Ooops – I Upgraded…

It wasn’t intentional, at least the scheduling wasn’t intentional. However, last night there was a power outage and our servers crashed and then came back on. What is different, though, is that the firewall server is now running Forefront TMG instead of the old ISA 2006. This is much better, of course, but previously I [...]

Not All Coming Up Roses

The FiOS install went great, but… After turning in my cable box yesterday and cancelling my residential cable service through Cox, they came out this morning and disconnected my business internet service as well. Argh. And just as I was getting packed to head to Los Angeles for TEC2010. As you can see, though, all [...]

Media Center and FiOS TV

Two words: Awesome. Well, that wasn’t two, so I’ll compensate by adding a few more. Today, we ditched Cox cable for Verizon FiOS TV. Cox, the regular local cable provider, is actually not bad. They have great [for a cable company] customer service, but I’ve been disappointed with the service itself. The signals are low [...]

New Web Server

I bet you didn’t even notice, but we’re now running on Windows Server 2008 R2, which is 64-bit only. Yay! This is has been an ongoing project which I started a while back when 2008 came out. I wanted to migrate all the sites from 2003 to 2008. I got bogged down and then R2 [...]

40

No, not the U2 song, but Friday, I turned 40. It’s an eye-opening experience and I frequently wonder where the time has gone. I mean: I don’t FEEL 40… except after I work out too hard. This year, after saving up lots of money by selling off old books, I was given a gift card [...]

Server Room: Complete

Upon arrival back from our trip to Houston, it was good to arrive back at the house to see that our basement work was complete. The wall was done and painted, the wall trim installed, and the door put in place. It looks like it was always there. Here are some pictures of the inside: [...]

Saved By The Elephant

I have a spreadsheet I keep on my laptop with which I keep track of my billable hours for work. The company has a tool, but I like to keep an independent check on it with my own records. Just in case, right? I click on the desktop shortcut I have setup for it and [...]

Email Is Back: With A Vengeance

After about 5 days without email, I was finally able to restore our email service – and even get us upgraded to Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate. All it took was a complete destruction of the old Exchange environment (twice) and rebuilding from scratch. Good thing I was able to take a backup of the [...]

Email: Bad

So, in the process of upgrading my email server to Exchange 2010 Release Candidate, the power went out [it was out for a whole day] and now it’s VERY messed up. I’m trying to restore services, but we cannot send or receive any new emails right now… So, I’m not deliberately ignoring you. This time.

Additional Media Center Woes

Things were looking up with the media center now that I got the cable card tuner and a new video card. It was looking great, that is, until the technician left. It seems that Cox has implemented Switched Digital Video on their digital cable network. That totally broke my media center. I can get a [...]