On July 21st, I challenged myself to make a blog post at least once a day for the next 365 days. Here I am a week and a half later and I am happy to report that I have made good on the promise so far. They say it takes 21 days to form a habit so I have 11 days left to make it stick. I think I will make it. I will likely post more often then once a day once I really get into the swing of things though. I would ideally like to post 2-4 posts a day but I am taking it slow. I have a tendency to be a little wordy so I think 4 posts a day would consume a LOT of time. I will leverage Twitter for items that are short an interesting.

I went back and read some of my posts and one thing I want to change is to add more technical posts geared directly towards IT Pros and computer geeks in general. I have a list of topics I will be posting about and I have some screencasts in the works that will get posted here as well as the TechNet Edge site. I won't have any difficulty finding topics to post about, but I do want to make sure they are relevant to you.

I enjoy working with SBS, ISA, Exchange, Windows Client and Server, Hyper-V, Media Center, and networking technologies so you will see a stronger focus on those topics. You won't see much in the way of SCOM, SharePoint, and SQL though. They just aren't my bag.

What do you want to see information about?

Cheers!

I am really starting to enjoy Twitter. Actually, I am enjoying the experience that certain applications give me with Twitter. If you aren't familiar with Twitter, it is a service that allows you to send very short messages - 140 characters max - in the form of "tweets" to people that follow you. Think of it as subscribed IM's. I use it to let people know what I am doing and find out what they are doing. Many of the World Wide IT Evangelists have used it this week to comment live on sessions, make plans for lunch and dinner, and generally just update each other on what is going on. Since it is real time we are always in touch.

Twitter is the service that makes it happen but there are a bunch of apps out there that make it useful.

twhirl - this is a Twitter client that helps organize your Tweets as well as who you follow. I know there have to be other clients out there but this was the second one I loaded and I like the interface and the layout so I have stuck with it.\

Tiny Twitter - This is a client for Windows Mobile devices. I didn't like this one too much until this week when I updated to the latest build. Prior to that it was killing my phone dozens of times a day. Now it runs smooth as glass. Great for Tweeting on the go.

OutTwit - This is an add-on for Outlook that helps organize tweets for you. I only loaded this one this past week so the jury is still out on whether I will get much out of it. It archives tweets in Outlook which means I can use the built-in search to find messages. Great for finding that tweet from someone that has a link to a news story or other interesting information. I have a lot more playing around to do with this app so I will post more on this when in a week or so.

twistori - This is a dynamic web site that scans Twitter Tweets for certain key words and scrolls those messages across the screen. Not particularly useful (to me anyway) but interesting when you have some time to kill and you want to be a little voyeuristic.

twitterfeed - I posted about this one a few days ago. This app leverages RSS to grab your blogs posts and tweet them for you. I set mine up so that it only grabs the blogs posts that have my twitterfeed tag associated with them. That way I don't over tweet if I decide to go on a blogging frenzy (yet to happen....).

You can follow me on Twitter here.

What other Twitter clients are out there I should look at?

Cheers!

I won the Guitar Hero contest last night! The contest was set up with two rounds and then a final elimination. In Round 1 there were five sets of two playing Pro Face-Off. Players had to agree on song and skill level. I was the only one that plays on expert with any regularity so I let my opponent pick the song and level. He chose "Bulls on Parade" by Rage Against the Machine and HARD difficulty. The song is actually pretty easy even on Expert. Lots of repeating notes and a short, simple solo. I haven't spent much time on anything except for expert so it was a challenge to play a level down and "skip" notes I was used to playing. But I beat him handily and even showed off a little by playing with my back to the screen.

Once Round 1 was complete, that left us with 5 winners which they then let the crowd vote with applause for their favorite two. I was chosen and had to face off against the other chosen player from Round 1. They upped the ante by requiring us to play on Expert and with a pre-determined song - "Rock You like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions. This is also a pretty easy song and given that I have been air-guitaring it for last 20+ years and playing it on Expert pretty regularly I won that one as well.

Round 2 repeated the format of Round 1 leaving myself and the Round two overall winner to compete. They also required Expert and the chosen song for this round was "Cliffs of Dover" by Eric Johnson. I love the song but I can't play it for squat. It is the one song where the timing just seems squirrelly to me and I have a hard time with it. Just before we started play I congratulated the other player expecting to lose.

