IT recruitment cold calls

I don't like cold calls. If I want to speak to someone about a technology I will find a company using the Internet and will call them. Stop calling me.

Especially IT recruitment companies. I joined this company in 1996, Matt came to work for me in 2001 and Michael joined the company (if not me) in 2002. There are (now) only 3 of us doing support, yes Gareth I know you are there too but I'm meaning my department, and it isn't going to go up at the moment.

Today's poor sap called from some recruitment company to ask how big my department is, so I looked at Matt and said "About 5 feet 10". Well, Michael is on holiday and I was in a playful mood...

Thieving scum

My great neighbour Paul has had his car off the road for about 6 months now and recently I've been loaning him my Peugeot as I tend to use the bike barring when I'm with Jake.

Because of offering him this, he offered to do some work on the car - first job was the failed head gasket. He's done that, taken photos, flushed everything and so on. I've given him transport, he's given me transport. She still slightly overheats, but nothing major.

Last night he took the Peugeot down to the Internet cafe in the next town. Now there's a big hole where the passenger window was yesterday. They took nothing as there was nothing of value in the car. They left the child seat, the loose change in the pot (under one pound) but they have just cost Paul about £100.

80,000 jail places for 60.8 million Brits. Or places for 0.13% of the population.
Over 2.2 million places (source: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm) for 301.1 million Yanks. Or 0.73% of the population.

So per head the US has 5.6 times the number of prison cells as us. Plus the 3 strike rule.

Harumph - bring back hard labour, chaingangs and National Service. Not central heating, TVs everywhere and sentencing reduced due minimise overcrowding. Here's a thought - get prisoners building new prisons then at least they have a vocation afterwards.

London is weird

Today has been sunny, raining, tipping down, overcast to the "is it nighttime" kind of dark and hailing so hard with such big hailstones that it looked like snow.

Glastonbury and Wimbledon are, of course, to blame for this.

Service Providers

In a natural progression, let's move to service providers.

My parents are now a week into their enforced Internet silence. Last Tuesday evening they had Internet access via their excellent Netgear DG834 firewall through to a service provider, had changed nothing and there were no problems. Since then, zip.

Mother is sufficiently technical that she can dance around Windows and her firewall. Firewall says "LCP is allowed to come up" but it simply will not connect. IP address is dynamic, username and password have been checked.

Here are some of the things that the ISP have said:
Your firewall is at fault, please contact Netgear
You have to flash the firmware on your firewall
You are running Vista / You need to reload your computer
You need to change your DNS settings to be able to connect to the Internet.
You need to uninstall your anti virus software on your PC.
You need to disable the Windows firewall on your PC.

The line is fine (a BT engineer has tested it).
The ISP is insistent that the problem lies in their house.
They have deleted her email address and recreated it incorrectly so had I not spotted that, all emails would have bounced after 2 days.
The firewall has been changed, so has the RJ11 cable and so has the micro filter.

But the best one is to insist categorically that the Netgear firewall will connect if the drop down box containing the options "PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet)" and "PPPoA (PPP over ATM)" is changed to "PPPoA 2364".

Now correct me if I am wrong, but you can't change a drop down list box for a start and I think that number corresponds to RFC 2364, the request for comments document for PPPoA on the Internet Engineering Task Force site.

Still, I saved the best for last. The ISP in question appears to have a more pressing problem. I'm not going to say which one it is, but click on https://webmail.talktalk.net/ and you'll find that the security certificate is invalid.

Should we have a whip round?

Exchange 2007 - OWA

WOW! You should see OWA on Exchange 2007.

• Auto fill of the names of punters from the GAL
• Auto fill of resources
• Calendar overlays for multiple users
• New mail now comes straight to Inbox, no pop ups or refresh requirements
• Absolute Outlook 2007 look and feel
• Direct access to documents on file shares and sharepoint portals
• Access to Public folders if they are in use
• Change password just works

Utterly stunning.

Ah. But there's a problem. A massive, massive problem. Someone "forgot" about non Internet Explorer support. They seem to call this experience "Outlook Web Access Light". Let's call it how it is - "Nothing like Outlook. Web Access 19th century".

The above list? Well, you might be able to change your password but given that all of the previous stuff doesn't work, I rather lost interest. Internet Explorer 5.2 on the Mac is OWA light only as it isn't Internet Explorer 6 or higher. Same with Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Yes, I'm talking about those shiny toys called Apple computers. There is no browser on the Mac that will do anything but OWA light. You can't cludge any of them to pretend to be IE6.

Looks like the double glazed windows are making the Apples go rotten, at least as far as email is concerned.

Numpties

Does no-one care any more?

Migrations to new servers and I have been creating huge quantities of notes of the projects. All separate, all diligent, all carefully checked. Some of the advanced stuff like SQL 2005 64 bit with mirroring and witnesses I have never done before so I am outsourcing. So why, oh why, do things happen to make me question the ability of some people to get themselves dressed in a morning?

Take Monday for instance. I have a long chronological list of tasks for me and consultant fellow. We get as far as "Install SQL Server 2005 x64 Edition". Reaches for disk only to discover I have been shipped the Itanium disk so it won't install. My trusty MSDN subscription gets pressed into action but the download speed of 90KB/s means that it takes over 3 hours to get hold of the 900MB installer so a large chunk of the day got wasted and the tail end of the day was a tad frantic.

Did thoroughness get left in the 20th century?