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The song from that fun new commercial from Apple for the Mac Book Air is New Soul by Yael Naim.

Dr. Wheek as an intern and other fun pics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So DEC 2008 is now wrapped up.

My overall comments at the moment… boy am I tired…. Chicago to SE Michigan is not like driving down to the corner store… Couple that with staying out to about 1 AM at some small dive bar called the Double Door listening to an amazing 80’s tribute band called Hair Banger’s Ball. They were truly VERY good. If you are in the Illinois or Indiana areas… go see them if you like 80’s hair metal… Poison, Ratt, GnR, Danzig, Van Halen, Ozzie, as well as Pat Benatar and others. Awesome, best entertainment item of any DEC yet.

As expected, met a bunch of new friends, caught up with a bunch of old friends, had a lot of good conversations.

Dean and joe Show went well according to everyone I unofficially polled. However who is going to tell me it sucked even if it did? Don’t know why someone wouldn’t tell me it sucked or I sucked, but most people don’t seem willing to say what they really think about things… I can handle it people… If the roles are reversed I would certainly give my opinion. Dean put on another show on Wednesday morning at 8AM, thereby causing him to have to miss the cool tribute band the night before… He was not thrilled about that, let me tell you… No not at all… Dean’s presentation was continuing on the material we had from our show plus some other stuff that didn’t make the cut into our first deck. Everyone seemed please as punch that was there. I was there for it, my voice was mostly gone from helping the tribute band sing the songs but I was there to show support and keep Dean honest. 🙂  I am looking forward to seeing the surveys for the sessions. There was a lot of talk about why why why didn’t you present again with Dean – you were good! It isn’t that I thought I was bad and shouldn’t present with Dean, I honestly don’t think much about if I was good or not. It is mostly a comfort thing, Dean loves it up there in front of everyone, that isn’t my preferred means of communication by any stretch.  I can’t actually relax and enjoy myself when I know I have that to do as I keep going over it over and over in my mind and then completely don’t use anything I am thinking about when I actually do it. Putting me up on a stage with bright lights so I can’t see people in a room too big for people to feel comfortable talking back makes it even worse.

 

Overall conference comments. There were a lot of complaints I was hearing about the hotel – the Chicago Hilton. A lot of complaints on the heat not working well, people being cooked out of their rooms even though they set the thermostat to like 65. Dean had that issue too when I walked into his room on Saturday. I was like, yeah it is warm and opened the window… He said… “Oh”. I guess being from a very southern part of Florida it doesn’t come immediately to mind to open the window to cool a room down. Welcome to the midwest in winter… 🙂

My personal complaints were that the light switch at the door controlled the socket that everything you didn’t want turned off was connected to. Like for instance the network hub, the refrigerator, the electrical socket for my laptop, etc. Dumb Dumb Dumb. I also was not pleased with all of the nickel and diming that was going on and the outright robbery of $50 for a 14″ pizza, coke and coffee from room service…. That was all over the place including even at the bag check… that should be complimentary for conference attendees; they spent enough on the rest. I am surprised we weren’t charged to use the elevators as well.  My parking alone cost something like $45 a day, sheesh. I won’t get into Dean’s other room issues other than to say they were substantial and he is a Diamond Hilton member. There was also a problem with the size of the rooms, if you walked in and turned around, you saw it all. Roughly the room was the size of the bathroom at the Red Rock in Vegas and they took up a big portion of it with a big screen CRT TV. I didn’t even have room to pull out the suitcase holder thing and put my suitcase on it. Now the bathrooms of course were even more tiny, you had to be careful or else you could use the toilet and bath at the same time though maybe that would be good for efficiency sake. Oh something else is that the common area rooms just weren’t big enough with high enough ceilings… I know that sounds a bit weird or picky, but they are great for conferences like DEC where a lot of the value is in chatting with others. It just got too loud too fast (lower ceilings) and the rooms were too small to really get people to do the giant circle of friends chatting that I think really sets DEC apart from other conferences. Oh yeah another thing, the soda’s seemed to be tough to get a hold of. That was a trifle annoying.

I can’t for sure say that the slide deck from Dean and my presentation helped at all, but I hear the next DEC will be back in Vegas… CHEER. Vegas is truly prepared for that kind of event. I hear it can’t be Red Rock which disappoints me to a great extent but heard it may be Green Valley which is good too. I also wouldn’t mind Mandalay Bay as that is a nice place too. Red Rock is by far, BY FAR, my choice though. Here are some pics from our slide deck to show how we pointed out our concern for Chicago…

 

First picture, just your average day at the Red Rock Resort in Vegas and your average day in Chicago…

 

 

Our lovely Aussie friend Katherine choking a chicken in Vegas and a Chicken choking in Chicago with absolutely no help from Kat.