I started out behind and stayed behind through the first 3rd of the song which is the hardest part for me. I missed every star power while he hit his. I thought it was over at that point but we hit the 2nd third and I managed to grab the star powers which if I remember correctly he missed. I started to catch him and the crowd started to get into it (for the record....it was a little lopsided in the crowd...most of my team and several other friends and acquaintances were there cheering me on). I started to see the power meter swing back my direction which gave me some hope and I finally caught him in the final 3rd and stayed in front for the win. My score sucked but I only had to win by 1 point. I think I ended up about 10 or 15 thousand ahead.

I am the Guitar Hero.....

btw......my XBox Live ID is "loper". Feel free to add me as a friend and let's play some Guitar Hero!

Cheers!

I just got off the phone after 4 hours with our very own Microsoft Tech support. My Exchange 2007 server stopped moving mail in or out and it appeared to be a hosed Edge Subscription. Turns out it was simpler yet far more complicated than that.

A few days ago I reworked IP addresses on many of the machines on the network including my Exchange Edge Server and my Exchange "everything else" server. However, mail was flowing after I made the tweaks and I didn't think anything about it until two days later when a friend called me and asked if I had received an email they had sent. I check and sure enough, I had not received anything in just over 24 hours. So I poked around and discovered that the Edge and Transport server roles weren't talking to each other. I did a few troubleshooting steps and got pressed for time so I let it go. Yesterday I had training so it didn't get fixed yesterday. This morning I received an Urgent Alert from my Systems Management Server (which in my case is my wife......if there is ever a hiccup with Internet access or mail flow she lets me know immediately) which meant it needed to be fixed today.

So....After getting my truck towed and dropped at the shop (I will post more about that wonnermous experience later) I decided to come back home and work the server.

It appeared to be an issue with the Edge connector. The Edge server was reporting that it could not resolve the IP of the Transport server so I thought it would be a simple enough fix. It never is. Turns out that when I changed IP addresses, I neglected to update my HOSTS file. I don't really even need the HOSTS  file info, so I just removed the offending entry and bounced the server for the heck of it.

That didn't fix it.

So I decided to just whack the Edge subscription and create a new one. That is when it started to go south and fast. I received a message that the account being used did not have appropriate permission to import the subscription on my Transport server. Seeing as how it is the same account I sued to install and configure Exchange and it is the same account I have used for over a year when doing any kind of maintenance on the server, I was a little concerned. I spent about an hour checking group memberships, permissions on objects, blah, blah, blah. I finally gave in a decided to call MS tech support.

The first gentlemen thought it was a DNS issue and he appeared to be on target until we realized that not only could I not create a new subscription, but I could not see my mailbox databases in the GUI or the command shell. Weird thing is that the get-mailbox command showed my mailboxes but get-mailboxdatabase returned nothing. Not even an error. So no it came back to being a permissions issue. We ultimately looped in two addition techs with different specialties. I gave them control of my server through our Easy Access system and let them do most of the driving.

We confirmed IP addressing, DNS settings, made sure replication was working between my two DC's, ran netdiag and dcdiag. I got a little nervous when I saw one of them typing ADSIEDIT in the Run window, but everything checked out and no changes were made. I did have a could of name resolution things we resolved but nothing go the mail flowing and we could not recreate the Edge subscription.  One of the gentlemen decided it was a flat out permissions issue and made a few tweaks to some items that changed a few of the error messages we received but nothing allowed us to create the subscription. On a whim I noted that I was not married to that account and if we could create a new admin account and test with that then maybe we could narrow it down.

Bingo.....

The new admin account allowed us to see the objects that were missing in the GUI and also allowed me to create the new subscription. As soon as the sub was created, mail started to flow. So it turned out to be a bad administrator account.

I don't know how or why it became corrupted but I do know that except for AV and Defender signature updates, the only other change I made was to the IP addresses and related DNS updates. It was a fluke that my administrator account got whacked about the same time.

It is now 6pm, the big DPE party starts at 8 and I have a Guitar Hero contest to go win. 

Cheers!

Ray Ozzie's keynote today at our internal training called TechReady was great. I have never seen him speak before and frankly don't know all that much about him. I know about Lotus and Groove but not much beyond that. Regardless, I like him and I like his keynote. I wish I could tell you what all was said but it is all internal communications so my hands are tied. Suffice it so ay that there is some cool stuff, industry changing stuff, world changing stuff on the near horizon.

