Questions of Representation

What do you represent? What do people know about you when you enter a room? Not what they think of you but what do they have faith in when you appear? Are they afraid or are they excited? Do they know that you are here to do something of worth or something that will simply end badly?

Thinking that you can savor a good response or alter a poor one is foolish. The same is true of our understandings of people we meet and deal with. They may not be in the same place you left them last. You have to accept that there are variables at work that fall beyond our scope of knowledge.

Lately I have found myself stepping left or right of where I would normally have stood metaphorically. I suck at chess because my ability to project beyond the here and now is very poor. Lately I have found myself trying to think beyond my next move. Don't get me wrong, if I were a strategist and not an idealist I would have more success in the material world. I am trying to see past the next moves to the end game. I suck at this too.

I am not a strategist. I keep thinking that if I were to plot and plan, map out my path, I would be able to walk with more certainty. The fact is that if I were to look too far ahead I'm afraid I would not like what I saw there. It may stop me altogether.

When does faith become an excuse? What or who is worthy of our faith? When do we finally get to see our sphere of influence from beyond our own perspective. Would we want to? It may be horrible.

The next thing

If all goes well I will have an office to call my own in a week or so. I plan to take all that does not make me happy out of my house and put it in the office. What will I do with all of this space?

I have a feeling that my joy about this space will soon fade away and it will become another brick in the wall.

I sold some old textbooks online tonight. I have been putting off that task for days for now good reason. I posted and sold two out of the three in less than 2 hours. I should say 2 and 1/2 episodes of Heros. I am now officially a Netflix junkie!

Clutter and Debris

I am letting go of the junk that surrounds me at home. I have two trash cans now and they are both full every week. I am finally moving in to this house. We have 5 years, 2 hurricanes, and 1 strike, in this house. The neighbors on both sides are the same as when we moved in. This is the most stable I have been in 15 years of living on my own.

I have not watched hoarders. I am not going through a 12 step program. I am not going through a mid-life crisis. The closest thing I can relate this to is perhaps waking up knowing that I am not likely to ever move out of this house. Some people would kill for this type of security. I feel suffocated by it. The things that don't change in my life are usually intangible and idealistic. My physical world used to be in constant motion but it is settling down now.

We will go to Ikea in the morning to buy some organization stuff. Nothing to fix my storage issues mind you but to fix kid storage issues.

I am waiting for the right opportunity to present itself for me to get moved into a "workshop". There are few rental opportunities that offer the type of security, access, and price that I am looking for. This is a fight for another day.

To be cliche'

It seems like there is someone standing right behind me all the time. Call it conscience, guilt, angel enforcers, whatever. Any minute they will draw their sword and take my head off with a single highlander turned samurai warrior chop.

This week I read of a man jogging on a beach being killed by an airplane landing on him. I swear I keep hearing low flying aircraft.

You don't know what you want until you get it and then you are usually half way through with it when you figure it out. The great moments in stories where people put the puzzle together and figure out that which had eluded them the first 300 pages never seem to happen in real life. That moment comes sitting on a riding tractor with hat hair in the rain . I can't figure it out.

In the Swing of things

Lets talk about the Small Business Server again. I have been asked to help swing migrate a bunch of SBS 2003 servers to SBS 2008 using the SBSmigration.com swing kit. I have not done one yet but it looks promising. I am having a conflict of conscience and I am starting to question if SBS 2008 is the solution that I want to encourage going forward.

Looking at my clients that have SBS 2003, none of them use Exchange. One did but they use a hosted exchange solution now so there goes that. I can't find anyone that has ever or plans to ever use Sharepoint. These seem to be the biggest reason to put up the extra money required to buy SBS 2008. If you remove these from the equation you start to wonder why pay more for SBS.

I am trying to make a list of things I like about SBS 2k3 other that I can only get with SBS 2k8. It is hard to do.

1. Remote Web Workplace. This is a big one because the ability to work from home is more popular now than ever. You would have to buy software to give a Server 2k8 Standard this functionality. This goes in the SBS 2k8 column.

2. Built in VPN. This is used at almost every one of our SBS 2003 clients currently and is very popular. It is a nice solution for those pesky laptops that need access. This is by no means unique to SBS. You can get software or hardware to do this for you without going to SBS. This goes in the Standard column.

3. Fax Server. This comes standard with Server 2008 anyway so this is not really a reason to go to SBS. Another one for Standard

4. GUI wizards and controls. I have only one client that would ever think about logging into the server to do anything on the GUI management console. I guess our clients just aren't interested in that sort of thing. This is no big loss for me because if you are going with Server 2008 Standard you don't need to configure the kinds of things that you do with SBS. Another win for Standard.

5. Free Outlook client. Oh, wait, that's right. Microsoft decided for me that no one in the world ever opts not to buy Office. It is not included in the more expensive CAL for SBS 2008. I can't say I know why. Another win for Standard.

