Starting a new hobby

Took up learning to fly. I'm starting a new blog to track that adventure: http://apexncflyer.blogspot.com/

Why debate religion but not science?

After reading more I've learned the debate at Messiah is actually designed to be a series of one-on-one interviews with the media. Wired wrote an interesting article asking why the candidates are willing to discuss issues in a religious context, but not in a scientific one. Hear hear.

We spent the last eight years under a religious zealot. That didn't get us anywhere good. One of the reasons I support Obama is because he is erudite. I hope he won't bow to religious leaders on any issues which are important to me (climate change, stem cell research, peak oil, renewable energy, etc.)

Debate at Messiah

Messiah College, my alma mater, is hosting what promises to be an interesting presidential candidate debate focused on moral and ethical issues.

Facebook Discovered

So after reading article after article about Facebook in Wired, I finally decided to check it out. Well, my gosh, how cool it is. I typed in the name of my highschool and was immediately presented with a list of alumni. One of which was my best friend from those days. I linked to him and saw that my college roommate was one of his friends. So I added him... and so on and so on. I'm up to 7 "friends" now which is neat. I even reconnected with an favorite professor from college. He, in turn, commented on this long abandoned blog and made interesting observations about my interest in gardening, zazen meditation, trying to be more likeable, etc. I then reflected on this and just went back and re read many of my old posts. What I've discovered is, I've fallen off the wagon terribly. Not only have I not been maintaining this blog, I've neglected my health mentally and physically and begun falling back into patterns of negative thinking at work. Well enough of that. Today I start back up on my Rob 2.0 project. Because I'm feeling I've downgraded almost all the way back to Rob 1.0.

Re-making connections has been great. I spent over an hour IMing with an old college roomate. Very therapeutic. Hopefully I'll do better at maintaining connections with people. I think that's important to a healthy lifestyle.

Shark Attack

So here I am minding my own business, splashing in the surf with my son Evan at Atlantic Beach, NC, when we notice a fire department pick-up truck come screaming down the beach right past us. Like something out of Baywatch. A minute later another "medical" type SUV goes screaming by. I figured someone might be drowning or had a heart attack or whatever. They stopped about 500 feet from where we were in the water. I mainly ignored all this... but then frantic mothers started waving their kids in to shore. I went up and quickly heard that the hub bub was about a shark attack! No way I thought. So I, and about 1000 other nosy people trotted down to see what was what. Sure enough they're bandaging up this woman who had a goodly part of her thigh missing. Her foot and one toe was also wrapped up. Not sure how bad the damage was. Cops on the scene said it looked to be a 5-6 foot shark from the bite radius.

Amazingly, they didn't close the beaches. No one went in for about an hour, but then we all started trickling back in as it was too damn hot to sit on the sand. And I'm on vacation and I'm going to swim dammit! :)

This has hit local news in Raleigh:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/640090.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=triangle&id=5481796
http://www.nbc17.com/midatlantic/ncn/news.apx.-content-articles-NCN-2007-07-17-0014.html

The news accounts don't make it sound quite as dramatic as it was being their live!

Outlook Presence Issue

Interesting Outlook Office Communicator issue. After installing Office Communicator some users reported losing the presence indication in Outlook
In Outlook's Tools, Options, Other tab is an Enable the Person Names Smart Tag feature. Below it is Display Presence Status in the From field. The latter is greyed out. When a user clears the first option and applies the dialog settings they lose the presence indicator smart tag in Outlook. We found that if you checked the first option again the smart tag would pop up when hovering over a name in Outlook, but it wouldn't display persistently.

After googling in vain for a day I finally realized that this must be a registry setting somewhere. So I stumbled around until I found it. Since there appears to be no information about the solution to this problem (though several other's have posted in Usenet wondering what the solution was), I figured I'd post what I found here. Maybe someone will find it useful.

The registry setting that controls this behavior (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\IM\EnablePresence=1). I still don't know why this option is greyed out in Outlook (tools, options, other, display presence in from field) for me. But at least now I have a workaround. Hoping this helps others.

See how my garden grows

Left to right we have carrots, garlic, lettuce, spinach, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, butternut squash, peppers, and some more tomatoes.

Garlic scapes

Last spring I planted garlic purchased from Gourmet Garlic Gardens. On their site they said that after the scapes shoot up it will soon to be time to harvest. Had no clue what he was talking about. Now I do. This is a "scape". This photo take a couple weeks ago. Many of these scapes have blossomed and exposed myriad tiny garlic cloves. I figure this is some sort of flower and a method of propagation in the wild. The site mentioned that some gourmets harvest these scapes and cook them up as a delicacy. I sampled one of the little cloves. My gawd that was about the hottest, garlikiest thing I've ever eaten. Not really knowing what to do with the scapes I've just been cutting them off and adding them to the compost bin. I wonder if I'll get random garlic plants growing in my compost heap now?

Spring Soccer

Both kids just finished their soccer season. Chloe and Evan both benefited a lot socially from just running around with other kids and getting some exercise. Evan especially really grew over the sprint. In Evan's league his team, Sidewinders, finished the season in first place. They then had a tournament and it was very exciting watching him go though the rounds all the way to the Finals! The final game wound up tied 1-1 through overtime and then went to penalty kicks. Sadly, we lost the shootout, 2-1. But wow, was that ever exciting and, frankly, quite nerve wracking. Evan mainly played as the goalie and a little bit of defense. In goal he made about 10 saves throughout the tournament. Most were easy scoops, but four were real shots on goal. I think I may remember each one vividly for a long time. Two he caught, one he deflected with a good kick. And one did get through, but it was a heck of a kick to the corner and there was zero defensemen helping him. And he tried so hard to get to it! I am one proud papa!