It was all down hill from there though. I attended a Windows Mobile session that didn't teach me anything really new and then a session that was was for my org but didn't tell me much about my team. On the up side I noted this to the speakers and will be meeting with them in the next couple of weeks to clue them in.

Then I decided to cut out early because I am helping a co-worker recover some data on some drives that is important (one drive is toast, the other I am backup up data for right now). Upon going to retrieve my car from the parking garage I found that it was stuck in park and will not disengage. Spent a couple hours working on that before contacting the wife to come pick me up. So tomorrow I will be consuming valuable training time dealing with getting my car out of a parking garage, towed to my mechanic, and getting it fixed.

On the up side I am about to take these drives over to my buddy's house and have a cocktail or two and relax.Also, at our team party tomorrow evening there is a Guitar Hero contest that I am going to enter. Even bringing my axe from home. I will let you know how I do....

Cheers!

Today I listened to a speaker that held my attention not just once, but twice. One of those times was post-lunch which is the most difficult for me. Of course I also did some break-dancing after lunch as well so my blood was pumping. More on the break dancing later.

Today, Simon Sinek came and spoke to our worldwide IT Evangelist team. I didn't have high hopes because these kind of "rah rah, shake the pom-poms and rally the troops" sessions do anything but most of the time. But ten minutes in he had my attention as well as every other ITE in the room. That is a pretty tall order for a bunch of Type A personalities that are accustomed to controlling the conversation.

Simon is CEO of Sinek Partners. His blog is here. He works with companies and organizations to help them realize the "why" in what they do. If you check out his site or just do a search on him and spend some time reading the articles, the common theme that develops is that many companies know what the do, but not why the do it. As a result, many of the employees are in the same boat - they know what the do but not why.

It was an eye-opening experience when he was talking about this and I asked myself why I do what I do. It didn't take long for me to figure out that the answer I gave myself in about 2-3 minutes of thought is completely different from the answer I have given people for the past 6 years I have been an evangelist. Anyone who has asked me what I do for a living would hear me say that I work for Microsoft as an IT Evangelist. Anyone outside the industry would be clueless and those in the industry would likely start making assumptions. I typically would toss in "I travel around the country speaking to people about Microsoft's great products and technologies" which is completely accurate but still doesn't provide a lot of clarity as to what I really do, much less why I do it.

His talk with us today helped re-invigorate my passion for what I do at Microsoft which is really to help educate IT Pros on the products, technologies and services that can help make them more productive, efficient and successful in their roles. That is a much better description of what I do and also covers in part why I do it.

I could spend the next 2 hours going on and on about the impact his talks with us today had but I have to finish this post up by midnight to make my post for the day and I still have more to talk about so I promise that I will go more into this later this week (has to be later in the week because I will be in training, lectures, and other activities from 8am till later every day this week)

Break Dancing.....

Imagine if you will a 6'3" 240 pound guy that believes toe tapping is a form of dance on a stage trying to break dance. You don't have to imagine too much because I believe we actually have some film of it. I will see what I can do to get it and get it posted here.

Why was I break dancing? It was a team building exercise where we had to work as a break dance team to come up with moves and compete against other teams for the spot of best break dance team. If that weren't bad enough, we did this little exercise immediately after lunch.

Ugh.....

It was a lot of fun and it did demonstrate team building, but it was not a pretty site. Multiply me times about 40, add/remove a few pounds and inches of height here and there and we had a recipe for hilarious disaster. Think about it.....the bulk of us are in our late 30's to early 40's and we are.....break dancing.....  It still has me laughing.

After all of the official team building and lectures, we were treated to dinner and Teatro Zinzanni. This is a dinner theater style venue in downtown Seattle that combines, song, comedy, theater, acrobatics and a dash of circus type flair along with a 5 course meal. Great showmanship by the entire cast that interacts very well with the crowd. If you have ever been to a "Tina and Tony's Wedding" type show, it is similar though not quite as fast paced. Great place to take a date (albeit not a cheap one!) and families could easily make an evening of it. Just make sure you have enough time carved out for it. I believe we spent right at 3.5 hours and every bit of it was worth it.

Whew!

Beat the deadline again!

I will be Twittering and blogging is bursts this week as I attend sessions and will communicate what I am allowed to tell you about cool and interesting stuff.

