Our last DVD player bit the dust a few weeks ago so I’ve been watching for a good price on one online. Luckily, I picked up an almost identical Philips for $19.99 on Woot about a week ago and it showed up today. This of course led to Ryan immediately asking if he could hook it up and the answer was a resounding yes. I acted as the official photographer for the activity.
I’ve been wanting to compost at home for quite some time now but was resistant to the work, pests and smell involved in traditional composting so I did a bit of research and came across trench composting. Trench composting is a method where a trench is dug and filled with kitchen scraps, leaves, twigs, lawn clippings and the original soil. Over the course of 1-12 months it naturally decomposes and evidently results in quality topsoil. Ryan & I dug our first exploratory trench tonight and proceeded to fill it with some kitchen scraps (apple pieces, eggshells, coffee grounds), leaves and a small amount of wood chips before filling it back up.
We originally wanted to try what I call The Wild Corner of our yard but found it to be a tad bit rocky so we moved over to another corner of the yard. The ground was much less rocky and we were able to dig our mini trench without any issues. The planter box is eventually going to be filled with soil and have vegetable seedlings planted. Ryan & I built that too but I didn’t get pictures. All in all it was a fun activity to do with Ryan.
I’m at home this week and was astonished to find my backyard has turned green!
If you click the image to see the higher resolution you can see that this panel has HDMI, VGA and composite inputs. It’s built into the desk and by following the cables I found that they all pass through to the flat panel TV in the room.
I don’t have an HDMI or VGA cable with me and could not locate a store that sold either one so I didn’t get to try it out unfortunately. I’m definitely going to be picking up a VGA and HDMI cable to carry around with me going forward.
I walked around Jersey City some more last night and found it to be a very nice city with some spectacular views along the Hudson river. The merchant ship’s propeller was huge, taller than me in fact. I took the picture of the Jersey City Fire Department boat for my son, who is usually pretty interested in that type of thing.
For dinner I found a small deli on a side street, where I had a fantastic steak burrito, macaroni salad and chocolate pudding for dessert. 
Some pictures of my current trip to Jersey City, NJ. The first three are the view from my room on the 22nd floor of The Westin. The rest are from my recent walk around town before dinner. This has been a good trip so far!
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.
– Lucius Seneca
I originally found a link to Twitter Mosaic while browsing through kevinbriody.net and couldn’t make my own fast enough. I believe it safe to say that I have an interesting and eclectic mix of followers.
Photo by JadeXJustice
In December of 2007 I was feeling burned out and decided to leave the consulting world to get a Real JobTM. It didn’t take me long to find a contract at Microsoft as a Partner Technical Consultant but I only lasted four months there before I left to accept a position at Azaleos, a Managed Service Provider located in Seattle. I started the position as a Sr. Messaging Engineer and by January of 2009 I had been promoted twice and ended up as Director of Operations with 22 direct reports.
However I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not cut out to work for someone else so effective Monday April 20th I will be offering my services through Cohesive Logic LLC, a technical services firm focused on Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint & Office Communications Server. It’s been a great run and I’ll be leaving behind some very smart people that I have really enjoyed working with. Can’t say I’ll miss working in a cube though…
As I’ll be traveling again I will have much more time to update this blog so I plan on increasing my writing skills (a.k.a. learning to write all over again) by posting here more frequently. I’ll also be reinstating View From Here, which is something I greatly enjoyed.
I’ll try to keep the content fresh and interesting, so do me a favor and subscribe to my feed and keep me company on my travels by leaving comments!
Do you store PSTs on your file server? This is a fairly common issue that most people either aren’t aware of or don’t care about for some reason. If you ask me it’s A Bad Thing that should be avoided at all costs. Microsoft has a KB article on this and I’ve copied and pasted a few choice sections out of it below…
The .pst files are not meant to be a long-term, continuous-use method of storing messages in an enterprise environment.
Other Behaviors of .pst Files over WAN/LAN Links
- All operations take longer.
- Write operations can take approximately four times longer than read operations.
- Outlook has slower performance than the Exchange Client.
When you store .pst files, shares may stop responding. This behavior may cause several client-side problems, such as causing Outlook to stop responding or freezing desktops on client computers. Queuing in the Server service work queues is what causes this temporary condition. The Server service uses work items, such as a request to extend a .pst file, to handle I/O requests that come in over the network. These work items are queued in the Server service work queues. From there, they are handled by the Server service worker threads. The work items are allocated from a kernel resource that is called the nonpaged pool (NPP). The Server service sends these I/O requests to the disk subsystem. If, for reasons that are mentioned above, the disk subsystem does not respond in time, the incoming I/O requests are queued by using work items in the server work queues. Because these work items are allocated from the NPP, this resource eventually runs out. Running out of NPP causes systems to eventually stop responding and to log event ID 2019.
Consider one more scenario that is not specifically called out in the KB: real world file server performance. If you have 400 users with 1GB PST files located on a single file server what happens when they all come in at 8AM and load up Outlook? Outlook is going to try to load the entire PST at once and your file server is going to be asked to deliver 400GB of data to 400 users simultaneously. Yet again, A Bad Thing. These are obviously make believe numbers but hopefully you get the idea.
Microsoft makes a few recommendations in the KB, all of which are feasible, but I would add a big one that is becoming more popular daily - Archiving. I’ll write another post that covers some archiving options in the coming weeks but until then know that it allows you to move your user’s older and less frequently accessed e-mail to slower, cheaper storage with minimal impact to the user experience. It also allows you to provide a “bottomless mailbox” as far as your users are concerned as they will never hit their quotas if your policies are designed properly.
[ LINK ] to Q297019 - Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link
