Devin on Earth

Over the next couple of months, I’d like to slowly sketch out some of the thoughts and impressions that I’ve been gathering about Exchange 2010 storage over the last year or so and combine them with the specific insights that I’m gaining at my new job. In this inaugural post, I want to tackle what I have come to view as the fundamental question that will drive the heart of your Exchange 2010 storage strategy: will you use a RAID configuration or will you use a JBOD configuration?

In the interests of full disclosure, the company I work for now is a strong NetApp reseller, so of course my work environment is conducive to designing Exchange in ways that make it easy to sell the strengths of NetApp kit. However, part of the reason I picked this job is precisely because I agree with how they address Exchange storage and how I think the Exchange storage paradigm is going to shake out in the next 3-5 years as more people start deploying Exchange 2010.

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft re-designed the Exchange storage system to target what we can now consider to be the lowest common denominator of server storage: a directly attached storage (DAS) array of 7200 RPM SATA disks in a Just a Box of Disks (JBOD) configuration. This DAS/JBOD/SATA (what I will now call DJS) configuration has been an unworkable configuration for Exchange for almost its entire lifetime:

• The DAS piece certainly worked for the initial versions of Exchange; that’s what almost all storage was back then. Big centralized SANs weren’t part of the commodity IT server world, reserved instead for the mainframe world. Server administrators managed server storage. The question was what kind of bus you used to attach the array to the server. However, as Exchange moved to clustering, it required some sort of shared storage. While a shared SCSI bus was possible, it not only felt like a hack, but also didn’t scale well beyond two nodes.
• SATA, of course, wasn’t around back in 1996; you had either IDE or SCSI. SCSI was the serious server administrator’s choice, providing better I/O performance for server applications, as well as faster bus speeds. SATA, and its big brother SAS, both are derived from the lessons that years of SCSI deployments have provided. Even for Exchange 2007, though, SATA’s poor random I/O performance made it unsuitable for Exchange storage. You had to use either SAS or FC drives.
• RAID has been a requirement for Exchange deployments, historically, for two reasons: to combine enough drive spindles together for acceptable I/O performance (back when disks were smaller than mailbox databases), and to ensure basic data redundancy. Redundancy was especially important once Exchange began supporting shared storage clustering and required both aggregate I/O performance only achievable with expensive disks and interfaces as well as the reduced chance of a storage failure being a single point of failure.

If you look at the marketing material for Exchange 2010, you would certainly be forgiven for thinking that DJS is the only smart way to deploy Exchange 2010, with SAN, RAID, and non-SATA systems supported only for those companies caught in the mire of legacy deployments. However, this isn’t at all true. There are a growing number of Exchange experts (and not just those of us who either work for storage vendors or resell their products) who think that while DJS is certainly an interesting option, it’s not one that’s a good match for every customer.

In order to understand why DJS is truly possible in Exchange 2010, and more importantly begin to understand where DJS configurations are a good fit and what underlying conditions and assumptions you need to meet in order to get the most value from DJS, we need to separate these three dimensions and discuss them separately.

While I will go into more detail on all three dimensions at later date, I want to focus on the JBOD vs.. RAID question now. If you need some summaries, then check out fellow Exchange MVP (and NetApp consultant) John Fullbright’s post on the economics of DAS vs. SAN as well as Microsoft’s Matt Gossage and his TechEd 2009 session on Exchange 2010 storage. Although there are good arguments for diving into drive technology or storage connection debates, I’ve come to believe that the central philosophy question you must answer in your Exchange 2010 design is at what level you will keep your data redundant. Until Exchange 2007, you had only one option: keeping your data redundant at the disk controller level. Using RAID technologies, you had two copies of your data[1]. Because you had a second copy of the data, shared storage clustering solutions could be used to provide availability for the mailbox service.

With Exchange 2007’s continuous replication features, you could add in data redundancy at the application level and avoid the dependency of shared storage; CCR creates two copies, and SCR can be used to create one or more additional copies off-site. However, given the realities of Exchange storage, for all but the smallest deployments, you had to use RAID to provide the required number of disk spindles for performance. With CCR, this really meant you were creating four copies; with SCR, you were creating an additional two copies for each target replica you created.

This is where Exchange 2010 throws a wrench into the works. By virtue of a re-architected storage engine, it’s possible under specific circumstances to design a mailbox database that will fit on a single drive while still providing acceptable performance. The reworked continuous replication options, now simplified into the DAG functionality, create additional copies on the application level. If you hit that sweet spot of the 1:1 database to disk ratio, then you only have a single copy of the data per replica and can get an n-1 level of redundancy, where n is the number of replicas you have. This is clearly far more efficient for disk usage…or is it? The full answer is complex, the simple answer is, “In some cases.”

In order to get the 1:1 database to disk ratio, you have to follow several guidelines:

1. Have at least three replicas of the database in the DAG, regardless of which sites they are in. Doing so allows you to place both the EDB and transaction log files on the same physical drive, rather than separating them as you did in previous versions of Exchange.
2. Ensure that you have at least two replicas per site. The reason for this is that unlike Exchange 2007, you can reseed a failed replica from another passive copy. This allows you to avoid reseeding over your WAN, which is something you do not want to do.
3. Size your mailbox databases to include no more users than will fit in the drive’s performance envelope. Although Exchange 2010 converts many of the random I/O patterns to sequential, giving better performance, not all has been converted, so you still have to plan against the random I/O specs.
4. Ensure that write transactions can get written successfully to disk. Use a battery-backed caching controller for your storage array to ensure the best possible performance from the disks. Use write caching for the physical disks, which means ensuring each server hosting a replica has a UPS.

At this point, you probably have disk capacity to spare, which is why Exchange 2010 allows the creation of archive mailboxes in the same mailbox database. All of the user’s data is kept at the same level of redundancy, and the archived data – which is less frequently accessed than the mainline data – is stored without additional significant disk or I/O penalty. This all seems to indicate that JBOD is the way to go, yes? Two copies in the main site, two off-site DR copies, and I’m using cheaper storage with larger mailboxes and only four copies of my data instead of the minimum of six I’d have with CCR+SCR (or the equivalent DAG setup) on RAID configurations.