I can't think of any other reasons to implement SBS 2008 instead of Server 2008 Standard. Remember I removed the Exchange and Sharepoint from the equation so if a client needed that sort of thing I would have to say that SBS 2008 would be a consideration.

I will do a price comparison between sbs2k8 and 2k8 standard in my next post. Should be interesting. Lets see where that takes us.

Once again in 2010

The blog is back. I am here for you. It is mid February and this is my first post. That is a little sad.

Several new things in my life to blog about. The TV show "Better Off Ted" is my new favorite show. I am into uncluttering stuff now, I am an unclutterer so to speak. Oh, and I quit my job. I gave a seven weeks notice and started to work full time for myself January 1.

I know that everything is different but I have not changed. Spending and sleep habits are only the tip of the change iceberg but they are all that I can see for now.

I just thought I was being pulled in different directions before. I honestly don't know how I ever found time to make it to work each day. I suppose that if I had a hard job that pushed me to excel I would not have ever started a side company and took a night job in addition to my charity work.

We are looking for a church now also. Lets not stop the hope and change express at just work and home life. We visited a methodist church and the best thing in the world happened. The Southern Baptist have a tradition that I call "smother and grill". A visitor can barely make it through the door without shaking 20 hands and answering 50 questions. If that was not bad enough they have a "stand if you are a visitor" moment and then the preacher encourages everyone in the building to run over to you to hug and touch. There is even special music to let you know how long you have to run over and hug the stranger. It is a type of musical chairs that inspires even the oldest in the crowd to line up to say something and touch your arm or back.

Well... that being said, the Methodist church we went to was a very different experience. A couple that was manning the door approached us and spoke for just a moment and then they said, "we will leave you alone to get settled in". WOW. That was cool. During the service there was a "lets all say hello to each other" moment but it was very brief and I don't recall music. I think only the people in front of us turned around to say hi.

Based on my social retardation I would say that I am more Methodist now. I need to find if there is a special diet or a blood letting ceremony that is not listed on their website.

More to come.....

The ballad of SBS 2008

From the first moment I started using Microsoft Small Business Server Premium 2008 I knew I had made a mistake....

It was actually before the first moment I had a chance to use the OS. This may not be true for all vendors but Dell would not sell me an OEM copy of SBS Premium 2008 pre-installed. Their own small business quote team could not figure out why. Worse yet they sold me an Open License pack and listed media on the invoice but did not send the media citing some crazy Microsoft licensing policy. Okay, well I thought I could log into the Microsoft site and download it but that was a no go due to the same weird licensing policy.

It took 3 people from Microsoft Open Licensing Team before I convinced them I wanted the media shipped to me. I even had to pay for the FedEx charge. I will let all that speak for itself.

I get the OS and install it on my empty Dell Server. All goes pretty well I suppose until I see that there is no consolidated MMC server management console like there is in SBS2003. The nay sayers will say "nay, there is a console" but it is not useful out of the box like SBS 2003. I had to tweak it.

Setting up my clients posed some challenges due to the fact that one of the machines turned out to be Windows 2000. Guess what boys and girls. The most stable and longest running OS that Microsoft ever made is not supported in SBS 2008.

Guess what else is not included in the grossly expensive CAL price? Outlook. That is correct folks. If you buy SBS for the Exchange capability and happen to use Word Perfect instead of Office you have just added about $90 a machine to your cost of install.

It gets worse. The much improved backup tool built into SBS 2008 does not support NAS drives. EDIT - Not in the GUI at least - EDIT. You can add a cheap external drive from Wal-Mart and run your backup but if you have a RAID mirrored 2 TB NAS you are out of luck. Fortunately we had already bought another backup program which kind of supports NAS backup.

In conclusion I should have read the details more closely. While I have read about SBS 2008 it was mostly glowing reviews from fanboys. I thought that if SBS 2003 was good then SBS 2008 should have similar features and actually add features. Sadly it is the opposite. It is more expensive with less features EDIT that I care about EDIT.

Before any crazy fanboy (or fangirl) posts and says true things like "NAS was not supported in 2003" or "The cost of the CAL reflects the hardwork and dedication of millions of coders.... blah blah" or "Everyone had Outlook already so why give it away for free", EDIT insert nicer wording! EDIT.

I like Server 2008
I don't like SBS 2008
I may still suggest SBS 2008
I will not buy EDIT brand name removed EDIT again
OWA is not and is not likely to ever be the same as running outlook on your desktop. .

The positive in all of this is that the client has me on his side. I was able to work through Dell and Microsoft's attempts to force me to use clarkconnect out of frustration. I like that you can't use the administrator account for anything. I like the 64 bit system support. While no one will ever explain why it is any of Microsoft's business if I use 2 nics is still a mystery.

I am still ticked about the Outlook thing. Warn a brother would ya? Crazy.

UPDATE - 11/18/09 -
Billy, Thanks for the offer of help. I have your backup software installed and it is in fact backing up the client's data to a NAS. I will spare everyone my thoughts about small business backups. I am generally positive but I am frustrated about this whole project and wish to blend back into the background noise of the net.