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Tuesday, December 28, 2004 |
Just as soon as I get rid of some of them, the good folks at Gmail give
me more invites. So, in the interest of spreading this cheer,
anyone need a Gmail invite? I got six to spread around.
4:46:04 PM  
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As my three week sabbatical from work comes to a close, I have been
thinking about my job for the last couple of days. Here are some
thoughts, in no particular order.
- Email Migration
- As I write this, my workplace is moving our mail system from Novell's NetMail to Mirapoint's
appliance product. On one level, I am somewhat crestfallen about
this. In a sense, you could say I was one of the lead technical
staff on getting NetMail running. The problem, though, was that
certain decisions were made which doomed the system from the
start. I warned that these problems would hurt us down the road,
but no one heeded my warnings. We were ultimately never given the
chance to fix them, and the new CIO came in and negotiated a deal with
Mirapoint.
Now, Mirapoint is nice as there is very little management. It
feeds off of our current directory, and all is well. One of the
problems I have observed, though, seems to be with its proxy--so-called
Message Directors. These directors have caused problems.
For example, in my geekiness, I like using Pine--both from a PC using
PC-Pine and from a Linux laptop. I store my configuration file on
the IMAP server, and Pine is set to read this configuration.
Well, the message directors do not allow this, as their proxy service
does not allow the IMAP AUTHENTICATE LOGIN command to work.
Another problem that was observed after migration is the response that
Netscape/Mozilla clients expect when retrieving messages.
Essentially, the response was not getting sent, and the client would
barf. So much for standards-based, huh?
At some point, I should write up a whole diagnosis of what went wrong,
what we should have fixed, and why we did not make any attempt at
fixes.
- The nice part about the migration is that I will no longer be
tethered to my desk, constantly monitoring NetMail and the servers for
any problems--performance or otherwise. Without that to work on,
I can now devote time to more scholarly pursuits: Perl, Linux, and more
Novell beta testing.
- One of my colleagues has been performing some upgrades
today. I have not heard from him as far as whether or not this
was good or bad, but it sounds as though things are going well.
He IM'd me this morning before I hit the gym, so I knew what was going
on.
- When I return to work, the first part of our reorganization will
be put into place. Things will not change greatly for me, but a
layer above me will be removed. It will be different in one
respect, as my current manager will manage a different group. I
think that is a good thing, though. He is a good person, but I
think that many in our group--including me--thinks that his best
managerial days are behind him.
I still need to spend some other time being geeky on this blog.
Of course, I can still procrastinate, just as I am about to do
now.
4:44:10 PM  
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- I had a long day today, and I really did not do anything. I
helped my friend assemble his Christmas gift--a nice large gas
grill. After that, he invited some folks over for the inaugural
use of the grill--steaks, asparagus, skewers, and romaine lettuce (yes,
lettuce!). All of this was grilled, and was quite good.
- I just checked my postal mail today, and I was met with a deluge
of Christmas cards. A large part of this is my fault, as I did
send my cards out later than I had expected. The other problem,
though, is that I was remiss in informing some folks of my new
address. It is still good to see the Christmas cards from friends
and family that I have come to expect over the years.
- Tomorrow I need to stop by the UPS Center here in Baltimore to
redirect a package. A Christmas gift for my uncle arrived later
than expected from Amazon, and I was hoping to have it in time for my
trip to the Eastern Shore. Of course, the delivery man stopped by
last Wednesday when I had stepped out to run some errands. Dumb
luck, I suppose.
- An old friend is in town this week, and I look forward to seeing
him. I will also be catching up with another friend on Wednesday,
and a Happy Hour with my cousin will occur later this week.
Oy.
- I need to get back to my friend who called yesterday to invite me
somewhere. I am also getting back to the gym tomorrow after a few
days respite.
12:11:38 AM  
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© Copyright 2005 Jason J. Thomas.
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AIM: jjtaim MSN: jasonjthomas@hotmail.com Yahoo! Messenger: jasonjthomasumd
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