Not so fast. Microsoft’s claims around DJS configurations usually talk about the up-front capital expenditures. There’s more to a solid design than just the up-front storage price tag, and even if the DJS solution does provide savings in your situation, that is only the start. You also need to think about the lifetime of your storage and all the operational costs. For instance, what happens when one of those 1:1 drives fails?

Well, if you bought a really cheap DAS array, your first indication will be when Exchange starts throwing errors and the active copy moves to one of the other replicas. (You are monitoring your Exchange servers, right?) More expensive DAS arrays usually directly let you know that a disk failed. Either way, you have to replace the disk. Again, with a cheap white-box array, you’re on your own to buy replacement disks, while a good DAS vendor will provide replacements within the warranty/maintenance period. Once the disk is replaced, you have to re-establish the database replica. This brings us to the wonderful manual process known as database reseeding, which is not only a manual task, but can take quite a significant amount of time – especially if you made use of archival mailboxes and stuffed that DJS configuration full of data. If we can reseed 20GB of data per hour[2] (from a local passive copy to avoid the I/O hit to the active copy), that’s 10 hours for a 200GB database or 50 hours – over two days! – for a 1 TB database. All during that time, you have one less replica of that database to protect you. If your business processes and requirements don’t give you that amount of leeway, you either have to design smaller databases (and waste the disk capacity, which brings us right back to the good old bad days of Exchange 2000/2003 storage design) or use RAID.

Now, with a RAID solution, we don’t have that same problem. We still have a RAID volume rebuild penalty, but that’s happening inside the disk shelf at the controller, not across our network between Exchange servers. And with a well-designed RAID solution such as generic RAID 10 (1+0) or NetApp’s RAID DP, you can actually survive the loss of more disks at the same time. Plus, a RAID solution gives me the flexibility to populate my databases with smaller or larger mailboxes as I need, and aggregate out the capacity and performance across my disks and databases. Sure, I don’t get that nice 1:1 disk to database ratio, but I have a lot more administrative flexibility and can survive disk loss without automatically having to begin the reseed dance.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m wildly enthusiastic that I as an Exchange architect have the option of designing to JBOD configurations. I like having choices, because that helps me make the right decisions to meet my customers’ needs. And that, in the end, is the point of a well-designed Exchange deployment – to meet your needs. Not the needs of Microsoft, and not the needs of your storage or server vendors. While I’m fairly confident that starting with a default NetApp storage solution is the right choice for many of the environments I’ll be facing, I also know how to ask the questions that lead me to consider DJS instead. There’s still a place for RAID at the Exchange storage table.

In further installments over the next few months, I’ll begin to address the SATA vs. SAS/VC and DAS vs. SAN arguments as well. I’ll then try to wrap it up with a practical and realistic set of design examples that pull all the pieces together.

[1] RAID-1 (mirroring) and RAID-10 (striping and mirroring) both create two physical copies of the data. RAID-5 does not, but it allows the loss of a single drive failure — effectively giving you a virtual second copy of the data.

[2] I don’t yet have solid data on how fast reseeds are in real-world conditions, so this number is an educated guess. I do believe, however, it’s a higher rate than what you’d see in most circumstances.

It’s amazing what kind of disruption leaving your job, looking for a new job, and starting to get settled in to a new job can have on your routines. Like blogging. Who knew?

At any rate, I’m back with some cool Exchange blogging. I’ve been getting a chance to dive into a “All-Devin, All-Exchange, All The Time” groove and it’s been a lot of fun, some of the details of which I hope to be able to share with you in upcoming months. In the process, I’ve been building a brand new Exchange 2010 lab environment and ran smack into a myth that seems to be making the rounds among people who are deploying Exchange 2010. This myth gives bum advice for those of you who are deploying an Exchange 2010 DAG and not using an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport as your File Share Witness (FSW). I call it the Exchange Trusted Subsystem Myth, and the first hint of it I see seems to be on this blog post. However, that same advice seems to have gotten around the net, as evidenced by this almost word-for-word copy or this posting that links to the first one. Like many myths, this one is pernicious not because it’s completely wrong, but because it works even though it’s wrong.

If you follow the Exchange product group’s deployment assumptions, you’ll never run into the circumstance this myth addresses; the FSW is placed on an Exchange 2010 HT role in the organization. Although you can specify the FSW location (server and directory) or let Exchange pick a server and directory or you, the FSW share isn’t created during the configuration of the DAG (as documented by fellow Exchange MVP Elan Shudnow and the “Witness Server Requirements” section of the Planning for High Availability and Site Resilience TechNet topic). Since it’s being created on an Exchange server as the second member of the DAG is joined, Exchange has all the permissions it needs on the system to create the share. If you elect to put the share on a non-Exchange server, then Exchange doesn’t have permissions to do it. Hence the myth:

1. Add the FSW server’s machine account to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group.
2. Add the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group to the FSW server’s local Administrators group.

The sad part is, only the second action is necessary. True, doing the above will make the FSW work, but it will also open a much wider hole in your security than you need or want. Let me show you from my shiny new lab! In this configuration, I have three Exchange systems: EX10MB01, EX10MB02, and EX10MB03. All three systems have the Mailbox, Client Access, and Hub Transport roles. Because of this, I want to put the FSW on a separate machine. I could have used a generic member server, but I specifically wanted to debunk the myth, so I picked my DC EX10DC01 with malice aforethought.

• In Figure 1, I show adding the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group to the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01. If this weren’t a domain controller, I could add it to the local Administrators group instead, but DCs require tinkering. [1]

Figure 1: Membership of the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01

• In Figure 2, I show the membership of the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01. No funny business up my sleeve!

Figure 2: Membership of the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group

• I now create the DAG object, specifying EX10DC01 as my FSW server and the C:\EX10DAG01 directory so we can see if it ever gets created (and when).
• In Figure 3, I show the root of the C:\ drive on EX10DC01 after adding the second Exchange 2010 server to the DAG. Now, the directory and share are created, without requiring the server’s machine account to be added to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group.

