OnQ

On Backups

Today I remembered once again why I love backups. I opened my QuickBooks file and found, to my horror, that my Accounts Receivable window had eaten all entries after December 12, 2006. Even though my bank balance looked OK, I'd lost all the invoices that have been entered for 2006, and a few for 2005.

Was that the end of my world? Heck no.

I fired up my Mac backup utility, restored the file that had been backed up the night before, opened it, and all my QuickBooks happiness had returned.

How much did this backup utility cost me? Zilch. It is included as part of my .Mac account. Did I get a good return on my investment? Absolutely. How many hours did I save of trying to re-enter my Invoices (I create PDFs of every invoice because I e-mail them to clients)? I can't even begin to think.

It's something simple, but every once in a while you run across a situation like this where having a backup saves your backside. And this wasn't even a 'disaster' in that sense of the word (although me losing my QuickBooks data would have been disastrous for me).

Don't quiver. Just backup. Just do it. Trust me.

On Transitions

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems. So it's been with moving my web services. Not that Vlad has been problematic, oh heck no. He's been great. It's my former web hosting provider. So here I am, two weeks later, and I still have yet to get that other domain moved over.

This one has been running along just fine, thank you, I've just been slow to post blog updates. They weren't kidding when they warned me about the SBS MVP mailing list...

On MVP

Yesterday, on my birthday, I was bestowed with a great honor. I was named an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) by Microsoft in recognition of the work I've done in the Small Business Server community over the past year. On the one hand, I'm thrilled to have my contributions recognized in this way by the community, and I'm very proud that I'll be able to add the MVP initials to my name over the next year. On the other hand, I'm still dumbfounded that I've been added to such an elite group of experts in the small business community. Seeing the MVP in my title may have some people think that I'm an equal with the other MVPs who belong to the SBS group. I certainly dont' think that way. I have the utmost admiration for the other members of the SBS MVP community, and I know I'll have to work even harder to live up to the expectations that the title implies.

Thanks to those who nominated me for this award, and thanks to Microsoft for researching the nomination and giving me the award anyway. It was a wild year in 2005. I can only imagine what 2006 will bring.

On Documentation

While getting caught up on some billing and administrative whatnot this weekend, I ran across a few items that I wanted to review when they came up, but just didn't have the time. Fortunately, I had saved them for later review, which means about 4 times a year I'll go through the archive and do a quick scan through all the stuff that's collected there and usually end up deleting most of it.

There was a common theme I picked up when going through the pile this weekend, and it's definitely worthy of a blog post, if not a whack from Susan's famous 2x4.

Technicians look at errors and use them to find solutions to problems.
Good technicians document these errors for later review.
Great technicians share this documentation with others so that they can avoid reinventing the wheel.

Here's what I mean:

For the past two years, I've been participating in the SBS public newsgroups, the forums on smallbizserver.net, and several mailing lists. By participating, I mean that I've been responding to posts/messages/whatever, trying to help those who have submitted pleas for help. [Granted, I've been a lot less active in the newsgroups of late, spending more time in the forums at smallbizserver.net, but that's another story.] And by no means am I the only person doing so. A great number of people in the SBS community do this as well, especially the MVPs. The great thing about the newsgroups and the forums at smallbizserver.net is that Google indexes them both, so it's fairly easy to find a post or response to an issue with a simple Google search. The experienced folks in the community know this. Folks new to the community usually figure it out fairly quickly.

Anyway, I ran across a couple of messages this past weekend that exemplify the point I'm trying to make. While these may seem self-serving at first, that's not what I'm trying to get at. There are hundreds of examples of this throughout the community. I just happened to notice these because they've got my name attached to them.

Example #1: A post to one of the SBS mailing lists where the author noted that he found the solution to his problem by Googling the error and finding a solution I had posted in one of the newsgroups.

Example #2: A post on a rather famous blog where the author noted that she found the solution to her problem by Googling the error and finding a solution I had posted in one of the newsgroups.

OK, so it was the same newsgroup post that was the answer to both issues, but the point is the same. Because I posted the specific errors and the solution in the message, someone else who had the same problem was able to find the solution by searching on the error. I try to do that whenever possible for exactly this reason. Even if the error and the solution aren't in the same post, in the case of newsgroup postings or message threads on smallbizserver.net, you can generally scan through the thread returned by the search and find the solution, if it's been put in there.

