff along that I need, and I’ve been able to just hand our taxi driver a post-it note with the address of the venue the last two cities. But this level of obsessiveness takes it too far, and dumps me right in the middle of awkward, paranoia mode, which is so not helpful. If I’m chatting with one of my co-presenters and there’s a lull in the conversation, I’m immediately worrying that it’s a direct result of something I’ve done or said; if I don’t get included in a casual conversation, I spend minutes trying to figure out why. Take me out of my routine, and my Asperger’s isn’t at all far underneath the surface, no matter how well people tell me I conceal it.

The funny part is, I really love speaking — and the bigger the audience, the better. Smaller audiences require me to deal with a collection of individuals, which taxes my social skills to the limit. I find smaller audiences usually tend to be “flatter” — they don’t react as well to the jokes I make, they don’t tend to ask questions of the same intensity, and I just don’t seem to “click” as well with them. This is disappointing; I want my audiences to feel like they’re getting not just the technical information they paid for, but I want them to be entertained. I want them to feel like I’ve helped them. Hardly anyone who comes up to me afterwards and asks a good, hard question ever takes me up on my offer to email me so I can research and give them an answer. I tend to get good marks and comments on my feedback sheets, so if the people listening feel like I’m doing them a disservice, they’re not complaining about it, but I just can’t read them.

Give me an audience of 150+ people, though, and I start to have fun. I’m only nervous for a few seconds, and then something clicks and I turn on. The few times I’ve talked in front of a really large audience, I had great sessions — lots of fun, lots of laughter, and lots of good questions. 

Having said all that, for being a smallish group today, the crowd here in Dallas was just plain fun. At the other venues, I’ve left my cowboy hat off when I got on stage; I left it on here and was able to get a laugh from it (at Anaheim’s expense; sorry, SoCal!) My post-lunchbreak observation that bringing in 100% clouds and rain to make the Seattle boy feel more at home was probably overkill got another good laugh. Thanks to everyone who showed up and had a kind word or question for me; y’all were great.

Now to see if I can get an hour or two of sleep before the wake-up call drags me out of bed. Have to get to the airport early enough to be sure to get on my flight home, since I’m not sure what kind of crowding has resulted from last night’s weather-related ground stop. I’d be more than mildly stressed at this point if I didn’t make it home tomorrow reasonably on-time.

I recently discovered that I’ve been unintentionally dispensing incorrect advice about a new Exchange 2007 Edge Transport feature. My shame at getting it wrong is only moderated by knowing I’m in good company. Fellow Exchange MVP Jim McBee recently posted to his blog on this same topic, and so I’ll just quote him here:

So if you see me talking about how Edge does safe/blocked sender aggregation, ignore the “blocked sender” part, because that’s my inner idiot poking out and saying hello.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just returned from Denver where I was a speaker at the Microsoft Unified Communications: Featuring Exchange Server 2007 roadshow. While I’m not big on travel, I definitely enjoyed Denver; I like the city only slightly less than I like the Pacific Northwest and I got to hang out with my co-presenter (and Exchange rockstar) Jim McBee.

The New York, Atlanta, and Denver events are done, the Chicago event is happening as I type, but there are still six more dates. Dates listed in bold are ones I’ll be presenting at:

• San Francisco – April 17, 2007
• Anaheim – April 19, 2007
• Dallas – April 24, 2007
• Boston – April 26, 2007
• Phoenix – May 15, 2007
• Washington DC – May 17, 2007

The cost for the event is only $99; register at the link above. If you want more details about Exchange 2007 and the show is coming near you, then go register now. Events are filling up!

As you can see, between my regular deadlines and my upcoming travel, I’m staying busy for the rest of the month — but I’m going to work in time to walk through some nifty PowerShell hints and tips I picked up while finalizing my PowerShell session for Exchange Connections, including a great feature I was shown by Microsoft’s Evan Dodds.

Low-frequency updates continue to be the word of the month, much to my chagrin; I’ve got an aggressive travel schedule (well, aggressive for me at any rate) this month, combined with leather-clad, spike-studded deadlines on projects. After doing Exchange Connections in Orlando last week, I just got back from Denver after speaking at the Windows IT Pro Exchange 2007 roadshow.

Back in January, I noticed and posted about a curious assumption I’d found in the Exchange 2007 docs that Edge Transport servers would be dual-homed on both the Internet and the internal network, instead of having a single network interface in the perimeter network. I pointed out that this really didn’t gain you any benefits and made things more complicated, and I made sure to pass this feedback on to Microsoft.