Figure 3: The FSW created on EX10DC01

I suspect that this bad advice came about through a combination of circumstances, including an improper understanding of Exchange caching of Active Directory information and when the FSW is actually created. However it came about, though, it needs to be stopped, because any administrator that configures their Exchange organization is opening a big fat hole in the Exchange security model.

So, why is adding the machine account to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group a security hole? The answer lies in Exchange 2010’s shift to Role Based Access Control (RBAC). In previous versions of Exchange, you delegated permissions directly to Active Directory and Exchange objects, allowing users to perform actions directly from their security context. If they had the appropriate permissions, their actions succeeded.

In Exchange 2010 RBAC, this model goes away; you now delegate permissions by telling RBAC what options given groups, policies, or users can perform, then assigning group memberships or policies as needed. When the EMS cmdlets run, they do so as the local machine account; since the local machine is an Exchange 2010 server, this account has been added to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group. This group has been delegated the appropriate access entries in Active Directory and Exchange databases objects, as described in the Understanding Split Permissions TechNet topic. For a comprehensive overview of RBAC and how all the pieces fit together, read the Understanding Role Based Access Control TechNet topic.

By improperly adding a non-Exchange server to this group, you’re now giving that server account the ability to read and change any Exchange-related object or property in Active Directory or Exchange databases. Obviously, this is a hole, especially given the relative ease with which one local administrator can get a command line prompt running as one of the local system accounts.

So please, do us all a favor: if you ever hear or see someone passing around this myth, please, link them here.

Busted!

[1] Yes, it is also granting much broader permissions than necessary to make a DC the FSW node. Now the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group is a member of the Domain Admins group. This is probably not what you want to do, so really, don’t do this outside of a demo lab.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding a large number of posts (just over 250!!!) to the archives of this blog. For a number of congruent reasons, 3Sharp is closing down the Platform Services Group (which focused on Exchange, OCS, Windows Server, Windows Mobile, and DPM) and my last day will be this Friday, October 16 after over six and half years with them. With 3Sharp’s gracious permission and blessing, I’ll be duplicating all of the content I’ve posted on the 3Sharp blog server over to here. If you have a link or bookmark for my work blog or are following it via RSS, please take a moment to update your settings. Yes, that means there’s going to be more geeky technical Exchange stuff going forward, but hey, with a single blog to focus on, maybe I’ll be more prolific overall!

To head off some of the obvious questions:

• This is not a horrible thing. 3Sharp and I are parting ways peacefully because it’s the right decision for all of us; they need to focus on SharePoint, and I’m so not a SharePoint person. They’ve done fantastic things for my career and I cherish my time with them, but part of being an adult is knowing when to move on. We’re all agreed that time has come.
• I’m not quite sure where I’m going to end up yet. I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire and I have high hopes for them, but it’s not time to talk about them. I am going to have at least a week or two of time off, which is good; there are several projects at home in dire need of sustained attention (unburying my home office, for one; fixing a balky Exchange account for another).
• I’m not going to be a complete shut-in. I’ve got a couple of appointments for the following week, including a Microsoft focus group and a presentation on PowerPoint for Treanna’s English class. I’m open to doing some short-term independent consulting or contracting work as well, so contact me if you know someone who needs some Exchange help.

Thank you to 3Sharp and the best damn co-workers I could ever hope to work with over the years – and a huge thank you to all of my readers, regardless of which blog you’ve been following. The last several years have been a wild ride, and I look forward to continuing the journey with many of you, even if I’m not sure yet where it will take me.

Stupid website, but it gives me a chance to taunt my co-worker Kevin. This morning I got a puzzled e-mail from him, asking me why this picture of me in Sydney from February (yes, that’s Sydney, Australia; we were there for training for work) was the most-viewed picture in his online galleries (warning, probably not a worksafe gallery). I have no clue, but I think it’s damned funny.

Kevin’s a hard-core picture nerd; he’s got a wireless card for his digital cameras that will automatically use any nearby open WiFi connection to upload pictures to his Web gallery. This means that on a trip he’s usually got pictures uploaded before he gets back to his hotel, let alone before he gets home. That’s pretty cool, even if (like me) you aren’t inclined to take gigabytes of pictures everywhere you go.

Chilling at the conference.

The lovely brownie-tart thingies they fed us today.

My work blogs posts.

 

 

The speaker just said, and I quote, “regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward.”

That’s, um, well, interesting. And wrong.

So, I’m in Sydney for a training conference that I’m talking about in my work blog if you’re interested. There’s a lot of interesting small differences that have more of a mental impact to me than the big ones:

• The exit signs inside buildings are green with white letters. I’m used to the opposite.


• Didn’t find a single country radio station. Of course, this could be because the alarm clock/radio in my hotel room is cheap.


• Speaking of hotel rooms, holy crap are they small! I’m having flashbacks to the really crappy hotel room in London from a couple of years back.


• Did I mention that the hotel rooms have a distinct lack of ornamentation? Very small, very functional, but it feels like living in a cupboard.


• Apartment buildings are painted interesting colors.


• Window dimensions are subtly off.


• They’ve got Taylor Swift’s Teardrops on My Guitar on the muzak system here at the conference center. I noticed an interesting lyrics change: the line “it’s just so funny” is “it’s so damn funny” here. Apparently, in the United Nanny States of America, the terrorist will win if a 17-yo girl says “damn” in a country song.


• The magazine in my hotel room had Nicole Kidman on the cover, but I’ve not yet seen a single mention of Kylie Minogue.


• Speaking of Nicole Kidman, she’s done two movies with Daniel Craig — The Golden Compass and Invasion, which I watched on the plane. Basically another cover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only they wimped out on the ending.

Whoops! Time to go, more later!

In just a few more hours, I’ll be on my way to do something I’ve never done before — cross the equator. I’m just going to kayak down to the big black line floating on top of the ocean, nip across, spin around counter-clockwise, then nip back home.