When working with my clients, I try to get them to write down the specific errors they see, word for word, to help me find the solution more quickly. I then document those errors in my internal database for future reference. For the more interesting errors/solutions, I'll create blog posts or post to the newsgroups or mailing lists or whatnot. The bottom line, if I've run across a problem, chances are someone else might hit it, too, and if I can get information on a fix out there in some way that will help someone else find and fix the problem quickly, then why not?

Now, to the real reason for this post - it's from an older post on Susan's blog, but the sentiment cannot be reiterated enough. Down at the bottom of the post, Susan has this to say:

Calling into Product Support Services means that the issue will now be documented, my SRX case will be filed and the next time someone hits this issue it will be known immediately and that person fixed right up.

And she's exactly right. One of the key reasons that the folks on the CSS support lines are so successful is that they have a great internal knowledgebase to look up errors and find previous cases where those errors were reported and the solutions that fixed them. This is not intended in any way to detract from the technical abilities of those working the line. I know a number of those folks, and they're some of the best in the business. But there's a reason they ask for the exact errors that you see and often request complete log files and other troubleshooting data. That's so they can look to see if other cases have reported this information and find the documented fix for it. But more importantly, if your issue, like the one Susan discussed in the post, is unique and one that they haven't run across before, they can get it documented so that the next time someone calls in with the error, the solution can be found and delivered quickly.

So, two notions to wrap up this post. First, if you participate in the public forums, either requesting or providing troubleshooting, be sure to provide sufficient details about the errors and solutions so that both can be Googled. I can't tell you how many times I've run across the solution to a problem within the first two hits from a Google search.

Second, if you spend more than 15 minutes Googling a problem and can't find a workable solution, pick up the phone and call CSS. If they've already got the solution in their systems, you'll likely be back up and running fairly quickly (of course, that depends on the nature of the error, but you already know that so I won't dwell on that here). If they don't, once they do get the solution, it will be documented and available for future callers who may have the same situation.

But the bottom line is this: document, document, document. If you don't have the documentation, you're going to have a harder time navigating to the solution.

On smallbizserver.net

If you haven't been to the smallbizserver.net site, you must be living under a rock. I have it right up there next to Susan Bradley's blog as the two best places to get information and answers about Small Business Server.

If you haven't been to the site since December 10, then you've missed the following announcement that was also posted to the SBS 2003 public newsgroup:

"As per December we are proud to announce that Eriq Neale is now part of the Smallbizserver.Net Remote Support Team. Eriq is known for his excellent contributions to the Smallbizserver.Net forum and specifically the Mac forum. Also Eriq being located in the United States makes it possible to get support 24 hours per day.

We welcome Eriq to our Support Team as our 3rd Magical M, the M of McGuru.

Small Business Server - Frequently Asked Questions:
http://www.smallbizserver.net/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

Remote Support Services by M&M:
http://www.smallbizserver.net/Support/tabid/219/Default.aspx"

I'm really, really excited about this. First, it's an honor even being associated with such an outstanding site. Second, being asked to help out with Remote Support through the site was something I never even considered.

Thank you, Mariette and Marina, for including me in your team. I'm thrilled to be working with you two!

On Blogging

When I put together my last post on the joys of LiveMeeting and the Macintosh, I did something a little different. At the time I decided to do the post, I was sitting at a PC, not at my normal desktop Mac. That's just one of the benefits of using a web-based blog publishing system - I can blog from anywhere, including my PDA. But I digress.

So I wrote the blog page on the PC and, as I usually do, I checked the appearance of the final result, because I had used a lot of special HTML formatting in the post. Lo and behold, the main page looked and read fine, but the "read more" page was all out of whack. Thinking it had something to do with my special formatting affecting the CSS in the site, I went back and removed the formatting. No change. Then I went through and looked at several other entries on the site, and they were all out of whack, just like the most recent post.

That's when I realized that I committed one of the sins that I yell at other web developers about: when I updated the templates on the site, I didn't check for cross-platform compatibility. Ironically, the site looked fine from my Mac browsers, but it choked in IE 6.