Cheers!

I am sure there are people who read my blog who don't follow me on Twitter. I am sure I have Twitter followers that don't read my blog. I am also sure that many like to keep those things separate and have no interest in following me on both. So when I found out about TwitterFeed, a service that pushes your blog posts to Twitter, I immediately thought about how I could get blog updates into Twitter without burdening those that follow me. I don't want a lot of duplication between the two and I want to be selective about what I push out.

Since TwitterFeed uses RSS feeds from the blog to update Twitter, I decided to create a "twitterfeed" tag and use the RSS feed from that tag as what TwitterFeed links to. Now, if there is a blog post that I feel is important enough that I want to push it to Twiiter, I just add the twitterfeed tag and that post will get picked up. That allows me to pick and choose what posts I want pushed to Twitter.

This post is tagged as such..... I promise I won't tag every post going forward....  :)

Cheers!

Ya know......we (Microsoft) have taken a lot of heat for the past year and a half on Vista. A year ago I heard the rumblings and I shook my head because much of what was being said rang true. Now we are at Vista SP1 and much of what people have complained about is resolved. However, many of the every day people I speak to that complain about Vista have never actually used Vista...or....they used Vista a year ago. They saw a TV commercial or heard a friend or co-worker bad mouth Vista and decided that was good enough for them. The same holds true for many IT Pros I speak to - they evaluated it a year ago, ran into a few problems, and decided to stick with XP. Now we are a year and a half after RTM, SP1 has been available for 5 months, but many of the people that I spoke to a year ago haven't taken a second look.

They don't know that many of the application compatibility issues have been resolved.

They don't know that User Account Control has been updated to be less pervasive.

They don't know BitLocker has been updated and there are new recovery tools.

They don't know how much faster disk-to-disk and network files transfers are.

There are many other updates as well. You can read about them here.

Now that's not to say that for IT Pros they can just drop a Vista DVD into a server, share it out and deploy a few thousands seats with ease. There is a planning and deployment process that should be managed. But that isn't anything new. IT Pros had to do that a decade ago when moving from Win 3.1 to Windows 95.

To that end, there is a relatively new portal to help IT Pro's who would like to evaluate and deploy Vista for their environments. The new Vista Springboard site has prescriptive guidance on exploring new and updated features of Vista, testing it in a lab setting, testing the compatibility of your apps, and deploying and finally managing it on a day to basis.

If you haven't take a look at Vista in a while (or maybe you have never loaded it!) take a look at the Springboard site, read up and get familiar with Vista, then let me know if it is enough or if it is even the right stuff.

Cheers!

You probably have read some stories on the "Mojave" experiment. For those that have not, Microsoft invited people to come see a preview of a new Microsoft Operating system codenamed "Mojave". The people invited with Vista naysayers. At the end of the presentation it was revealed that what they were really looking at was actually Vista. This was after many of the naysayers stated they liked what they saw in "Mojave"

Check out the Mojave Experiment site on July 29th for more info.....

Cheers!

I have been playing around with PowerShell more and more lately. I have even loaded up the PowerShell 2.0 CTP. Today at out IT Evangelist meeting I discovered a new community site for PowerShell at http://powershellcommunity.org that looks interesting. Word is this will be the premier PowerShell scripting community site.

Cheers!

I guess I did those a little out of order. Should have started with the "weak postage" first since that is what this blog post is.

No cool tech info to talk about....No interesting tidbits of news that I think may not be posted anywhere else easily discoverable Just me making sure I get my post in for the day. I suspect that out of 365 posts that some will end up like this. However, today, I have a semi-good reason. Which brings me to then downtime....

A couple of days ago, "wallofvoodoo" (WOV)- my firewall server, had a few patches to install which I did. I rebooted the machine, went up stairs to make a sandwich, came back to the dungeon, and WOV was in a reboot loop (For the curious, it was ISA 2006 SP1 that made me reboot).

WOV has been my faithful firewall server for the past 7 years. Same hardware - just updating the software. When the machine started out, I had 4 Seagate 8 gig SCSI hard drives in a RAID 5 array running that system. Over the years the drives have begun failing until I was down to the final drive.

