January 2008 Archives
John does a great job of articulating something I've been wondering about. Harry Reid and Mitt Romney are both "observant" Mormons. Why does Romney come under so much more scrutiny for his religious beliefs than Reid does?
I've been remiss in not writing this post before, but I was reminded by a recent news article. (The antichrists of Westboro Baptist Church were apparently planning a demonstration at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach. The CO of Camp Lejeune told her Marines to stay away, but of course the Patriot Guard had plans to be there.)
Dad occasionally rode with the Patriot Guard chapter here in Ohio. He believed strongly in their mission, and he very much enjoyed the opportunities he had to ride with them. I contacted the Ohio ride captain to ask if they could render honors at Dad's services, and they exceeded my expectations. At the visitation, they maintained an 8-person honor guard for more than four hours, providing a line of flagbearers flanking the entrance to the funeral home. At the funeral itself, they provided both an honor guard at the service and a motorcade escort to the reception. All of us very much appreciated their presence. They showed the utmost respect, and it was an honor to have them there rendering honors to Dad.
Well, first off, it makes me sad how much I suck at playing drums, but that's another topic entirely.
All five of us have been enjoying rocking out with Rock Band. I've particularly enjoyed letting the boys hear some rock tracks that predate their birth (interestingly, they loved the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", which of course came out when I was 3). I'm about halfway done with the track list on medium guitar, and I've started making a few forays into "hard". Unfortunately, the strum bar on our guitar failed this afternoon, just as I was trying to master "Enter Sandman
Amazon has a bunch of $14.99 HD-DVDs
nola.com has a great slideshow of pictures from the LSU vs Ohio State game. (Just a reminder: LSU won the national championship, 38-24).
As with so many other things, there's a right way and a wrong way to create custom attributes for use with Exchange. These attributes can be made to appear in the custom attribute slots in Outlook, so you can extend the GAL (and views of it) to include things like birthdays, employee IDs, or other data not include in the schema. The wrong way is just to pick what looks like an unused MAPI attribute ID. Dave Goldman explains the right way here.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
A federal magistrate just hammered six Qualcomm lawyers for failing to properly handle and produce evidence in the long-running Qualcomm vs Broadcom patent dispute.
The judge concluded that their declarations and other evidence lead to "the inevitable conclusion that Qualcomm intentionally withheld tens of thousands of decisive documents from its opponent in an effort to win this case and gain a strategic business advantage over Broadcom," according to 48-page order released late yesterday.
"Qualcomm could not have achieved this goal without some type of assistance or deliberate ignorance from its retained attorneys," she added.
Ouch! I've written about this issue before, and it's not going to go away! You'd better have an effective discovery strategy in place before your organization ever gets involved in litigation, and this strategy should probably extend to making sure your inside and outside counsel aren't stupid enough to try to "lose" e-mail messages. That trick never works.
Technorati Tags: Unified Communications
Here's what Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft will be like.
This is a great song; I found it more or less by accident.
You might have been wondering how Marines can re-integrate to civilian life. A friend just sent me this handy guide (which I have edited somewhat to make it more family-friendly).
- ADMIT you have a problem. Say "I am a Marine, I have a problem."
- SPEECH
- Time should never begin with a zero or end in a hundred. It is not 0530 or 1400; it is 5:30 in the morning (AKA awful early)
- Words like deck, rack, and "PT" will get you weird looks; floor, bed, work out will work better-- get used to it
- "F---" cannot be used to replace whatever word you can't think of right now. Try "um" instead.
- Grunting is not talking
- It's a phone, not a radio. Conversations on a phone do not end in "out"
- People will not know what you are talking about if you tell them you are coming from Camp Lejeune with the MWSS platoon or that you spent a deployment in the OCAC
- STYLE
- Do not put creases in your jeans
- Do not put creases on the front of your dress shirts
- A hat indoors does not make you a bad person, it makes you like the rest of the world
- You do not have to wear a belt all the time
- WOMEN
- Being divorced twice by the time you are 23 is not normal, neither are 6 month marriages, even if it is your first
- Marrying a girl so that you can move out of the barracks does not make "financial sense", it makes you 'SPECIAL"
- PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- In the real world, being able to do pushups will not make you good at your job
- How much pain you can take is not a personal accomplishment.
- ALCOHOL
- In the real world, being drunk before 5pm will get you an intervention, not a "good for you"
- That time you drank a 5th of Jaeger and accidentally relieved yourself in your closet is not a conversation starter
- That time you went to the combat medic school and practiced giving vodka IV's will also not be a good conversation starter
- SPENDING HABITS
- One day, you will have to pay bills
- Buying a $30,000 car on a $16,000 a year salary is a really bad idea
- Spending money on video games instead of on diapers makes you a fool
- One day you will need health insurance
- INTERACTING WITH CIVILIANS (AKA YOU):
- Making fun of your neighbor to his face for being fat will not be normal
- REAL JOBS
- They really can fire you
- On the flip side you really can quit
- Screaming at the people that work for you will not be normal. Remember, they really can quit too
- Taking naps at work will not be acceptable
- Remember 9-5, not 0530 to 1800
- THE LAW
- Non-judicial punishment does not exist and will not save you from prison
- Your workplace, unlike your command, can't save you and probably won't. In fact, most likely you will be fired about 5 minutes after they find out you've been arrested.
- Even McDonalds does background checks
- Fighting is not a normal thing and will get you really arrested, not yelled at Monday morning before they ask you if you won
- GENERAL KNOWLEDGE
- You can in fact really say what you think about the President in public
- Pain is not weakness leaving the body, it's just pain
- They won't wear anything shiny that tells you they are more important then
you are, so be polite - Read the contracts before you sign them. Remember what happened the first time
Check out this cool video of a mid-80s Lincoln Town Car driving behind a 707. Don't try this at home (or at TOL, which has lots of freighter-conversion 707s taxiing about).
It turns out that Windows Mobile devices have unique device IDs. This comes about because WM is part of the Windows CE family, so each WM device has a two-part unique ID. The first 4 bytes represent a device family (e.g. all, say, HTC S730s will have the same 4-byte value). The remaining 12 bytes are supposed to be globally unique to all devices from the manufacturer, so that two (say) Palm Treo 750s will have two different device IDs. These IDs are not the same as the IMEI or phone number (in part because not every device will have an IMEI or phone number-- consider a WiFi-only device that syncs to EAS).
There are several different uses for the device ID. From an Exchange perspective, the two biggest ones are:
- looking at the IIS logs on the CAS server to see when a particular device synced and what happened when it tried (e.g. are there errors? did the sync complete? when was the last sync?) Some of this information is visible on the Mobile Devices tab of the OWA's Option page, or you can get it using the get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet.
- provisioning access by device. For example, you can allow only a specified device to connect for a user, which prevents them from using other (presumably unsupported or unauthorized) devices. To do this, you use the set-CASMailbox cmdlet with the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs switch.
Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile
