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A Collection of Random Thoughts
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
 
Exciting news from the Exchange team
The Exchange team blog (You had me at EHLO) has just posted more info about Monad and it's future in Exchange 12.  Obviously, they can only share certain information as Exchange 12 isn't even in Beta yet, but they shared some examples of things you will be able to do using Monad, and I'm excited.  I've seen some of the action personally, and as they posted, Channel 9 has a video of a Monad demo which should be fun to watch (warning - it's a fairly large video).
 
It seems the original intent of the post was twofold.  First, to debunk claims that Monad was being attacked by a virus.  As was pointed out, though there is indeed a virus that was written using Monad, there is currently no exploit to a) get the virus ON the machine, and b) get the monad script to run.  Both of those are fairly crucial and it's a shame that whoever reported the virus failed to mention them.  Secondly, a few examples of what can be accomplished using Monad are presented.  I have no doubt that Monad will be able to save quite a bit of time for many Exchange admins and it's way cool to know that everything you can do in the GUI can be done from a Monad shell (since the GUI is now built using Monad cmdlets).  This hasn't been the case with previous versions of Exchange, and to me, it indicates that Microsoft is trying to make this work for everyone (read as *nix folk who are used to doing everything from a shell interface) and I believe it will be a big selling point to Exchange 12.  Kudos to everyone who's been working on that, and I can't wait to hear and see more.
 
You can read the original post here

- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 8:58 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
 
Another plane crash
What's up with all the recent airline crashes? Ok, so 2 crashes really isn't that many, but 2 crashes in 2 days?

First was the crash of the Boeing 737 of Helios Airlines - that one crashed into a mountain, killing all aboard.

Then, this morning there are reports of a chartered MD-80 going down in a remote region of Venezuela near the Colombian border.

Let's hope this is all for a while.
- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 9:05 AM 0 comments
 
And so it begins again
School starts for my kids (2 out of 3) today. Seems like school starts earlier in the year than I remember, but I think they get out sooner in the summer too, so it all works out. We took a few pictures of them this morning - this was the one of all three of them. Our oldest son starts First grade and our middle daughter starts Kindergarten. They were all very excited, but our son was a little embarrassed that Mom was going to come pick them up from school. The good news? School is only a block away from our house, so they will be able to walk to school.

I remember walking to Elementary school as well when I was growing up, but it was much farther (no, it wasn't uphill both ways, though). It took around 15-20 minutes to walk to school vs. less than 5 minutes here. I'm not sure that I'd be comfortable with my kids walking that far, but the town I grew up in was MUCH different than where we live now. For starters, there were only ~2000 people that lived in town. I think there were a LOT of things that we did as kids that you just don't see that much any more. Our parents often didn't know where we were or who we were playing with (yeah, like that is going to happen nowadays) and simply called us when dinner was ready (or blew a whistle). I suppose I should ask my parents sometime if they were ever nervous about is going off and playing like that, but if they were, they never talked to us about it. Sometimes I feel like I'm being overprotective, but I just don't want anything bad to happen to my kids. I'm sure every parent feels that way.
- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 8:47 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
 
Space Shuttle arrives home safely
Whew!  The Space shuttle Discovery landed successfully at Edwards Air Force Base in California at approx. 7:11am Central Time, completing the first successful mission since Columbia broke apart over Texas two and a half years ago.  I was listening to coverage on NPR on the way in to work this morning, and I didn't realize how many things have to be done once the shuttle lands before the astronauts can get out.  It takes somewhere on the order of 45 minutes to complete everything before the hatch is opened and the astronauts exit the shuttle.
 
I'm sure this successful landing is a relief for NASA officials, but it appears they still have some work to do.  Even on this launch, there were chunks of foam insulation that fell off the external fuel tank.  That has got to be disheartening for the folks that have been working on that for the last 2 years, but I'm hopeful that they will come up with a solution so that they can again resume launches.
 

- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 7:48 AM 0 comments

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