No, seriously — I’m heading to Sydney, Australia with my cow-orker Kevin to a week-long training conference. I think I might be able to survive the flight. I leave Seattle on the evening of February 2 and land in Sydney on the morning of February 4. By my calculations, that’s nearly 40 hours of time — but due to the vagaries of the International Date Line, I’ll experience far less of that (Sydney’s 16 hours ahead of us). In effect, I will not exist for February 3. That’s right, folks, I’ll be completely non-existent for my 12th wedding anniversary. Don’t worry, though; I’ve been aware of this for long enough to have made (and executed) plans and all the proper observances have been made; Steph will not be shortchanged.

Other than survive my time in time-zone limbo and the grueling plane flight, I’m hoping to meet up with a longtime net.friend and fellow SJGames freelancer and maybe even get to do the Harbour bridge climb. So, if you don’t hear from me for a week, it’s all good — I’m having fun down in the land of the Southern Cross.

Whoa. I just realized, that if I see any stars, they’re going to be totally different.

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.

Big conference, lots of geeks. With two laptops and a Windows Mobile cellphone, I’m not at all unusual here. The conference organizers have wisely established free Wi-Fi for us all.

Well, guys, that’s a great start, but how about you give us some bandwidth? I’ve had faster connections over my old 300 baud modem.
 

First, I would like it to be known that I am only doing this under protest. I don’t usually participate in blog memes, because most of them are damned silly. However, I got tagged on this one by Paul in what looks like a fairly typical spree of spreading the love, so I’ll go ahead and do it.

So here’s the meme, in Paul’s words:

The latest craze sweeping the series of tubes is “5 Things”, a sort of chain letter in which victims participants are supposed to list 5 things that others may not know about them, then pass the baton on to some other people.

And here are my responses:

1. Those folks who read my professional blog (e)Mail Insecurity have already figured it out, but those of you here have probably not heard about it yet. This week, I got the official notice that I had been awarded the the 2007 Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award in the technical community of Microsoft Exchange. Basically, this means that Microsoft has noticed and appreciated the work I’ve done out in the real world (blogging, speaking, writing, spending time on mailing lists) helping people learn about and use Microsoft Exchange Server. It’s has some neat perqs that come with it, including a great network of other MVPs (many of whom I’ve already been blessed to work with over the years) and more direct access to the Exchange product group at Microsoft. Of all the things I’d envisioned for my five-year goals, this wasn’t one of them, and I’m truly blown away that I’ve been selected.


2. Most of you know that my ambition is to be a full-time sf author and have many novels and story ideas in progress. Many of you know that I also enjoy singing and writing music, going so far as to dabble with guitar and keyboard. What almost none of you know (hush, Steph) is that I have the ambition to write and produce my own professional fully-sung Eucharist liturgy (a Christian Communion service, for those of you not up on high church terminology). I’d write it so that the congregation would definitely have parts that they’d join in, but there’d be four main celebrants (SATB, of course) with much harder parts to perform. In my perfect world, I’d be able to entice Jason Michael Carroll, Sting, Alison Krauss, and Sarah McLachlan into performing at the inaugural celebration of the liturgy.


3. Taking a cue from Paul, I had my first paid computer job when I was 12. The secretary at the resort Dad was working at needed someone to do some data entry for her, as they’d just switched her IBM PC from one accounting package to another and she needed to get the accounts receivable data into the new software. IIRC, I was offered the princely (for the time) sum of $8 an hour. We estimated that it would take around 24 hours or so, so I was standing to make quite a decent chunk of change. The first morning, I went into the office, acquainted myself with PC-DOS for the first time, and spent the first four hours doing data entry. When lunch came around, I grabbed the manuals and read them while I ate. I noticed that the new package talked about being able to import data from a variety of programs (none of which was the old package) and formats, so I checked the manual for the old program. Sure enough, it could export to one of those same formats. I backed up the work I’d done so far and tried the export/import. Perfect! You’d think she would be happy, but no — she was quite upset that a 12-year-old had figured this out and somehow made her look bad. She paid me for one single hour of my time — since the actual export/import work had taken one hour and was in a separate data file from the one I’d spent the morning on, she claimed that it was the only work that counted — and that was that.


4. While I grew up in Oregon and have spent the majority of my post-college years in Washington, I am not in fact a native Pacific Northwesterner. My family actually comes from back ’round Wisconsin and Michigan, and we moved out to Corvallis, OR when I was just 11 months old. The Pacific Northwest Native Advisory Board did, in fact, take this into consideration, decided that it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t get my parents to move out here before I was born (and in fact one member of the panel commended me for “extraordinary action in relocating his family while still shy of his first birthday”), and granted me PNW native status anyway. This is good, because if I didn’t have that status, I wouldn’t be able to gripe about the Californians as is the right of all native PNWers.


5. During high school, I participated in an academic competition at our local community college. To fill out an empty time slot so I could take the entire day off, I picked the radio broadcasting competition, since when I was a young lad I used to spend hours in my room with cassette recorders pretending to be a DJ. The next year after the competition, I spoke to the college radio faculty director about doing a 15-minute radio show focused on events at the high school. Suddenly, I found myself gathering information for, recording, and producing a weekly radio show. The poor college DJ who had to run my piece before his own show quickly grew to hate me, as I pushed the envelope of what I could do by including clips of favorite pop songs and completely harshed the mellow of his own show (which was heavy metal, IIRC). I had the complete backing of the faculty director, though, so there wasn’t much he could do. My first year of college, I took radio as a pass/fail credit and continued harshing the mellows of the broadcasting program students; my format, right in the middle of a highly-desired timeslot, was an eclectic combination of news commentary, music selection and experimentation from all genres (there was literally nothing I wouldn’t play), and pure naked listener gratification. I must have been making someone happy, though it wasn’t the “serious” broadcasting students; I enjoyed a constant high level of feedback from the surrounding community. Again, that kept The Powers That Be from stepping in and messing with my groove.

I’ll just note here, for the record, that I’m only doing this because I already have a couple of things I wanted to blog about and I can twist this meme to my service. The fact that I’ve been needing to update here is just extra gravy. The fact that one of my other co-victims needs to actually fix his blog server before he can respond just makes me feel better about the whole thing.