 

 

All of us after a nice meal in Vegas and all of us wondering if we will be eaten in Chicago…

 

 

And because people wanted to know who they could voice their concerns too and Dean and I are so helpful…

 

 

Hehe. Dean and I got a kick out of making the slides. I started coming up with those ideas whilst sitting next to the pool back at the Red Rock at DEC 2007. You can ask anyone who was near me as I was specifically taking pictures to use for the next slide deck…. I heard Gil wasn’t smiling too big when that last slide there went up. I hope he is smiling now, it is all in fun, you CANNOT do something like this that is so easy to make sarcastic fun of and NOT expect Dean and I to respond. You will get us every time… We are weak in that way, if we see a chance for Humour… by gosh we will take it…

 

The whole slide deck will go up in the near term for people to look at. Probably a PPS because you want to play it, not skip through the slides, we have lots of animation and fun in there. Also the scripts Dean showed off will be made available. 🙂

 

 

The MSFT folks, as always were great. I was severely disappointed not to see ~Eric and Dmitri (shame on MSFT for not sending them) but it was good to see the likes of Stuart Kwan (of the Ottawa Kwan Clan), Nathan Muggli, Robert Deluca, Brian Puhl, Moon (do I really need to use the last name? I mean how many Moons have you met in the DS group), and many of the others again. I will see them all again in a month at the MVP summit which is great. I have to point out very specially that Moon was great on this trip. I have to admit that on the last MVP Summit she rubbed us DS MVPs the wrong way in her PPT presentation. I won’t go into details but a lot of MVPs were not happy. Well I am happy to say she is very different in how she projects herself now. I would say the way I saw here the last few days is how she really is versus what we saw at the summit. I truly enjoyed talking to her about the issues we see in the OS. Also she was wearing some rockin green tennis shoes, I believe Converse Chuck Tailor All Stars but I didn’t look too close. I don’t know about you but I am sick to death of PC Business Casual attire. Why do we have a bunch of automatons running around? In part it is because we make them dress that way. People need to dress how they like and other people need to get over it. I mean I am not thrilled in seeing spandex on an 80 year old but hey, if that makes them happy… I can close my eyes. 🙂

 

Stuart came up with the traditional Wook challenge only Wook wasn’t around again so now it has become the Wook Memorial Challenge. The challenge was to get a picture of me (yes me, joe) for some reason and make a movie poster out of it with something to do with Active Directory. Stuart had 1000 people in the room to choose and he picked me, the person who least likes having his picture taken LOL. Well since Wook wasn’t there the challenge gauntlet was picked up by Pam Dingle, Sean Deuby, Laura Hunter , Joe Kaplan (yes the other Joe programmer), Adam Greene, Aaron Steele, and Chris Lowde. The result both amuses and scares me… It includes me as well as Dean, Princess, Stuart, and cameos by Guido Grillenmeier and Wook. Here is what they came up with…

 

 

Hmm lets see what else… Oh yes, nicknames were popular again this year… We have some new ones. You will recall the old ones

• Dean – Dean-3po
• Me – R2-Joe-2
• Gil – Gil’bacca  (emphasis on the second syllable)
• Jorge – Princess Horr-hay

And this year Dean gave up his Dean-3po so we could do

• Darren Mar-Elia (the GPO Guy) – 3-GPO

So then Dean was given

• Emperor Palpa-Dean

And then the new ones

• Stuart Kwan – Qui-Gon Kwan
• Nathan Muggli – Darth Muggli
• Pamela Dingle – Queen Ama-Dingle

We also gave a nickname to Eric (not Fleischman) but I can’t recall his last name… He didn’t remember that Princess had the nickname Princess so we named him Ewok so he would remember better next DEC.