So over the course of several hours this morning, I went through and finally found the source of the problem and restored the formatting of the site to normal. In the process, I came up with three morals to this story.

Moral 1: Always, always, always do a cross-platform check on your web pages. Open the site in multiple browsers on multiple platforms. Normally, stuff developed for the web works fine on Windows and breaks on the Mac. But in this case, it worked fine on the Mac, but broke in Windows, because...

Moral 2: IE 6 does not adhere to CSS specifications correctly. I ran across a number of sites discussing the problems of certain standard CSS functions not working correctly in IE. I found and fixed a few that I had introduced when I customized the template I was using. But the core problem came from...

Moral 3: Never assume that when you acquire software from a vendor that they know what they're doing. In this case, the developer of the template I was using munged the headers of all but the main index template. I didn't find the exact piece that caused the problem, but when I copied the headers from the main index template over to the other templates, the pages started displaying correctly again.

Now I can sleep better knowing that the regular readers of this blog (all both of them) won't have to deal with odd formatting when they read an extended or past entry on the site, as they apparently have been doing without complaining for several months.

Unless they've been reading from a Mac...

On Improvements

I've been preparing for the Macintosh in SBS webcast coming up on December 8. Through the process, I've learned quite a bit about the changes that Microsoft has made in the LiveMeeting product after they acquired it from Placeware. But first, a couple of observations:

• Susan Bradley rocks. Most of you already know that. She has bent over backwards to help me get this webcast together.
• Microsoft seems to have actually improved the Macintosh support for a predominantly Windows product.

Still getting this webcast out the door is not going to be a piece of cake. Here are some of the challenges I'm having to overcome to get this to a point where I'm even comfortable presenting this webcast.

Presenting from a Macintosh

In this new version of LiveMeeting, not only can you attend a meeting using a Mac, but you can present as well. Given a few conditions.

First, you can only connect using Safari on the Mac. The presenter (and meeting) console are available as Java tools, but for some reason, LiveMeeting refuses to allow Netscape or Firefox connect, even though they can run the Java applications just fine.

Second, the console is completely different from the PC console. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the ActiveX versus Java builds, but it would have been nice if the interfaces were at least somewhat similar.

Third, there is no audio support for the Java console as attendee. If you want to attend a LiveMeeting from a Mac and listen to the audio, you have to hope that the meeting has a dial in number so you can audio conference. Just remember to press #6 on your phone when you get connected so your connection is muted. Trust me, no one wants to listen to the sound of corn chips being eaten during a meeting.

Fortunately, Microsoft has improved the presenter tools from the Mac in one key area - you can now share the desktop from a Mac. This improvement, of course, is the only reason I'm able to do this webcast at all. There's really not much value in a webcast that has screenshots - I've got blog posts that do that. No, the real value here is being able to show, real time, what's going on in the Macintosh interface, especially for those who have not seen the interface before or in a long time.

Preparing the presentation

LiveMeeting uses the PowerPoint slide show as its basic presentation methodology. No big deal, I'm used to doing slide decks, all the way back to the days of Persuasion. (Raise your hand if you remember that tool. Yeah, I didn't think there would be many of you.) You can either create the slides in the LiveMeeting presenters interface, or you can create one off-line in PowerPoint and upload it into the meeting space when you are ready.

Unless you're on a Mac, that is. Though LiveMeeting offers a tool to convert a PowerPoint slide deck into its online slide format, it doesn't work from the Mac. All I could do from the Mac was upload the converted slide format media. No problem. Let me just export from PowerPoint on the Mac into the LiveMeeting document format. Hm. Not an option. OK, so I search the Microsoft web site for the conversion tool. Oh, yeah, there it is. Let me download it, except that it's not available for Office 2004, or any version of Mac Office. No problem. I'll download the tool to my PC, convert the deck, upload the stuff from my Mac into the meeting space, and go on from there. Interestingly, a 300K slide deck becomes an 8MB LiveMeeting file. And when I go to upload it from my Mac, LiveMeeting still won't accept the upload.

This is where I figure out that I can connect in to the meeting as presenter from my PC and can then disconnect without closing the meeting. I'm glad I stumbled across this nugget of information, because I'll need it later.