And now on to my victims, which is the hard part. I’ve been seeing this meme running around the tubes for a while, so anyone who hasn’t already done it is either less connected than I am or just as likely as I am to say “Poppycock!” at the whole concept and just not participate. With that caveat in mind….

….I choose you, Alistair, Andrew, Brian, Nick, and Steph (in alphabetical order so no ranking is implied).

Oy vey. We’ve been Slashdotted.

Let’s see if our T-1 and web server can hold up. 

Today, my company released a report comparing several anti-phishing technologies, including a beta version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. I note this because I was one of the researchers and authors of the report. Needless to say, we’re already catching a lot of flack in the press because we scored IE7 the highest of the various products.

Many of you have heard my opinion of IE6 (I switched to Firefox back in the 0.4 timeframe). I just want to say that through my exposure to IE7 as gained through the testing for this project, I ended up switching back to IE7. I’m now using IE7 RC1 as my main web browser, and slowly converting my mass of Firefox bookmarks back over to IE7 RSS feeds and favorites (as appropriate).

So, make of that what you will.
 

Not fond of Mondays in theory or in practice. Even with all the things that have gone right today, I’m still pretty cheesed off about today:

• Getting up at 5:20 so I could be on the road before rush hour and into the office early: good.
• Having to shift back into the office: enh. We’ll call this a draw.
• Forgetting the box with my laptops, thus necessitating a second round-trip: bad.
• Having to deal with my schedule and a new dentist to take care of the tooth (top front left) I broke on Friday: bad.
• Having a co-worker make repeated references to my broken tooth, laughing and saying it makes me look like a hick: very bad.

You know, dude, the first time you laugh at how my broken tooth makes me look like a redneck, then apologize because it was insensitive, I’ll give it to you for free. When you go on to say it again and keep laughing…

…why was I moving back into the office again? Oh, yeah, to increase my productivity and help re-integrate me into the team. Newsflash: I feel so integrated right now.

Just for reference, the previous sentence was sarcasm and not to be read literally.

The current project I’m on at work? I’ve decided it needs a new name. I’m henceforth calling it Operation Zeno’s Paradox.

You know you’re in trouble when you’ve finally found a solution to a
roadblock that is keeping you from finishing a major portion of your
project, serendipity has dropped a convenient piece of hardware in your
lap with which to effect this solution, and then in order to ensure
that your day of brilliance is turned into wasted effort — not to
mention stalling your continued hopes of forward progress — that
hardware blows up. And spectacularly, I might add. I’ve seen power supplies blow up before, but never as enthusiastically as this. Huge clouds of white smoke pouring from the machine.

My first thought was literally, “Wow. I knew somebody didn’t want me to finish this project, but this
is a little much.” Then I sighed, calmed Treanna down (she was standing
two feet away from the machine at the time), and hauled the now-carcass
of a computer back to 3Sharp to rebuild.

Let’s hope the redeployment goes more smoothly, yes?

I hate putting in long hours to compensate for fucked-up technology. Even before my laptops bit the big one, I was having problems with one of them. Since then, they’ve gotten a lot more flaky because I haven’t had the time to migrate all of my data, pare down the cruft and crap, and perform fresh clean installs.

So instead, I get to put up with a piece of shit that insists on dropping a vital network connection at random and inconvenient times, which of course cannot merely be restarted as I’m supposed to be able to do, but requires me to save all of my data and reboot the damn thing. This is the third time in less than an hour I’ve had to reboot this bastard. I’m already depressed about this project to begin with, and running hard against a deadline. I don’t need the additional stress and aggravation of a laptop that’s trying to get me to blow my fuse.

Message to my T30: Just. Fucking. Work. I’ve not been working my ass off and dealing with all of the other bullshit I’ve had to, I’ve not been stressing over my complete and spectacular lack of stellar performance at work on this project, I’ve not been worrying about getting fired just so I can be sabotaged by a Thinkpad with delusions of Dellhood.

I’m home from Europe a couple of days early; I was originally supposed to be in Oslo today, doing a second presentation, but I got really sick once I got to London and my bosses couldn’t take the chance I wouldn’t be better (sorry, Jim, for making you go to Oslo!). Lisbon was interesting. Paul talks about it a bit and relates some of the interesting bits of what happened there, but I have a couple of comments to add:

• I was less than thrilled to find that they seem not to serve straight orange juice, but like to mix in other things. From the one sip I had my first morning, those other things might include pineapple, which would have been a huge problem for me.
  
• The steak was awesome. The bacon was not, and the McDonald’s burger just didn’t taste like real beef.
  
• Walking on the sidewalks was an interesting experience. First, they were pretty narrow — combined with narrow streets and fast city drivers, it made it feel like you were taking your life in your own hands on certain streets. Next, they were cobbled with irregular stones, and the resulting surface wasn’t at all level. Added strain to my feet.
  
• I found out on Monday afternoon that my track (Exchange 2007 for the IT Pro) was in the main auditorium. It was a big auditorium, and there were a lot of people who had signed up for it. It seemed to go well, though; I got a good laugh from my intro joke and a lot of good feedback.

Being sick sucks. Being sick in a foreign country in a shoddy hotel really bites. And I was pretty out of it — the only reason I wasn’t in more serious trouble is that a couple of college friends (Mickie and Jen) were at the same hotel and keeping an eye out for me.

I’d been planning on going and staying with Jen and her husband Rich in Harrogate (up by York) on the weekend anyway, but instead of going back to London Sunday night I just stayed a couple of extra days and got better. It was definitely the right thing to do; the area right around Kings Cross station (where my dodgy hotel was) was a bit grimy and depressing.

The highlight of my trip was going to York on Sunday. I still wasn’t fully up to speed, so we focused on the Minster (the giant cathedral there; I’d been planning on trying to catch Sunday services there, but we didn’t get out the door quite on time and I didn’t feel like hanging around for the Evensong service at 4pm). That is a lovely cathedral. I now plan on going back there with the family at some point.

I’ve not been blogging much lately because I’ve been buried under a ton of work. One of the things I’ve been busy with has been developing a full day of content on Exchange 2007 to present in Lisbon (May 30th) and Oslo (June 8th).