 

The especially astute will likely work out that there is a pattern to the naming standard being used…

 

I am very sorry to say I didn’t really get a chance to see many presentations. A lot of it was busy talking to Microsoft and the attendees about things and meeting people in general. In particular Monday was dead for both Dean and I because we were too busy working on ours. Difficult to work on something like that across the internet; you want to see each others expressions etc. Tuesday I got to see Stuart’s keynote which was great though that is when the Wook challenge got thrown down. Also saw Nathan speak on RODCs in branch office scenarios. Both Dean and I picked up one or two things we hadn’t heard before but that isn’t surprising, Nathan has forgotten more about RODC than anyone else knows yet, that is part of being the PM for the product… Also attended the birds of a feather session for AD on Tuesday. That turned out well but didn’t start well, there was no organization other than theres a room, go in and talk. I spent most of the time at a table with Dean, Sean, Ulf, and Moon chatting about issues we saw that should be fixed like making all dialog boxes sizeable… I hate few things more than having 2 large monitors and a dialog box that comes up with a ton of info but is tiny because of my resolution and I can’t expand it to see all of the info. On Wednesday I only got to attend the Directory Services Chalk Talk which was a good conversation right up until we hit the every present age old Prune/Graft request and then all hell broke loose in the room and we didn’t move forward for 30 or so minutes…

One thing that came out of that discussion though was the ABSOLUTE WITHOUT A SINGLE DOUBT STATEMENT FROM MICROSOFT DIRECTORY SERVICES DEV TEAM THAT CLONING FORESTS IS AN EXTREMELY BAD IDEA – it isn’t just un-supported, it is actually dangerous. There was no hemming and hawing, there was no “it depends”, it was absolutely, positively, this is a bad thing… 

I keep telling people that is bad yet some people still recommend it and do it. Interestingly I most recently was fighting indirectly with MCS Canada over this because they wanted to do it for a company I know of. I was told by one of the higher up DS Services managers that this recommendation is documented somewhere, I just don’t know where. But let it be said that I saw the eyes popping out of the heads of all of the DS Team PM’s when cloning a forest was mentioned. If you get Dev to do that, you are not in a good place…

 

Ok this is far more than long enough for now. My thanks to my friends Christine, Stella, and Gil and the others from NETPRO for having me out to present. I did indeed have fun even though it was in Chicago and I very much enjoyed meeting everyone I got to meet and seeing people I have met before. I loved all of the stories of how people are using AdFind, AdMod, OldCCMP, and all of the other joeware utilities. I heard stories of my utilities working to make modifications to hundreds of thousands of users and saving the admins involved a ton of time, that makes me very happy.

 

Anyway, enough for now. When I am ready I will post some more.

 

    joe

If you live by my house… could you please stop by there and reboot my Exchange server? It appears to be hung…

Hundreds of miles from home and no access to email… GREAT!

This isn’t ENTIRELY Exchange’s fault… I neglected to test VPN access into my home network prior to coming to Chicago after changing out my entire network configuration when I moved last fall… That is all my fault. But I should be able to depend on my Exchange server actually running a week without me sitting right there… 

I tried to get Trouble to reboot the server but she has problems with the power button… She is great on the keyboard though as some of you have experienced with wildy odd IM’s at weird hours of the night.

On Sunday Chicago seemed to forget where it was in the relation to the rest of the country and the time of year, it was well into the 50’s… Then on Monday morning it did the same… By Monday afternoon though it seemed to look around a bit and recalled where it was and said, “oh right then, let me correct that” and the temperature quickly nose dived into the 20’s. So the surprise of 50+ degrees in the beginning of March in Chicago was quickly trampled upon.

This temp change does a very special thing for me… It makes my head hurt incredibly because a temperature differential of more than say 20 degrees (especially in a few hours) is usually due to a pressure change and yes there very much was one. I appear to be broken because that causes my head to want to explode. Yes… riding on planes is usually a fun experience as well, which is why if you see me on a plane or within hours of getting off of a plane and I just nod to you and can’t have a conversation please don’t be mad at me, I probably can’t hear you or possibly I can’t even see straight. Even now as I sit on the 24th floor of the Hilton my head still hurts and my ears are still popping. This all started around 4AM Central Time for me (5AM Eastern and 10AM London time for my friends in those locations) when I bolted upright with a massive headache. I took copious amounts of pain killers which was enough to dull the roar so Dean and I were able to present on Monday afternoon.

The presentation went well, everyone seems to quite enjoy our friendly ribbing on the chosen forum this year, including Gil himself. It is all in good fun but seriously… Chicago in March, not a good place for a conference that was previously in places like Vegas and Vancouver. Chicago in say May/June, that could be pretty darn fun. It is a very pretty city.