Well, they’ve responded: the most recent update of the Exchange 2007 documentation shows that the dual-interface assumption has been removed from the relevant topic. It’s nice to know I wasn’t missing something! Thank you, Microsoft, for the response.

Apple sells gift cards that can be redeemed online or in their physical stores. So far, so good.

Apple sells gift certificates for iTunes — both phsycial and email versions. So far, so good.

A friend got me a $50 Apple Gift Card for Christmas. So far, awesome.

Apple won’t allow my to use my Gift Card to buy songs off iTunes. Annoying. 

Apple won’t allow me to use my Gift Card to buy the email iTunes Gift Certificate (which I would receive immediately, and be able to use to buy the $50 worth of songs I’ve got saved in my iTunes cart, that I was planning on being able to listen to on the plane tomorrow).

Bastards.

Thinking about it, the reason behind it is probably either a) fraud prevention or b) the result of some legal settlement/contract along the way…but either way, it’s incredibly crappy that I have credit with Apple, want to make a purchase, and can’t through no fault of my own.

Apple, you suck. Fix this, because it makes iTunes and the Apple Music Store far less convenient. I don’t really care what the underlying problem is; you’re a smart company. Fix it and get out of the way of me spending money at your store.

Another Exchange Connections event has come and gone. As nice as the venues are, I really wish the spring Connections events weren’t in Orlando — the town itself is spread out, limiting how easy it is to get out of the event venue for a couple of hours and go do anything on your down time. I was lucky enough to get direct flights to and from Orlando, thus limiting the amount of horsing around I had to do in airports, but the flights are correspondingly longer. consequently, even though I managed to snag an aisle seat in an exit row on my flight back (with no one in the center seat), I awoke today with a killer migraine, a lovely parting gift from seat 15C.

The other thing I lucked out on this year was getting to do all of my sessions on the same day. That may sound like a lot of work — and it is — but there’s a large amount of mental energy I have to invest in getting ready to go up on stage and present, so only having to do that workup once (and sustain it for the day) actually ends up being easier on me. Here are the slide decks for my presentations, along with comments:

• EXC16: DCAR with Exchange
  I received an interesting comment from several of the attendees at this session, which was that they were not originally going to come to this session because the acronym DCAR meant nothing to them. I know that few people in this industry use it other than Paul and I, so I need to see what I can do about that.
  Key take-away from this session: as far as Exchange 2007 comes with out-of-the-box functionality aimed at discovery, compliance, archival, and retention, you still need third-party software to do a proper job of it — and you need to consider these activities all as facets of the single larger task of messaging data management. Thing I learned from this session: my job gives me the luxury of examining these types of tasks and looking for the bigger picture, but the people who work to keep production environments running don’t often have the time. I need to not be afraid of talking about things I think are “obvious,” because they may be coming from a new perspective some of my attendees don’t get the chance to share. In return, they share their experience and perspective with me, which helps me better fine-tune my message for others.

• EXC17: 10 Tips to Make Your Exchange Server a Good Net Neighbor
  This was a nice small session, the perfect wrap-up for the day, although I wonder if attendance was hurt slightly by the fact that it was the last session of the day. Nevertheless, I think there were some good questions and discussions, and I’ve definitely got some ideas for future blog posts (and possibly magazine articles).
  Key take-away from this session: you can significantly enhance the reputation your domains gather by thinking about how your Exchange organization interacts with the rest of the Internet and making some appropriate changes.
  Thing I learned from this session: so much of our understanding of email best practices in the end comes back to a fundamental understanding of proper DNS theory and operation — a subject that far too many admins do not have adequate grounding in. Especially in the Windows community, DNS tends to get treated as a black box, and someone who learns how Active Directory integrates with DNS may not learn that some of the assumptions AD makes about DNS are only valid in the context of an AD domain.

• EXC18: Iron Chef: Using Powershell with Exchange 2003
  Definitely the one that took the vast majority of my mental prep time; I hadn’t realized when I proposed this session what a challenge it would be. On the other hand, I’m glad I did it, and I’ll be breaking it down into a series of detailed blog posts in the coming weeks.
  Key take-away from this session: cmdlets make things so much simpler, but once you’ve got your data in a PowerShell object you can still do some amazing stuff in a very small amount of script.
  Thing I learned from this session: logistics are everything in the success of a presentation; the problems I had with my demos came not from the scripts, which I was re-writing until an hour before the session, but from my last-minute decision to run the slides off the provided machine and run the demo scripting off my laptop. As a result, my practice run (which involved switching in and out of an RDP session) was useless and the attendees kept having to remind me to switch the screen to the right machine. I’m just glad they seemed to take it in good humor.