Astu Are thte readers will have noticed the timestamp of this entry, done some math, and realized that I’m probably not in the US anymore. Those readers would be correct. I’m sitting in one of the food courts (near the B and C concourses) of the Amsterdam Schipol airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Lisbon in just under three hours.

This is my first international flight, and other than some business trips to Hawaii, my first time off the North American continent. Since I’m sorta wiped out and still have work to do before I take off, I’ll share just a short list of observations (in no particular order):

• Airports look like airports, no matter where you are.
  
• I’d not realized exactly how much I appreciated the US airport (and Washington state) total ban on smoking until, halfway through my meal, the nice people at the next desk lit up.
  
• What’s up the the “T” gates (Transfer) they have here? What are those for? They look like ticket counters…but surely you buy your tickets ahead of time, not hop-by-hop, right? Are they an Amsterdam peculiarity, or are they an EU thing?
  
• Wifi providers here are just as willing to take adavantage of your wallet as they are in the US.
  
• Amsterdam is flat. Really flat.
  
• You don’t hear announcers in US airports naming specific people for specific flights, telling them that they are delaying the flight and threatening to offload their luggage. You do here.
  
• They have a Star Wars Transformer in one of the toy shops here. No shit. Anakin’s Jedi Starfighter turns into a fighting Jedi mecha. Who knew? And it’s using the real Transformer brandname — has the trademarked “More than meets the eye” tagline and everything.

I might do more later, if I’m not complete tapioca after 17 hours of travel plus an afternoon of session prep.

I have to acquire some Microsoft certifications in a short amount of
time. Not a full MCSE, although that’s always been in the gameplan, but
at least one passed exam (and thus Microsoft Certified Professional
status) from a specific list of exams, Real Soon Now. And hey, if I’m
going to go into MCSE Study Monkey Mode (MSMM), I might as well do it
right and get my MCSE out of it, yes? Then I can worry about getting
some of the hard, security related certs.

So I’ve been cracking the books and taking practice exams. For the
most part, I know the material — if I didn’t have to worry about
finishing ebook chapters and developing talks for Exchange Connections,
I could easily have my MCSE within the next couple of months — I just
have to learn Microsoft-think. Most of my errors on my practice exams
so far have been because I haven’t acquired the particular mental
shorthand the tests expect you to have. Example: one of the Exchange
questions I hit asked you to select, from a list of tasks, the three
tasks you needed to complete to install Exchange in a certain scenario with the least amount of administrative effort.
It turns out the three tasks were all concerned with making sure the
account you were installing from had the proper permissions. I missed
one of those permissions because I selected the task where you ran two
particular pre-installation routines (Exchange admins know them as ForestPrep and DomainPrep).
I’ve been dealing with convoluted Exchange organizations for so long
now that manually running those steps has become second nature and I
just plain forgot that if you have the correct permissions on your
account, the Exchange installer will automatically perform those steps
for you when you install the first Exchange server. I missed two
questions because of that particular thinko. Le sigh.

It’s all good, though; I’m confident I’ll be able to get a decent
set of successful exams under my belt in the next couple of weeks and
be well on my way to my MCSE cert (seven exams required, with two more
if I want the messaging competency, which I do). And since we had to
run into Redmond today (I needed to swing by the office and grab some
software I need for a couple of current projects), we swung by the
British Pantry, a neat little shop that sells all sorts of great
British items including food and beverages. The Strongbow cider is hawesome (don’t know about hawesome yet? This blog entry from Nickerblog
should help), and even the Newcastle Brown Ale (which I bought on the
advice of a British gent who admitted it’s crap beer but spun a funny
enough story about it that I agreed with his conclusion that it was
worth trying at least once) was far tastier than American beer. (When
he said it was less than stellar beer, I replied that I was used to
that, being an American.) Clearly, I must tour the UK and sample their
beers when even their crap beers taste better than the horsepiss we’ve
got here.

Oh, for those who know, my homebrew experiment failed utterly, so
there will be no tasting parties in the near future. I’m not sure if
I’m going to sink another $65 into getting supplies for a second
attempt, so we’ll have to see what happens. There might be some
alternatives — or I could just drop the whole project altogether. I
need another vice at this point like I need another hole in my forehead.

Today was a day of mileposts.

It was my first working day of 2006. Because Paul and I got our various projects wrapped up before vacation, I went into the 3Sharp offices and spent a good part of my day doing something I’ve never done before — pack up my office. No, we’re not moving locations, and yes, I’m still with 3Sharp. However, we’re getting tight on office space and since my average in-office time over the last year has probably been close to one day a week, I realized it was going to be a lot less disruption if I offered to give up my nice one-person office and officially move everything to my home office. It made all sorts of sense, but I found myself feeling very uncomfortable getting the first couple of boxes packed up until I realized that my only previous experiences with packing up my office were at the end of a job, not switching locations while staying employed. Once I realized that, the rest of the packing went a lot more smoothly.

Today was also the day I won my first Texas Hold’em tournament. One of the local bars hosts a couple of freelocalpoker.com tournaments every Tuesday and a friend and I checked them out last November. Now that the anti-smoking law has kicked in here in Washington, I can go play without coming home reeking, so I showed up tonight for the 9:30 game. We had ten players — a smaller turnout than normal, even though the later game is usually a bit smaller than the 6:30 game — so we all crowded around a single table. Two hours later, I was the proud possessor of a $15 gift certificate for the bar. Not only that, I’d earned the bounty (extra points received for being the player to knock the previous winner out of the game). Unlike previous games (where I can remember all the hands I lost all too clearly) I don’t remember much; the only hand that really sticks out is the hand where another player and I both got a straight and split the pot. There are bits and pieces of the rest of the game, but I have no idea how I won. I do remember (if my math is correct) that I knocked out five people — I had a couple of hands near the end where two players had gone all-in, so when I won those hands, I knocked out two players at once.

Finally, today was Steph’s birthday. And now that she’s gotten her nose out of the new Honor Harrington book I got for Christmas, she gets the rest of my attention before sleep time.