Final Config - Dual 400mhz CPUS, 768 megs of RAM, single 8 gig SCSI drive running ISA 2006 Enterprise

The final drive went south on me after 7+ years of near 24x7 operation so I decided to retire the hardware and build a new ISA box. I actually had a server running Win2003 R2 sitting idle so I patched it up, tossed on ISA 2006 +SP1 and then spent a significant amount of time importing config info from the original server and making tweaks to tighten things up. Funny thing is that this server has a relatively new 2.4ghz CPU/MoBo combo but the drives are pretty old in the grand scheme of things. It has a 60 gig and an 80 gig drive in it. I am using the 60 gig drive as then ISA cache drive since the cache tops out at 64 gigs. I expect these drives to go south relatively quickly so I am backing the machine up a little more frequently than normal.

Anyway....

After the downtime was resolved, my home LAN re-configured, a dozen devices re-IP'd, and some other misc cleanup, I realized I had not posted for the day. Only there wasn't time because of....

Fun.

My wife and I went over to the Chateau St. Michelle winery tonight and saw Chris Isaak in concert. We had never seen him before but I had heard from people who had that it was a great show. He did not disappoint. I especially liked his mirrored suit he wore for the encore.

So here I am, barely making it under the deadline wire to get my weak post in for the day about nothing particularly helpful or exciting.

What did you do today/tonight?

Cheers!

Have you ever spent hours and hours and hours trying to resolve something and ultimately it could have been resolved in just a few minutes?  That is the experience I had over the past couple of days. I was working with a couple of virtual machines that were created with Virtual PC only I was using them in Hyper-V. The issue I had was getting the new Integration Services for Hyper-V (sort of the equivalent of VM Additions for Virtual PC) working with these VM's.

I removed the VM additions, rebooted, installed the IS components, rebooted, and....

...no change.

I tried many, many iterations of going into safe mode and trying to track down registry info, and, blah, blah, blah.....

Ultimately the fix came down to a check box.   

I finally broke down and posted to an internal alias about the issue and received a response instructing me to run MSCONFIG.EXE, choose the BOOT tab, Advanced, then check the box for Detect HAL, then reboot the VM.

Once that was complete, the IS stuff worked.

Damnable check boxes.....

Cheers!

Tonight I am going to my first Nerd Dinner. My wife would argue that she has been living Nerd Dinners for the past 8 years, but that is a story for another time. Scott Hanselman organized this for tonight over at the Food Court at the Crossroads Bellevue Mall (note....the link to directions on the invite site was dead as of this posting. I sent a corrected link to Scott).

I have never been to a nerd dinner.

I have no idea who will be there or what to expect. But just the thought of nerds/geeks/dweebs/dorks meeting at "the mall" revives memories of playing D&D at the mall back in the early 80's. A bunch of gangly, cumbersome, pimply faced kids with shirts buttoned up to the top button, scores of well sharpened #2 pencils (critical for D&D!), graph paper, and 20-sided dice. The ultimate party foul was to spill a Coke on the playing field.

These days I am not so gangly and I only endure the occasional zit (come on...I am 42! go away already!). I stopped playing D&D loooong ago (I would enjoy playing again if there is a group on the East Side) but I still have most of my gear. In fact I still have my original D&D manuals from the 70's. I wonder how much those might be worth.

Anyway....I am looking forward to hanging out with some fellow geeks tonight and meeting some new people. If you happen to be free tonight, come on out!

Nerd Dinner!   Tonight!      Be there and Be Square!

Cheers!

And so it begins.....this is the first post of the 1 year test that I am doing to make at least one post a day for the next 365 days. At first I thought I would shoot for just business days but I figure I can get the other 104 posts in as well.

I don't want to just post fluff to make it through though. I want the posts to be useful, relevant and of value.

Here we go.....

We are about to start our live event deliveries again and I have been working on one particular piece of content that we will be delivering. I put together a session called "Why to Deploy Vista with SP1". Pretty easy session really. Why would you deploy without SP1 unless you have 1) a serious application compatibility problem or 2) you just don't care about the stability and security of your Vista systems? Of course there is quite a bit to SP1 but in the session I am focusing on some of the performance enhancements for networking and file copies as well as improvements in BitLocker, Group Policy and Diagnostics.

Did you know that once you have Vista SP1 in place you can use BitLocker on driver other than the C: drive? You can even use BitLocker on removable drives (as long as they are formatted NTFS). One of the first BitLocker questions I hear is "What about the performance impact of encrypting/decrypting on the fly?".

There really isn't any.