So I upload the file from the PC (and since it will do the slide deck conversion automatically, I didn't need to download the tool to convert the deck into the LiveMeeting format) and can still modify the presentation inside the LiveMeeting console using my Mac.

Broadcasting Audio

So I've got my presentation uploaded, I've been able to share my desktop, now to the last piece - audio. As a presenter, I have a phone number I call into so I can present the material by voice. In my test meeting, where I've got several workstations in my office connected, I fire up the audio on the PC after I dial in, and I can't hear anything on the PC. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. What we call "dead air" in radio parlance.

Susan points out that I need to click the Start Broadcast button in my presenters console. Oh, wait! There's no Start Broadcast button in the Mac presenter's console. This is where I learn that not only can I log in and out of LiveMeeting as a presenter without ending the session, but I can also log in as presenter from multiple machines. Excellent. So I log in as presenter from my PC, find the Start Broadcasting button, and lo and behold, audio across the internet! Unless you're on a Mac, but I've already covered that.

Recording the Meeting

After doing more testing on audio quality and desktop sharing speed, I'm ready to test the recording function. There is a Recording button in the Mac presenter's console, and when I click that, I find the equivalent of the Start Broadcasting button. I bypass that for the moment, as I'm already broadcasting and I want to start recording. Sure enough, I can start, pause, and stop recording in the Mac presenter's console. What's even cooler is the audio level indicator that moves based on the sound of my voice into the phone. In the Macintosh presenter's console. So we can tell audio levels from the Mac console, but we can't actually listen to the audio on the Mac. Anyway, I record the test session and stop it when I'm done. Pretty straightforward.

More audio

After a successful test that proves I can do what I want in this webcast, even if the setup is a little weird, I give the green light to move forward with the scheduling. That's when I decide to play with the audio a little more. After clicking the Stop Broadcast button in the Windows presenter's console, I go back to the Mac presenter's console and click the Recording button again. The console clearly shows that there is no audio connected, but with the click of a button, the console implies that I can actually start the broadcast from the Mac after all. So I try it. Sure enough, it seems to connect to the teleconferencing system, because I can see the audio levels move in the meter when I talk. But nothing is coming across the internet audio. I bang on it a little further, then I look at the Audio console in the Windows presenter's console. It doesn't think there's a broadcast going. I click on the Start Broadcasting button, audio starts flowing from the teleconference system across the internet.

I'm not 100% certain this isn't a glitch given that I started the broadcast from the Windows console initially. I'll have to test another conference setup and try to initiate the broadcast from the Mac side without even logging in to the Windows presenter's console and see what happens.

1. Log in as presenter from a Windows PC.
   
2. Upload the PowerPoint slide deck from the PC.
   
3. Log in to the presenter's console from the Mac.
   
4. Modify the presentation deck to include the Desktop sharing slides for the Mac demos.
   
5. Call into the teleconference line.
   
6. Start the audio broadcast from the PC.
   
7. Start the recording from the PC or the Mac.

Yes, it would be nice if I could get all the parts and pieces working from the Mac side, but I'll take what I can get. The biggest hurdle, sharing a Mac desktop in a meeting, has been overcome, so the rest is really just a minor annoyance, and an annoyance I can certainly get around.

And, for all this effort, I sure hope people show up for the meetings. Both of them. (Meetings, not people, that is.)

On Mail Flow

Back in February, both Susan and I posted about problems we were seeing with Verizon and people using Exchange to route e-mail through the Verizon smarthosts. I had several clients who were having the issues at the time, and we found workarounds, but Verizon's statements that "we didn't make any changes" rang horribly false.

Fast-forward to November 14, where I'm setting up a new SBS server for a client, and we immediately ran into the problem of not being able to send mail successfully through DNS, because he's on a dynamic IP address on Verizon's network that has been blacklisted by several groups. (don't get me started on that rant, either). So, on a whim, I decided to try and set up his Exchange server to route all outbound mail through Verizon's mail servers, just to confirm that nothing had changed.

Imagine my surprise when test messages didn't bounce back!

We sent stuff to AOL, we sent stuff to the sites that had blacklisted him, and everything we sent went through. Since I had already told him that we'd probably have to use a service like MailHop from DynDNS, when I let him know he could put the credit card back in his wallet, he was overjoyed.

