August, 2007

The large throng of groupies hanging about the xBox360. Hard to explain to the wife. The campfires burning in the basement and the remainders of some others. Floor is littered in water bottles and chip bags as well as wrappers from hot dogs. "Peace" and "Anarchy" symbols have been spray painted on everything, including the dog. Large throngs of police cars are circling your house for weeks...

I was catching up on my RSS reading and noticed a post by my fellow IT Pro Advisor, Ruth Morton , on the Canadian IT Managers blog . It seems that the time is nearing, time for another round of DST "fun". She posted some great links which I'll share here... Key Dates: September 30th, 2007 – The New Zealand DST time change October 28th, 2007 – DST “Fall Back” time change for the US, much of Canada...

The other day I asked you to vote for the content theme for the My TechNet tour and I want to remind you to vote if you haven't already done so! Voting closes on August 31 and a winner will be declared. I also want to let you know about the upcoming IT Manager tour. If you want to know more about either tour, vote for My TechNet, or register for the events, click on the image to visit the homepage...

Hero Pronunciation: 'hir-(")O Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural heroes Etymology: Latin heros, from Greek hErOs There are a lot of heroes in day to day life. Fire, police, paramedics, armed forces, system administrators, network engineers, systems analysts, the list goes on. Some may find it odd that I listed some IT related careers in that list, but I think it is perfectly normal. Dictionary...

Hello my name is Rodney and I am hooked on Facebook. At first I wasn't keen on Facebook but everyone I work with was doing it. I signed up and at first it was cool, I could add people I work with as friends, "poke" them, and laugh at their silly high school pictures. I then started adding some real friends, which was great because it offered me another way to stay in contact with people in Winnipeg...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) Suddenly one day quite unexpectedly I was offered the position of IT Manager. I had never given such a move any thought. However, never being shy about taking on a challenge (or is it too stupid to know when to say “no”?), I accepted. My initial experience was somewhat similar to when we have a change of government. You know, when the new government suddenly...

Sean is back with a humorous take on job hunting. While some of it is pure fun, there are a lot of great tips as well! --------------------------------------------------- Dos and Don'ts when trying to apply to a large major corporation whose name we shall not name... DO - Be Persistent in checking out the job listings DON'T - Go online and start writing completely new and fake job postings "Just to...

David Sengupta is the Global Director of Product Management for messaging & communications products at Quest Software ( http://www.quest.com/exchange_2007 ). He is responsible for all aspects of product strategy for messaging, archiving and communications solutions including management solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. In his 10th year as...

In case you are wondering if you mis-typed the URL, this still is the Canadian IT Professionals blog :) We underwent a little bit of a cosmetic change based on feedback we got. Most importantly..... Simple, clean look that should load faster Dynamic page width to fit 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio screens better Links to the other Canadian comunity connection blogs We hope you like the new...

A few times a year the TechNet team travels across Canada delivering technical readiness sessions to IT professionals. The tours are always focused around a particular theme, take the Core I|O Tour last fall which had branch office as a theme. Going out for the Fall tour this year we are changing things up a bit and letting YOU vote on what YOU would like to see us come to your city and talk about...

So after some begging and pleading and promising to paint the fence at my managers house I managed to get a week off and I headed back to Winnipeg to visit friends and family and see the old stomping grounds. A couple of local IT Pros, Jason Miller and Pasquale Pescatore figured it would be a good idea to take me fishing. First thing wrong with fishing is the 5am wakeup call. The last time I was...

I recently bought Guitar Hero II for the xBox360 and I am HOOKED! Sean was nice enough to share his tips with me and I thought they are worthwhile for everyone to see! -------------------------------------------------- Alright all you experts out there. You all think you can kick *ss in Rock and blow the scores away? Pshaw! Here's the REAL tips on how to actually blow away all the scores in Guitar...

Sean Kearney (Toronto, Ontario) Windows 2000 and 2003 Sean Kearney is showing his serious side again. This is a great tip (and much easier than a post I wrote years ago ) on converting dynamic disks back to basic. As a field technician with more years experience than he cares to admit, he is full of tips like this. Do you have a tip? Why not share it with the rest of the community by emailing...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) Designing, constructing and commissioning a process plant bears some similarity to software development. When we develop software we always start from a perfect set of requirements that never change, right? In your dreams. Building a process plant, especially when the process is the fruit of your own research, is not dissimilar. If we waited for the perfect...

Sean is still in a musical mood this week and set his sights on the MVP program. Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------- Sung to "Secret Agent Man" Circa cool '60s spy show When the servers crashin' in the night Sparks are flyin' such an awful sight Data can't be found and the problems all around Who's the ones that bring you so much light They're the MVPs, Microsoft...

I do! I am the first to admit that licensing can be really confusing but there are some tools that can help you (including the CanITPro team) navigate the waters so to speak. In the virtualization realm there are some calculators which I linked in a previous article to which would help you figure out what you need based on your virtualization strategy. In my experience the big problem was figuring...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) My entry into the PC world started with the Commodore 64 . I bought the “kit”; C64 computer, 1541 disc drive and 1084 RGB monitor (good monitor which did service for many years). All excited I took the “kit” home and set it up only to find myself in constant competition with my 10 year old son. Suffice it to say that it was very clear where his career...

A while back we posted an entry in the From the Trenches category about Mark Seniow and his implementation of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 in production while the product was still at the Beta 2 stage. If you missed that post you can read it here. Mark credits his success in part to a program we ran last year called IT Pro Momentum (and we will be running it again this year) which gives support and resources...

In this hard pressed world of stress and pressures, Some of us have forgotten the basics. How to relax. In this simplistic guide. We're going to discover the basics of that long forgotten art; RELAXING. Seems simple doesn't it? Just don't "DO" things. Right. Let's just see if you can remember the basics. DON'T answer the phone. DON'T check the email. DO sit down. DO open your choice of beverage, whether...

Licensing. It can be a headache, it is often misunderstood and things are different in the virtual environment. There are some great virtualization specific licensing resources I wanted to share to help you navigate these waters. First of all there are two calculators available online. Calculator 1 lets you interactively build virtual machines running multiple Microsoft server products to estimate...

So Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 was released a while ago and with that the Virtual Server Resource Kit was also sent to the printers. This is all very well and good, but I know a lot of you are already playing with Windows Server 2008 and would like to run Virtual Server on Server 2008. Well the virtualization team at Microsoft is on the ball and have posted this article on Installing Virtual Server...

Sean Kearney (Toronto, Ontario) Exchange 2007 Sean Kearney is our Friday Funnies guest blogger but he has a serious side too! This is a great tip on how to change the default port and SmartHost in Exchange 2007. This might come in handy for those trying to host an Exchange 2007 server behind a residential ISP connection. -------------------------------------------------- I almost forgot about this...

Most folks that know me also know that I tend to work rather late. Well past midnight most nights. It's not that I am a workaholic but there is that 11pm to 2am sweet spot when the kids are asleep and you can focus on whatever it is you need to do. Last night, while going through my email I got a new message indicator in Outlook 2007 that immediately caught my eye. It was from the folks at http://connect...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) Having chipped away a little of the “outer shell” of getting the first real opportunity to use PDMS, it was “put up or shut up time”. One of our regular clients (from Tasmania) wanted us to use PDMS. That was the official line as far as the client was concerned. However, the assigned PM would only do it if it was done in parallel with the manual system...