Chapter 3 of my DCAR ebook is now online, details on my work blog. If you need to read about these things, enjoy.

If you’re wondering what I’m going to be up to this spring, wonder no more! Get thee hence to the Looking forward to Exchange Connections Spring 2006 post on my work blog and find out!

This last week (Monday through Thursday), I was in San Diego for the Windows/Exchange Connections conference. It was my first Connections conference as well as my first trip to San Diego.

San Diego was a nice town; it reminded me somewhat of Honolulu with enough elbow room. Mind you, I didn’t see too much of the city; we were at the Hyatt down on the water, only a couple of blocks away from the Midway memorial (a two-hour tour that I didn’t get time to take). What I did see, though, was fairly clean and had character. I met up with Mickie and one of her local friends for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory on Monday night and can report that Californian drivers are still nuts. Although I did notice that both of the taxi drivers I used drove perfectly well — signals, ample lane-change space, slowing to let people merge — and showed signs of sanity I’ve not seen in taxi drivers anywhere else. Apparently the combination of California + taxi driver undoes the evil of both stigmas.

The conference went well; check out my work blog for more specific information on things I did and saw (I’ve written parts one and two so far, with probably two more on the way).

Both kids woke up with an excess of phlegm, so we kept them home from school today. Sounds like a good day for them to work on updating their web sites and blogs, especially since I just handed out the URLs to the members of my family.

In other news, Microsoft has produced printed versions of one of the solutions I worked on in 2004, the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 Threat Mitigation Guide. They’ve printed quite a few of the solutions produced by this group. Printed copies are $5 from the Microsoft web site.

Also, Chapter 2 of my ebook on DCAR (discovery, compliance, archival, and retention) is now up for download. All in all, a busy week. I’m very thankful for this project; I just got my first payment last weekend and it means Christmas shopping is going to go much easier this year.

It’s a Monday. With a vengeance.

Work has been better, the car needs $1K+ in repairs soonish, some personal projects have been hit with unfortunate and untimely delays that I really didn’t need right now, oh no, and I’m stressed beyond all belief.

I really just want to stop coping and have a full-scale meltdown. Preferably in front of the idiot psych dude at UW who said there was no way I could be Asperger’s because I’d managed to stay married. I have news for you, Psych Dude — my marriage is one of the few stable things in my life and it gives me the strength to cope with all of the rest. And even then, there are days where it’s a near thing.

Where do I find the spiritual and emotional equivalent of bailing wire and duct tape? My supply is running out fast.

DCAR (Discovery, Compliance, Archival, and Retention) is a big topic these days. I’ve done some work with 3Sharp in this space, and I have been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to write an ebook for Windows IT Pro on the topic.

The first chapter is now available for free download with registration; the remaining chapters will be coming out over the next few months. So if this is something that interests you, feel free to go take a look.

I just got off of a weekly conference call for a biggish project we’ve been working on. We’ve had some unfortunate changes lately that have impacted the scope of the project in a fashion that would not be exaggeration to call “dramatic”. One of those changes dumped a fairly involved and possibly gnarly piece of work square in my lap, which of course left everyone else free to not worry about it. Instead, they’re all worrying about the other major change of scope.

As is my wont, I was blowing off steam by IMing one of the other participants in the call and mentioning that the only reason I’m not stressing about Major Change #2 is that I’ve got to focus on Major Change #1 or I’ll be completely overwhelmed (and in all honestly, I’m almost there just with Major Change #1). The response I got was this:

eat one elephant @ a time

That about sums it up perfectly. Now to find my elephant fork…

Um, Missy dear, what exactly have you been telling the fine Exchange ladies and gentlemen about me? I’m taking an incredible ration of shit from the assorted suspects and they keep mentioning your name. And Tom, your name has gotten taken in vain more than once.

And for the record, my kilt shows off what a stud I am. Disagree all you want, but a certain luscious redhead says so and she trumps.

That is all.

I’m staying up late to get a paper done for work. While I’d rather not pull late nights and long days, in reality I have an extremely high amount of flexibility and self-determination in the day-to-day details of my job. The flip side of that coin, however, is that I keep that freedom as long as I produce the deliverables I have been assigned by my deadlines. Having the freedom to take a bit longer lunch break and go on a walk with my wife, or work from home, or not have set hours that I have to be in front of the computer working, means that I have in turn committed to putting in the time to get stuff done.

In a way, I think I would do superficially better with a more strict office regimen, but I think my production would suffer accordingly. (One of my bosses seems to agree; last time I was in the office and we chatted, he mentioned that he’s seen my productivity climb noticeably since I’ve been working from home again). Not having to toe the line means I don’t have any excuses for bad performance. The end result is that I’m developing routines and better work habits because I want them, in order to avoid late nights and long hours. It’s an ongoing process.

Every now and then, my late nights have an unexpected side benefit. A few minutes ago, I heard what sounded like a heck of a catfight in progress out in my carport. After it continued for a few minutes, I realized that, no, it sounded like a dog — some small yappy thing — and a cat. I got a flashlight and went outside to break it up. At this point, I’m in pajamas and sandals.

About 10 seconds after I get outside, the flashlight is useless. Great, dead batteries. The dog is cowering directly under our car, giving out weird yips. It’s been hurt, I think, and I have a momentary fleeting sense of admiration for the cat (since I really don’t like small dogs and I love cats). But something is breathing very heavily, and I realize that it’s not the dog. So I walk around to the end of the car to take a look, because I’m starting to get the bad feeling what we’ve got is a poodle getting beat up by an enraged possum. Sure enough, I get around to the end of the car and look on the other side (still waving the useless flashlight, because it is large and has a comforting weight), and there’s a large shadowy figure that’s too large to be a cat. This thing is panting and hissing and is paying absolutely no attention to me; it’s fixed on the tasty treat that is probably busily pissing itself all over the concrete underneath my Ford Focus.

It’s about this time that I finally realize what is really going on.