A few days later, I decided to give it a go on my mail server, too, just to see. I confirmed my authentication information, made the configuration changes, and sent a couple of test messages. No dice. Since I didn't really have time to troubleshoot it further right then, I moved the settings around so mail continued to flow through MailHop (the service I opted to use).

This morning, I decided to give it a go again. I wanted to test the SMTP Auth directly, so I found a site with not only the exact commands to use, but also a command you can use in Perl to generate the Base64 auth string. I built the Auth string, then ran the test against Verizon's mail servers. Authentication worked! So I went back to re-enable the Verizon SMTP connector in my Exchange configuration when I found the reason it hadn't worked earlier - I had inadvertently fat-fingered my account name. Once I corrected that, mail started flowing out through Verizon oh so smoothly.

Now I've got a few clients I need to convert back to using Verizon for a smarthost. At least until Verizon breaks the system again.

On Recordkeeping

Would somebody tell the marketing folks at Microsoft and Verizon to look at their records before making cold calls? In the last month I've had the following phone calls from these giants of industry:

1. Verizon Online DSL has called me twice (TWICE!) to let me know that I'm eligible to sign up for DSL in my area. Helloooooo... I've had my DSL account active for nearly three years now. What's more ridiculous than my name showing up as a potential new customer in the first place (you think they could make a quick cross reference against their existing customer base, but I guess that would be too hard) is that I told the first guy that called me that I was a DSL customer already. Then, a week later, I get a SECOND call with the same sales pitch!

2. Microsoft called me today to let me know about a training class down in Houston that will help me to become a Small Business Specialist. Ummm, not only was I the first Small Business Specialist in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I was one of, if not THE first Small Business Specialist in Texas.

Why not make use of the data you have? Or does this fall into the area of "What would you do with a brain if you had one?"

On Domains

Today was domain issue day. Two separate issues from two separate clients both ended up related to Active Directory and domain problems.

One client had a laptop that had been getting the infrequent 1030 userenv errors (no 1058 errors, just the 1030's). Today, she changed the password on her account, and suddenly she was unable to access resources on the server after a reboot. Plus, some lovely 1080 userenv errors started appearing. A quick remove from the domain and a rejoin took care of it.

I had another client with a number of strange errors related to DNS and domain activity on a server that had been promoted to a DC in his SBS network. After digging around in the event logs, it looks like the initial dcpromo never really took the first time, but there were no outward signs that the process had failed. A dcpromo down to member server status and a dcpromo back to a DC should take care of it.

Just seemed a bit odd, that's all...

On Resumes

I apparently need to pull my old resume off the net, wherever it might be. I got a call this evening from someone who wanted to screen me for a position in their company. Within a few seconds, I found out that an agency had sent my resume to this company and noted that it was an older resume, but apparently it was still impressive enough for the company to want to talk to me anyway.

Here's what is really interesting - the company wanting to screen me was Microsoft. The last time I updated my resume was before I went to work at Microsoft. I guess that means it wasn't a fluke that Microsoft hired me the first time around...

On Upselling

How sad is it that I've become so used to being upsold every place I go that I hardly notice it any more? I just know that at the end of my desired transaction, whether it's at my favorite drive in ("Would you like to Sonic size that combo?") or at a technology reseller ("Would you like to purchase service protection for that iPod?") I'm used to saying "No" a few more times at the end of every transaction I make. I've been known to try and upsell my customers, but only to provide them with a service I think they need, not one that I make a huge profit margin on.

But the other day, I heard upselling like I never thought possible at a place I never would have expected it:

The US Post Office.

First, I had to wait in line for 20 minutes to get a single stamp to mail an envelope to Canada (from which you can deduce that I do not live in Canada, eh?) and heard the two postal service agents that were working the line offer multiple upsells to each and every customer they had. Are things so bad for the Postal Service that they have to try and upsell every single person that comes through the line? Seriously, I heard one of the agents trying to upsell a package shipment from First Class to Priority Mail at a cost of $6.95, and the package might get there a half day earlier. To her credit, the customer said "No," but she had to say it twice. Another customer was subjected to four different upsell options before the agent finally closed the transaction.

