March 11, 2007

Sleep is a luxury that I don’t get this week. After going to bed at not that long before five this morning I was awake around ten. I was scheduled to be in the office at noon so I had to be up and moving. Not long after I was up my schedule was pushed back to two o’clock in the afternoon so I had a little bit of time to relax. So Min and I walked down to Market Street to the Dunkin Donuts and got some breakfast before I had to leave.

I got caught in a conference call just before leaving the house and had to work from home until two. Then I hopped into the car and drove on into Warren to go to work. I am hoping that today will be pretty slow and that I will have plenty of time to relax and work on SGL and just take a breather while waiting for disaster to strike. There are a lot of people in the office today.

I ended up working, in the office, until around six. It wasn’t a long day but it was long for a Sunday. But hey, overtime is always good. I didn’t want to stay too late because I have to be into the office very early tomorrow morning.

Microsoft appears to be having a much harder time with the time change than we are in the Linux world. Our operating system impact was pretty low. All of the Linux machines that I use at home needed nothing at all. They just took care of themselves. At the office the only reason that we had a hard time getting the DST configuration working was because we do our own distribution of Linux and don’t have a normal distro making the patches for us. Really one of the biggest problems for Microsoft is that so many Microsoft customers buy their expensive products and then think that they can just skip buying the next one and run on old stuff forever. This isn’t how it works. No reasonably. If you use a free product, like openSUSE or CentOS, then you can upgrade as often as you like since it is free and you tend to stay up to date even though you don’t have to. But when you buy a really expensive product like Windows Server you tend to want to skip cycles to save money. But if you are penny pinching so much you shouldn’t be buying a product that requires constant commercial support. Microsoft makes some great products but you can’t use them in an unrecommended way outside of the support time frame. It just isn’t reasonable. If you are going to do it that way you are wasting the money on the product in the first place. When purchasing products like this the entire life cycle needs to be considered before investing in core infrastructure. You would never put down a new highway that needs to be repaired every five years if you know that you will only have a budget to fix it every fifteen years! Imagine how problematic that would be. Ten out of every fifteen years the road would just be closed waiting for you to save up enough money to open it back up again.

I spent the evening working on the server that has to head to Scranton tomorrow.  I worked late into the night getting Zimbra and WildFire servers working.  It took a long time and a lot of work but I finally got everything in place.  It was well after eleven when I finally got a chance to go to bed.  I was really tired but happy with the work that I had gotten done.  Tomorrow is going to be really hard though.

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