I’ve wandered into the middle of two very pissed off, fighting raccoons. I’m standing out in my carport with a dead flashlight in plaid flannel pajamas and open-foot sandals at 3:30am in easy striking range of two big, nasty, energized scavengers who are more than willing to take a swipe at me if they feel that’s their best way out of danger. A year or two ago, we had a raccoon get treed in our yard; when the cops came to deal with it, the not-so-little bastard charged one of them. These are junk-fed raccoons with a sense of entitlement. So what the heck am I going to do?

Okay, yes, I spent a couple of seconds wishing I’d followed my impulse to grab my thick quarterstaff before coming outside. At least then I’d have a long stout stick to try to beat them with and gain precious seconds before my toes get gnawed off by the rabid little berserker sizing me up from the driver’s side of my car. And then I decided turnabout was fair play and started yelling at them. I wasn’t yelling too loudly — I really didn’t want to wake the neighbors up — but it was enough to get their attention. The raccoon under the car stopped his “Shit, I’m BLEEDING!” yipping while his opponent looked over at me and growled even more loudly (don’t worry, buddy, I don’t care if you beat him up, just go do it in someone else’s yard) as if to say, “Zip it, you wimp.” I refused to be cowed (and here’s where I do NOT believe myself) and even stepped closer to him.

At that point, he backed up. Trapped Raccoon saw this as a great opportunity and took off like the fat waddling bastard he was, running to his freedom across my front lawn. Mean Raccoon is justifiably pissed at this turn of events; garbage day was a couple of days earlier, so pickings have probably been slim for the past few days and here some dork in pajamas just chased off his midnight snack. He and I get into a real macho staring match; he’s growling and telling me nasty things about my parents while I’m doing my best crazy Walter impression trying to break his nerve. Eventually, he realizes there’s no point in standing there arguing with me; I’m too big to eat and Trapped Raccoon has a heck of a head start. He finally breaks off and heads back around the back of the house. Within a minute, I hear the fight break out again, but this time it’s a running fight that is half a block down and moving farther away all the time.

Mission accomplished. Crap, that was some adrenaline.

I just shipped the first draft of Chapter 7 “Routing, Transport, and SMTP” of The Exchange Cookbook to my editor and co-authors. I wrote this chapter entirely by myself. It started off with 47 recipes (including the introduction); final size was 27 recipes. Many of the missing 20 were duplicates of either recipes in other chapters, belonged better in other chapters, or could be added in with existing recipes in chapter 7. Only a few got dropped because of time pressures.

It was a ton of work. I have a lot more respect for technical authors.

Now comes all the revising and technical reviews…but the draft is done!

Put Steph to bed a couple of hours ago and came back downstairs to finish up a recipe or two for the Exchange Cookbook, which I am co-writing with some awesome co-workers, and which is way behind schedule. When researching one particular twist got me frustrated, I dropped over to Yahoo!’s Launch website and fired up some streaming music videos in the background.

Holy crap, dude.

Found out that Lindsay Lohan — that precocious red-head who did a pretty good job of filling Hayley Mills’s shoes in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap a few years back — is doing the “Disney girl” thing and has a record album out, and one of her music videos (Rumors) has hit the top of the various countdowns. Decided to watch it.

For those of you on slow connections, let me save you the trouble; Ms. Lohan has put out a video that pretty much leaves her marching squarely down the trail of rebellion, “strong woman” independence, and barely-legal sluttishness that Britney Spears has perfected to a tee. The song isn’t too bad — certainly better than Britney’s recent efforts — but it’s tired and trite.

However, I’m not writing to rant about yet another 18 year-old sexpot turning out crap music videos. What scared me was that I remember seeing Ms. Lohan for the first time in 1998. The Parent Trap was one of Treanna and Alaric’s favorite videos for a long time, largely because of Lindsay’s performance. She was a spunky kid, and when Steph and I saw Mean Girls earlier this year, I thought she’d managed to hang on to that wholesome appeal while growing up and making the transition to being a young woman rather than a kid. But I was still thinking of her as “that kid.” She’s not — she grew up, with a vengeance, and now she’s definitely proven (to me at least) she’s not a kid anymore.

I’m just old enough — and just enough of a parent — to want to yell at her to put some clothes back on already, dammit! Because Treanna is almost 8, you see, and Alaric is 6, and it wasn’t all that long ago they were watching Lindsay’s debut. They are growing up, fast. Treanna’s going to become one of those hotties overnight; Alaric is going to be noticing the hotties (and getting some notice back from them) all too soon. If I’m doing my job, they’ll have good heads on their shoulders and will be better prepared than most of their peers, but they’re still going to get to a point where I’m cheering from the sidelines.

Bah. I should go to bed.

Oh, yeah — hot damn, Boston, what got into you? As long as it wasn’t the Yankees, I suppose it’s okay (but don’t tell the guys at work I said that, because I’m going to get really sick of their boasting about the Sox over the next year. Imigrants to the Pacific Northwest are okay until their hometown teams win; then they become annoying), but give a guy some warning, willya?

So why did I decide I needed my own blog? How come LiveJournal wasn’t enough?

• Well, I’m not terribly keen on LiveJournal’s interface, to tell the truth. I like having categories, since I write about a lot of different things. I like that you, the reader, have the choice to only read certain posts that interest you instead of the boring ones too.


• I like having the server bits to play with. When my stuff breaks, I usually know how to fix it (or choose not to fix it for a time). When LJ breaks or gets clogged, I’m hostage.


• I’m somewhat vain. I think I’m interesting enough that people will keep reading, especially once I get the XML syndication working so that my LJ friends don’t miss a thing.


• I already am scattered across multiple blogs, and I like the trackback feature that real blogs offer.

So, what other blogs am I on?

• At the Sharp End — my work blog, which is being discontinued as we switch to our new .Text blog server.


• 3Sharp blogging community — my new .Text work blog. Mine is http://blogs.3sharp.com/Blog/deving


• The Exchange Cookbook — the blog for the book I’m co-authoring, being published by O’Reilly and Associates.


• My O’Reilly author blog — a side effect of the book I’m co-authoring.

I’m almost ashamed to point to these blogs because I post to them so infrequently, but perhaps I can harness that shame into actually using them and posting to them. However, I just posted something new to my 3Sharp blog, so go read that.