I was steeled for the upsell onslaught when I got to the agent and asked for my "one first-class stamp for this letter to Canada." I was disappointed. I got my stamp and a "thank you very much" and I was on my way.

I did come away with one positive, though. One of the agents told a customer never to come in on a Monday. Mondays and the first day after a holiday are the worst times tom try and come to the Post Office, according to the agent. That, I figure, he probably knows something about...

On Reviews

Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of activity in the SBS2K and SmallBizIT Yahoo mailing lists regarding the SMB Nation conference that about 500 of us attended. There's even been some banter about one of the presenters that preceded the event and is still going on. Several folks posted their comments about the conference directly in the list (David Schrag, Larry Lentz, Tim Sullivan, etc.) and others summarized their positions in their blogs (Vlad Mazek, Anne Stanton). I personally have done a bit of both. I blogged on my thoughts during the conference, and I've responded to several posts on the mailing lists. Rather than give yet another summary of what I thought about the conference or any of the topics at the conference, I thought I'd share this instead:

It's not about the technology, it's about the people.

Time and time again, I keep waking up to this realization, and I guess it's what separates me from a majority of technology folks out there, SBSers excluded (they seem to "get it" too). Perhaps that's why I've been singled out for senior/management positions when I've been in tech gigs, I don't know. But what I do know is that the number one priority in my job right now is helping people. Sure, I generally focus on solutions for their technology issues, but the bottom line is that the focus must be on the person, not on the box.

You heard echoes of that throughout the conference. In Susan and Dana's security presentation the message was "you must have the policy in place before you can use technology to enforce it." In the marketing and sales presentations, the message was "listen for the pain points and answer those, don't just spout technology for technology's sake." Even in Jeff Middleton's plan to start rebuilding the small business infrastructure in New Orleans, the focus was not on getting the technology in place for the businesses, it is getting the people taken care of so they can pick up the lion's share of the rebuilding process themselves.

Those who never get this insight will be destined to be technicians forever, and I don't just mean in computing. You can excel at any trade (construction, jewelry design, accounting, HVAC, financial planning, secretarial, mechanic, etc.), but until you realize and live the "people first" aspect of your trade, you will continue to be a tradesman. And if your goal in life is to work in a trade for another company, more power to you.

But if you choose to work with small businesses, no matter what aspect of business you plan to support, your number one priority should be people management instead of trade management. If you own a security alarm franchise, you don't install alarm systems, you help businesses protect their physical and human resources. If you run a telecommunications outlet, you don't install phone systems, you help business people communicate effectively with their clients. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Or at least you should.

Arlin Sorenson nailed it on the head during his portion of one of the sessions. Listen to the customer. Hear what their pain points are, and let them know you can help ease those pains by working with them on the solution.

When I was in academia, the running joke every year was that if it weren't for the students, our jobs would be so much easier. I overheard someone say essentially the same thing at the conference - if it weren't for his customers, his work would be so much simpler.

I take a different stance. I love working with people. It's something I'm really, really good at. That I happen to be a technical whiz is a nice attribute, but I really take pride in my ability to listen and help put customers at ease. I listen outside the box to try and find ways to ease their pains that have nothing to do with my trade. But I'm not alone in this. I spoke with dozens of folks at the conference who, just based on my interactions with them, get this. These are the successful people I will be aligning my business with, according to the great advice given by Anne Stanton. I know that if I'm going to be successful in this business, I need to surround myself with greatness.

And I found a whole bunch of that at the conference...

On SBSers

As I wrap up my Redmond trip and get ready to head back to Texas, my initial observation about the conference attendees still rings true:

The SBSer is a unique beast.

Looking back over the conference, I recall interacting with very few individuals who came across as just "geeks" or "nerds." Instead, I found a group of people who remind me of many of the other small business owners I interact with on a daily basis. That should be no surprise, because that's what most of the attendees of this conference really are - business people with a passion for the technology.

The sense of community shared by most, if not all, SBSers was made perfectly clear in yesterday's MVP Roundtable discussions:

Several comments and questions were discussed regarding SBS user groups during the session. One gentleman (whose name I didn't catch) raised a concern about why he should get his competitors involved in a user group. The consensus from the remainder of the group could not have been clearer - the true SBSer does not view other local vendors as competition but as an opportunity for growth. Once the local community is established, anyone whose actions are counter to the good of the community will no longer be welcomed by the community.