How to Recover a mailbox when User Account is Deleted

The Recovery Storage Group in Exchange is great. It allows you to recover a mail store while leaving production mailboxes online. You can then ExMerge data from the RSG to PST. Problem: If the user account is missing then a ExMerge returns an error for that mailbox and doesn't present it in the GUI.

The error is: Error! Cannot identify the user with the msExchMailboxGuid \FE\40\D1\9C\DEOEA\A2\9C\A2\2E\7FHkx. The legacyExchangeDN is /O=RHD/OU=FIRST ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=JDOE.

Microsoft's KB919088 gives a workaround. I found I needed to add a step.

Essentially what you do is:

1. Recover from tape to the RSG normally, then dismount the RSG.
2. Create a new Storage Group
3. Create a new store, don't mount it.
4. Copy the EDB & STM files to the new stores database folder.
5. Rename the EDB & STM files to match the filename the new store is looking for.
5.5 Here's the extra step, go into properties of the store and set it to allow database to be overwritten by a restore.
6. Mount the store.
7. Create a new account, without a mailbox.
8. Attach the mailbox to be restored to the new account
9. Move the mailbox to a production store. Not sure why this step is necessary but it seems to be. I can never get ExMerge to read this new store. It may be due to replication delay. I'm not sure. The KB says to do this.
10. ExMerge the new account's mailbox normally. Note: the original legacyExchangeDN is preserved so the you need to find the account using the original user name.

Spelling bee champion

interview on CNN with spelling bee champ. I've become oddly enamored of watching the spelling bee lately. This kid's interview with CNN in which he clearly displays autistic characteristics has sparked my interest too. I've been busy defending this unfortunately-named entry on Digg.

read more digg story

Bike Commuter

I'm officially a bike commuter now. I successfully survived riding my bike into work and home again. Admittedly, this ride is a bit long (about 14 miles). I'm taking a lot of back roads right now. Once I get more confident riding with traffic I may be able to shorten that to about 12 miles. The ride in seems to be more downhill so that's pretty easy. Takes an hour and 15 minutes. Ride back took almost 2 hours though. Best part of the ride? Ordering a peach smoothie at Ralph's Italian Ices at the end of the trip home. :-)

Ancient History

I thought about the first web page I'd ever published. Then racked my brain for several minutes trying to remember where I left it... In a city... geocities... no... something to do with wealth? Emerald city? The golden city? what the... oh, yeah... Fortunecity!

Vacation

Disney World, here we come. A week in sunny florida.

I've discovered a neat Disney resource called DISBoards.com. Over there you can read my trip report on our vacation.

Found!

I was in my email and something told me to look in my Junk Mail folder. I rarely do this. I gave a quick glace at the dozen or so spam there and then noticed one labled Congratulations, we've posted your Found message. Well over a year ago, while hiking around Falls Lake in Raleigh I found a schoolgirl note in the middle of the Mountains-to-Sea trail. All folded up like it was tucked in her pocket. So I sent it in to Found magazine. I recall they'd emailed back saying the scan they got was unreadable so I sent it again. Never heard from them. Now, more than a year later they published it as the Find of the Day. Weird.

Tearing Down Exchange

I'm having a lot of fun this week tearing down an Exchange envrionment. I just deleted some three thousand mailboxes. Poof. All gone. Bye bye. More challenging is ripping out the public folder stores. Those things just don't want to die. I knew about deleting the OWA scratchpad and Store Event system folders, but it still wouldn't die. I finally went out on a limb and deleted the Schema system folder. Then it deleted easily. Hope that folder wasn't too important. But I figure we're shutting this whole domain down shortly anyway so how much impact could I really have. Deleting is so much fun! :-)

Soccer Practice

I enjoyed watching Evan run around doing soccer drills yesterday. He's learning how to throw in the ball. He spends a lot of time doing his hair pulling thing so I know he's stressed by the new environment; but he's trying really hard and mostly listening and staying out of trouble. And he's arguably not the worst player out there so I'm very proud of him! :-)

Brrrr

Had record cold Easter weekend. I covered my vegetable garden with sheets, but the peppers seemed to take the brunt of the damage. They have almost no leaves left. Tomatoes fared somewhat better. Carrot, pea, and spinach sprouts seem OK. Cucumber leaves have some damage at the tips. There's something growing in the lettuce bed, but I'm not convinced yet it's lettuce. Looks out of place and weedy. I may plant a few more lettuce seeds in that area as I think this crop may not have worked at all.

Soccer Dad

I'm officially a soccer dad. Took Chloe to her first practice. I was the one dad among a dozen moms. Evelyn took Evan to his practice and had the opposite experience. We'll probably trade off kids each practice. Chloe got a very good coach (Kristin). She was great with all the kids. Chloe did great learning her first soccer skills.

Eating In

We ate out today because Rick started with us and you always have to take the new guy to lunch right? But generally I and most of the guys on the team are pretty good about eating in. I'm the most fanatical about it having foregone lunch out a few times now. I'm trying to limit my lunches out to just Friday. This makes lunch out an enjoyable treat instead of a daily chore. I'm very gradually losing weight because of eating healthier lunches and getting exercise every day. I've lost just about 8 lbs now. I find my weight fluctuates by as much as 4 lbs on a given day. Water weight I guess. Bouncing around 280 - 284 these days. I was a solid 290 when I started my new job.