Sure, if you fire up some PerfMon type tools you will see charts and lines that show a performance hit and depending on the scale you may think it is a huge hit, but I challenge the average human being to even notice it. Hardware is just so fast these days that us humans don't feel the hit. In fact, my demo environment is setup like this -

Lenovo T61p laptop

100gig 7200 RPM SATA Primary Drive (C:)

100gig 7200 RPM SATA Secondary Drive (H:)

Windows 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V

I have BitLocked the C: and H: drives (C: is the O/S drive and H: is where I store all the Hyper-V .VHD files) and run Hyper-V VM's on the machine for demos. Both drives are fully encrypted and I don't have any complaints about performance on this machine.

I repeat....I am running a Server O/S and virtualizing additonal OSes along with it on fully encrypted drives and I am happy with the system.

That is pretty darn cool....

I think where people get tripped up is that they turn on BitLocker, go about their business and start complaining about performance while the drive is actively being encrypted/decrypted. In that case you can suffer a significant performance hit because the system is trying to encrypt/decrypt the entire drive and there is a tremendous amount of disk I/O going on. Once the drive is full encrypted/decrypted, the performance hit is in the low single digits (I have heard 1-3% and 3-6% separately....my personal experience seems to support the 1-3% range)

My Recommendation....

Just before bedtime (or quitting time), enable BitLocker, perform the required reboot, then turn it on for the drives in question. Let it run overnight. In the morning, confirm BitLocker is enabled by checking in the BitLocker Control Panel and then go about your business.

You won't even know it is there....

Cheers!

When you sign up for a NEW TechNet Subscription over at the TechNet site, at some point you will get prompted for a discount/promotional code. Use TMSAM02 and it will net you 15% off. This only applies to NEW subscriptions at the moment and it it should work for you regardless of where you are on the planet. This is a brand new promo and I expect a few speed bumps so please let me know if you have difficulties with it.

Cheers!

Not that I should have to point this out, but I have not been very active since my screencast posting on FTP(S) about a month ago. If you read my post on June 16th you will get a feel for why. It has been and continues to be a busy time for me. Add in that it is review time, and things are pretty active even though I am not on the road. I am still slowly converting the home network and I am still working on some additional IIS related screencasts. I had a specific request for one on User Isolation which I believe I will get posted by the end of next week.

However, starting Monday, July 21st, I am going to push for a goal of posting at least one post every day for the next year. I have a secondary goal of one screen cast every week. These are my own goals and I am posting about them here because I want to be held accountable for those goals. I would like the 18 people (up from 11 last year!) who read my blog to help keep me accountable.  :)

It is also a part of my master plan to overtake my buddy Keith Combs. Keith has established himself as a well respected blogger both inside and outside of Microsoft. This is reflected in his hit count. I challenged him last year and told him I would beat him out (I may have even said double his hits) by the end of this fiscal year.

That didn't happen.

But I have to confess that I didn't make a very concerted effort toward beating him out. This year I want to see if I can make it happen.

I have received a lot of email questions in the past few months from people asking about Windows 2008 features or how to diagnose or troubleshoot specific issues. Those requests will be some of what fuels my daily postings. Keep them coming. I also have my own topics I like to post about that will get tossed in as well. I am a big fan of Media Center, ISA (did you know that ISA 2006 SP1 is available?), and SBS. With the new deal with NetFlix announced, I am now more interested in what my Xbox 360 adds to my media mix as well.

Of course there is also all of the social networking stuff. Particularly in the virtual world arena. There are some interesting things to look at regarding places like Second Life and Google's Lively.

For now though I have to take a break and talk to the guy who is going to tell me how much money it is going to cost to fix the underground leak in the swimming pool that I only get to use 2, maybe 3 months out of the year. Depending on the cost I may just have to drain it and buy a skateboard....

Updated - 7/18/2008 -- Corrected my FTP(S) reference (Thanks Alun!)

Cheers!

You will notice on the left side of my blog, I now have links to a variety of services I frequent. I am paying particular attention to Friend Feed these days because it seems to track comments and conversations better. I can't seem to find a way to link directly to me in Second Life thought so that icon just links to the main page. If you know how to link to a profile or other direct info in SL, please let me know so I can update.

There are a few more things I am going to link to as well that I am trying to find small icons for. Failing that I will just create my own small icons for them :)

So many services, so little time!

Cheers!