So don't wait for an annual conference to hook up with a community - if there's not already an SBS users group in your area, take up your mantle and start one. The community is there to help you with this as well.

On Recognition

I was blown away by a comment last night. I was referred to as "the" by someone I had just met. As in "the" Eriq Neale. As in, this person walked up to me and said, "Hey, you're 'the' Eriq Neale."

I was humbled by the experience. I wasn't expecting that type of reception, and I certainly don't compare myself to the other "the"'s at this conference ("the" Susan Bradley, "the" Jeff Middleton, etc., etc., etc.) But at the same time it was kinda cool. Now if only I can train my neighbors to give me the same courtesy...

On Service

Maybe customer service isn't a lost art after all...

I did a horrible job of packing for this trip. I got my camera and digital video camera packed, but neglected to bring the USB and FireWire cables to transfer the data. I brought the flyers for the book, but neglected to bring business cards. I brought shaving cream, but no razor.

This morning, on a whim, I called the front desk at the Marriott to see if they had a disposable razor I could buy from a gift shop or something like that. Not only did they say they had razors I could have at the front desk, they are also sending up a valet with the razor and travel shaving cream.

Why didn't I call them yesterday?

On Grammar

OK, Microsoft Word must be as tired as I am. It caught a "grammar mistake" that's not a grammar mistake.

Unfortunately, Movable Type does not have a built-in spell checking tool (if it does, please point this out, because it's been driving me nuts) so to make sure I limit my typing errors, etc., I copy my text into Word, run it through a spelling and grammar check, and get my corrections done that way. I guess all my years of writing I've come to rely heavily on others (proofreaders, editors, etc.) to catch my mistakes so I don't look too heavily for them myself. Interestingly, that's not the case when I proof other people's work, but I digress.

So as I'm putting the final wraps on what I thought was today's last post, Word came back with something that just boggled my mind. Here's the sentence it checked:

"It's incidents like that that remind me how proud and fortunate I am to be an American citizen."

Word told me that "I am" should really be "I is."

Eh?

It didn't catch the double "that that" from the sentence, which I later went back and changed to "this that", but it somehow saw that "I am" would be better served as "I is."

Interestingly, when I change, "that that" to "this that" Word decides that "I am" is actually OK.

Whatever...

On Certainty

When you need to be 100% certain on an issue, it's best to be 110% certain instead. Yesterday I spent several hours troubleshooting an issue with MS CSS, because I was 100% certain that the issue we all thought it could have been up front was not the case. Only I needed to check one more time, because it actually was.

Yes, I got bit by the dreaded APC bug. A client was reporting all the classic signs of the problem, so when I was on site Tuesday, that was the first thing I looked at. I found version 5 running on the server, so I crossed that one off the list. Sure, I could have (and in retrospect should have) updated it at the time, but their backup issues were more pressing.

I found what I thought was the backup problem (and may still have been) but then I ran into a problem with IE (couldn't load to find updates fo thebackup software, etc) and other problems, so I started workin those. Eventually, because I was stumped, I decided to call in MS CSS on the case. Specifically the security team, because I knew the tools they have to help find bad stuff on the box are really good.

So I went back to the client site Wednesday night (had to do this after hours) and started work again. I did several virus scans while booted off a clean disk, found no problems. But when I booted normally, it took 40 minutes to boot and log in,Spybot, RootKitReveale and BlackLight would no run, etc. I got security on the line, and had them send me the scanning package. It wouldn't run correctly. Finally, after three+ hours of beating our heads on this, he asked me to look inthe Services panel to see what might not be loadin correctly.

That's when I saw it. The two APC services were hung in a STARTING state. I rebooted the box into Safe Mode, looked again at the APC services, and sure enough, versino 6, the bad seed. 10 minutes later, the services had been removed, the system rebooted, and Microsoft Update was being run to catch all the patches that hadn't been installed in a year. The backup problem was fixed, and the delay in logon times were gone.

The moral of the story? Even if you're 100% certain that you don't have the APC problem, when MS CSS asks you if you might have the APC problem, check it anyway. It's not going to hurt or take a long time to take a second look, and it could save you troubleshooting pain in the long run. [Obviously, the previous statements do not apply solely to APC software but anything that you know you know for sure.]

