New gig–On the Water Front

Monday I started a new gig as the Senior Exchange dood at Clearwire. I am in their Kirkland office for now, until the IT operations group moves to a new office in Factoria. The office in Kirkland is right on the water so I have a great view for the next few weeks before we move. The downside about being in Kirkland is that the office is packed so I am sitting with a laptop on the corner of someone’s desk – Check the two pictures above to get an idea

Things I miss already – no more free soda, no more picking a café to walk to for lunch, my team at Microsoft was awesome, and working at Microsoft in general

Things I like so far – I have enterprise admin rights again, I got fully setup my first day, I’ve already had an impact here and been able to do work, I get to work from home one day a week, my team here seems to be brilliant, I get free internet service, my cell phone is paid for he free legal service seems to be better.

Yesterday I worked on an Outlook Free/busy issue we solved by removing an Exchange server. It is great to have rights and power to fix things!! Speaking of Exchange servers and power. Check out the mighty power of my fully operational Mailbox battle servers. 16 cores, and 98GB or ram.

Wore Pants

I was forced to wear pants for a few hours yesterday. It was a tragic event. This is two times in a weeks time that I had to wear pants. Once for Clint at his wedding, and Again for this thing at ClearWire -  both events should be worth the effort in the long run.

Slope of Disillusionment

My new favorite PowerPoint slide – The slope of Disillusionment.

Followed by a brief outline of some of the major events for the next 12 days of my life – I don’t sit still much, and by the looks of it I am going to spend a lot of time driving over the next few weeks.

Tonight – Work till 4, then take Michelle out shopping – Come home and build servers

Tomorrow – Head to the PO for a party – Finish  “Go live Zebra” server work in the PO

Saturday – Come home to my baby, and move Kevin out

Sunday – Head back to the PO for Clint’s wedding.

Monday – Counseling with Bruce and Trenton

Tuesday – Court maybe – Hope we can avoid it, need to call – Sailing BBQ thing in Ballard

Wednesday – Zebra launch catch up

Friday – Cruise on Lake Washington for Seafair

Saturday – Get Trenton again – Plan a fun weekend

Sunday – Back to the PO to take Trenton home

Blocking the IPhone Part I

My employer has decided to block all IOS4 Iphone devices and not allow them to touch our Exchange servers. This is due to some issues that IOS4 is causing performance wise. We are requiring customers to upgrade to IOS4.0.1. IOS4.0.1 contains updates for several issues, including a configuration patch needed for IoS4 devices to successfully use Exchange ActiveSync line. Apple confirmed the problem and remediation offered by IOS 4.0.1 in the Apple KB TS3398. I sent the below message to my co-workers to help them generate a list of devices to provide to their customers.  I think the table is the most valuable bit of information, and it’s the reason I am posting this post.

Basic email I sent out

You can use the following information to provide your customers a list of potential IOS4 devices. Note that the DeviceUserAgent setting is ONLY set when the device partnership is first created. So devices that show as IOS3 from this command could be IOS4 now; look at the age of the partnership. We’ll need to communicate this note with our customers

Replace guapo in the command below with the OU of your customer, and run this command..

Get-CASMailbox -OrganizationalUnit "guapo" -Filter {hasactivesyncdevicepartnership -eq $true -and -not displayname -like "CAS_{*"} | Get-Mailbox | foreach { Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics -Mailbox $_} |export-csv bob.csv

Reference table for DeviceUserAgent translation.

IOS Ver	Phone HW	DeviceUserAgent
3	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/701.341
3.1	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/703.144
3.2	iPad	Apple-iPad/702.367
4	iPod	Apple-iPod2C1/801.293
4	iPod	Apple-iPod3C1/801.293
4	iPhone 3G	Apple-iPhone1C2/801.293
4	iPhone  3GS	Apple-iPhone2C1/801.293
4	iPhone  4	Apple-iPhone3C1/801.293
4.1	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/508.11
3.0.1	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/701.400
3.1.2	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/704.11
3.1.3	iPhone	Apple-iPhone/705.18
4.0.1	iPod	Apple-iPod2C1/801.306
4.0.1	iPod	Apple-iPod3C1/801.306
4.0.1	iPhone 3G	Apple-iPhone1C2/801.306
4.0.1	iPhone  3GS	Apple-iPhone2C1/801.306
4.0.1	iPhone 4	Apple-iPhone3C1/801.306

My Brain is Pissing me Off

Michelle and I have been doing a halfarse job of learning Spanish for the better part of 8 months or so now. We’ve been using Rosetta stone on the treadmill, Pimsleur in the car, getting tips and such from Marty, and what ever else sounds good as a learning tool. I think we’ve both picked up maybe a 100 words and we are starting to understand the basics. For me this is not fast enough and it is starting to annoy me. In June we kicked up the game another notch. We dedicated some time and enrolled in night classes at the local community college. We’re taking Spanish 1 and 2 this summer. Slowly but surely we are on our way.

What I’ve come to realize about my brain that is driving me nuts, is I don’t seem to have a gift for languages like I do other mental stuff. Ask me about that BES thing I read in an email 2 months ago and I can reread the document to you from memory. Ask me how to say the Spanish word you taught me 5 seconds ago and it is gone from my mine. I hope the language part of my brain is just under worked and I can get it in better shape the more I use it. I don’t want to deal with a part of my brain running like this.

It’s a very odd thing for me to have to actually have to work at something to learn. Normally I am a human sponge with a photographic memory and I learn things at lighting fast speeds, and I don’t forget much. Give me an IP address and I can recall it when ever I need it after seeing and or typing it once.  Yesterday I learned how to the type the accents on an English 101 keyboard. I can recall this and write the directions without error. I can remember the rules about where to add the accent, but I cannot remember what the letters with the accent are called. Mutter.

There might be a better way to do this but the following is how I’ve learned to add accentos when using Microsoft Word. It’s something I remember from the top of my head after reading it once and writing it once.

• The upside down Question mark ”¿” | is CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+? . Outside of word you can use ALT + the ACSI TEXT number. ALT + 168 is the upside-down Question mark ( Yes I can recall this off the top of my head after only reading about it once, I can even lookup parts of the table in my brain from when I learned it a decade ago)
• Vowels like áéó | to type vowel letters with accento you hold down CTRL, Press the apostrophe, let go of both keys then type the letter. 
• ñ |  For the ñ you hold down CTRL+SHIFT, hit the ~ button, let go, then type the N. Or you can use ASCI ALT + 164

Seriously I can remember the ASCI codes for things but I cannot remember the word for Mirror and I’ve been reading the label on my mirror for a week now every time I am in the bathroom. Actually I can look at the mirror in a picture in my head and read the word from memeory it enough to type it or use it once, but I cannot recall the word as I can other words in my lexicon.  Once I stop looking at the picture in my head I forget the word.

Brains are such odd things. I think for my next Spanish learning tool I am going to use some Mnemosyne stuff.