The end of a show, fairwell Battlestar Galactica

Galactica has aired it's series finale which is 3 hours long and broke into two parts (part 1 is 1 hour, part 2 is 2 hours) aptly called "Daybreak" part I & II.

I have never been more in love with a show then Battlestar and even now as I reflect on the closing of the show several hours later I'm still wishing it could be on next week.  For six years I've watched the survivors of the Twelve Colonies flee from their nuked homeworlds and be cast out into space with only a sole military vessel to give them hope and defend them from Cylon attacks.

Heartache upon heartache with dreams dashed at every turn is all that the survivors of the Colonies have to look forward to other then the hope of the 13th tribe and finding sanctuary.  Only then to have their dreams dashed again as they find that Earth was nuked by the Cylons too.

And yet through it all they endure much as we endure in the face of anything thrown against us.  At first I hated the ending, I hated the fact they found a planet and settled down, that they survived.  But they didn't.  They discarded their technology, they chose to wipe their slate clean and to begin again.  There's no stories of the colonies, no history books of the Galactica leading them safely.  It's all swalloed up in the annals of history.

It's a deeply philosophical closing for this show as it skips ahead 150,000 years to show the modern world that we live in and how disturbingly close we are to blurring the line between man and machine.  How much of our soul are we willing to sell and at what price does that come?

This guy rocks!

http://teknotes.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/msi-manager-reinstall-applications-assigned-by-group-policy/

Granted his post is over two years old but I've been trying all day to find a way to re-apply this Office install without screwing up the entire network. Why can't MS just make a tool to do this?

Microsoft makes life easier... they just forgot they did

So I've finally gotten around to making Office 2007 deploy able across the network instead of having to drag myself to each happy computer and do it by hand.  So I take my USB drive with the Office files and head off to the MS site.  What's this I see?  We've gone back to the stone age and I have to whip out notepad to edit the config XML file?  Well.... that seems dumb.  But... okay.

Source:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179195.aspx

This seems very backwards to me.  Why would we go through all the pain of making an MSI installer package just to be un-done by a XML file we have to edit by hand?  I bemoan, cry, and begrudgingly take a few days off to figure out what MS is doing and to burn some extra vacation time.

It doesn't make sense to me.. it just won't work.  The package keeps failing and doesn't give a report on why.  Everything seems clunky and I can't keep investing time into a project I can't gain momentum on.  Then Google comes and saves me.

Apparently buried deep inside of Office 2007 is the "Office Customization Tool"!  This tool provides a wonderful GUI in which everything is asked what I want, where I put everything, and what the company name is.  You do this, save the file, drop it into a folder named "Patches" and you're done.  The MSI looks at that folder to see if it needs any extra data before doing a GPO install and you're rocking and rolling.

So my question is... WHY NOT JUST TELL US TO USE THE OCT IN THE FIRST PLACE!!??!?!  I don't need to grind up my own wheat to know that I like bread.  I don't need to play in a stupid XML file in notepad to know I want an easy GUI to do it for me.

IBM Simple-swap: So simple... who the %&#! knows how to do it?!

I recently purchased an application server to dole out things like Office, Symantec, etc so I didn't need anything huge. Just big enough to hold the apps I was going to deploy and it would act as a file server for employee access. Not a big deal, right? A simple order, indeed!

Not so much if you're IBM. I've had several X-series IBM servers and I've loved all of them. I've "heard" of simple-swap but I've always gone with the hot-swap because the drives offered more speed for what I wanted. I didn't need anything fancy with this server so I went with the cheaper option of simple-swap drives. Oooooh what a mistake. What a mistake indeed.

This server states that it supports Simple-Swap OR Hot-Swap but IBM was not clear what the difference is (For those of you dying to know - Simple-Swap is simple SATA hard drives, Hot-Swap is SAS or Serial Attached SCSI. Both conform to the SATA form factor for data/power which makes it slightly confusing).

So we get all the hardware in and we go to slap in the drives (Hot-swap SAS drives) and they will not fit. Eh? Check the IBM site, IBM says they are viable hard drives but they won't! Take the drives out? The drive backplane has been completely destroyed. The drive plugs don't fit exactly in that if you look at typical SATA drive there's nothing between the power/data plugs.. these specific hard drives had a block that when pushed into the backplane destroyed the plug. Fortunately the drives survived, just the backplane was wasted but IBM was willing to replace that part.

So after a call to my rep and some to IBM I find that Simple-Swap and Hot-Swap are not inter exchangeable (the backplane could of told them that) and that it must be a bad listing on the site. After several days of being able to chew this over I think it's just a new server line that IBM rolled out because the RAID controller is capable of using the SAS plugs so it doesn't interface with the motherboard... a backplane swap out would work. But it's hard to explain exactly.

So we get the new hard drives in that are regular simple-swap hard drives and these fit beautifully. Install them, install the raid controller and.... oh... seriously? The raid controller doesn't plug into the drives? What's going on here? The raid controller is for SAS drives only and for a backplane that doesn't come with this server. So here we go again, RMAing the raid controller. Get the new controller next day, plug it in, boot the server, mirror the drives and finally I have Windows Server 2008 installed and ready to go.

Now if I only had some network cable to plug it into the network. I used up all my cable supply moving into the new building... sigh.