On Verizon

A few months ago, Verizon enabled some server settings changes on their mail servers which effectively broke the ability to send outbound e-mail through their mail servers (see the discussions on Susan Bradley's blog postings We Do Stop Working For You and Hey Verizon) Several of us had clients who were significantly impacted by this change, and many of us had our own servers impacted. We came up with several solutions, and for the most part, Verizon's stupidity didn't cause much more pain.

For about a month. Then the slow painful downhill slide into abject horror began.

Verizon clients who have static IP addresses can generally avoid having to use Verizon's SMTP servers for mail delivery from Exchange, as you can set up reverse DNS entries and what-not with your static IP that will get your mail past most of the spam cops. However, Verizon does not offer static IP addresses in all of their service areas, even with Business-class accounts. Yes, that includes me.

My solution was pretty simple. Use DNS for mail delivery where I can, and route outbound e-mail through the MailHop SMTP service provided by DynDNS. Yes, there were some mail domains I knew I'd have to route through MailHop from the get-go (AOL, Yahoo, etc.) but most mail I was sending through DNS was still getting through, so no big deal.

It started slowly, but over the past month, it's been getting worse by the day - more and more blacklists and other anti-SPAM tools ahve started blocking messages from my Exchange server. Somtimes because I'm in a dynamic IP block, but the last 12 mail delivery failures I've received have all noted that my IP address has been blocked becuase of excessive SPAM emanating from my address. The real kicker? Each one of those delivery failure notices has identified a different IP address!

I went back and looked at my DynDNS logs, and sure enough, Verizon has ben forcing an IP change on me every day. And on one of the days that some spammer got one of the IPs in the dynamic pool, s/he sent out enough spam to get blacklisted, so now I can't send mail via DNS for reasons that are completely out of my control.

At least Verizon doesn't block me from sending mail on port 25 to other severs, like some ISPs have started enforcing recently. At that point I'll have no recourse but to switch ISPs from Verizon, which is not a bad idea anyway.

If I could see that Verizon's decision to change their SMTP server configuration to refuse connections from Exchange servers was actually a move to help prevent the spread of SPAM from their network, I'd have a little understanding and tolerance for this idiocy. But it wasn't. In fact, it almost looks like they made the change to the SMTP authenticaion process specifically to prevent Exchange servers from being able to use their SMTP servers as smarthosts. And they've done nothing else to prevent the flow of SPAM through other mechanisms, so the blacklists have had to take that on instead.

So, in summary, Verizon charges me monthly access for ISP services, but will not give me a static IP. Then they take away my mechanism for sending e-mail reliably since I don't have a static IP. If I treated my clients this way, I would expect to get fired. I guess that's my last couse of action with Verizon - fire them and go with a different ISP.

On Power

As I sit here and listen to the delay between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder shrink rapidly, I'm reminded that I don't have UPSes on some of my critical pieces. So, before I sign off into that good night, I must shut down a few systems to protect the investment. Perhaps the new toy fairy will bring me a few UPS boxes in the near future...

On Blogging

Here I am with YADBlog and I wonder to myself, "How many blogs is too many blogs?" The simple answer is, "I don't know, but if I'm not confused yet, it must not be too many."

Wait, do I mean blogs I'm reading, or blogs I publish? It must mean blogs I publish, because I'm using bloglines to keep up with the blogs I read on a (somewhat) daily basis.

So if I'm wondering if I have too may blogs that I'm publishing, how many blogs is that? Well, I've got my personal personal blog, my Lessons Learned blog, and now this one. not to mention a couple of other blogs that started, ran their course, and now live in blog infamy, having been superceeded by other blogs, or just no longer applicable.

So why start this one? Because I needed another place to ramble aimlessly about technology, people, projects, and other stuff related to the work side of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got the Lesson Learned pages, but that's established itself as more of a "how to" of the Macintosh and SBS side of my brain. It's not a good ramble point for business contacts, technology missives, and general mayhem. And I really don't want to muck up my personal blog with this stuff, either.

So what's a technophile to do? Start YADBlog, of course. After all, what else is the internet good for?