Dean of course did smashing, his sense of humour, quick wit, and energetic presentations style just ‘knocked em dead’. The English accent[1] was quite popular as that always lends some form of authority to whatever he seems to want to say. For those of you who attended the session and weren’t aware that Dean and his company have training classes, I do highly recommend bringing them in to train you. You will not be disappointed, don’t just take my word for it, Brian Puhl (from Microsoft) said the same thing in his blog. Anyway if you want training from Dean and his crew, ping him over at MSETechnology. I have never heard from anyone who has been in one of their classes that did not rave about it. Having been in many MSFT type classes before I can assure you that isn’t the normal case for most people. Most of the classes I have ever attended I spend the time training the teacher and wondering if they had simply thought just a little bit longer about their career choice if maybe we all would have been better off. You could be the most technical person in the world or so so technical and you will walk out of the class WOWed. Dean constantly surprises me with little pieces of info that I had no idea about. Luckily I think I do the same for him and so we both keep each other quite entertained.

Dean and I both were a little disappointed in the layout of the room we were in… To start, it was just too large. We both tend to prefer an environment which can lend itself to a more casual chat feeling. Also instead of being down at the level with the audience we were up on a stage being blinded and simultaneously cooked by staged lights so all we could see very easily were the first couple of rows which contained some very scary subjects (Hi to Ulf, Laura, Mr and Mrs. Princess Jorge, Darren, the Brian’s (Puhl and Desmond), and some of our other favorite characters). Finally there was no way we could have spoken without microphones which is also an uncomfortable feeling for myself though Dean being the seriously great speaker that he is did fine. All and all though, people seemed to enjoy themselves and I have no doubt we pulled in the most laughing any session will likely have. Hopefully people found the technical information useful as well though admittedly the time spent on the humour slides may have outweighed the time put into the technical slides. The technical stuff was easy, we just know that stuff… the humour, that is tough, you have to make sure you don’t offend anyone toooooo much but you also have to try and gauge what the audience will even find funny. For example one slide that had our friend Katherine on it seemed to fall a bit flat though Dean and I thought it was a riot.  

Dean’s laptop decided to overheat at the very end of the presentation. I am both disappointed and quite happy about that. Disappointed that it happened at all but happy it waited until the end. Dean could have easily have just cruised along chatting about whatever making up subjects on the fly, he has that comfort level in a room with 50 or 1000 or 5000 people. That comfort level stops for me when you hit about 20 or so people… As I put in the slide deck, I am not a presenter, I do not deign to be a presenter. I am more of a stand around and chat kind of guy. I mean come on, I live on a ranch (some call it compound) in Michigan… Its a wonder I can even speak to other people properly at all. 🙂

As always, easily the best part of DEC again, at least for me and I think Dean as well, is the people I am meeting and speaking with and seeing the old friends from previous DEC adventures. I am happy to see how many people are using and usually loving AdFind and AdMod and the other utilities. I heard several stories that went something like “joe… we had to modify some 15,000 or 30,000 or 80,000 objects and we quickly put together a command line that included AdFind and AdMod and voila everything got changed to what we wanted…”. That really makes me smile because I was able to help out admins that are otherwise way too busy trying to keep their companies running… Unfortunately though, it also makes me feel bad for being so busy for the last 6 months that I haven’t been able to properly engage on those tools enhancing them even more.

Well anyway, time to start the day… More people to meet, more friends to harass. Luckily I was actually in my bed and got to sleep around 11PM local time (that would be 12 midnight for my friends back home). Yes that is kind of weak for a conference but I really was quite knocked out from the weather changes and from popping pain pills most of the day as well as just being relieved from the presentation going well after being a little stressed about it for the last couple of weeks. The first presentation there was no real level of expectation (at least I don’t think so), this time we were billed as “joe and Dean… truly the next best thing since sliced bread” and that can be a stressful position when you actually care to do well and we both care very much.

      joe

 

[1] Which he is faking now a days btw, he sounds like a Bronx Taxi Driver from Miami in private now because he has been corrupted by living in the States too long… 😉

Well off to the land of the Blue Brothers for me to see old friends and acquaintances and friends and acquaintances not yet met. Yep, that’s right, Directory Experts Conference is upon us. DEC is generally a lot of fun and there are a lot of very smart people there and also Dean and I. 🙂 

If you are there, feel free to come up and talk to us, that is what we most enjoy about DEC, the casual conversations. Don’t stand off in the corner watching and waiting for us to not have anyone around to talk to us, just come on up and jump in. Otherwise you likely never will talk to us because we tend to always be talking to someone and I don’t want anyone emailing me afterwards this year saying, well I was going to come talk to you but you were always talking to someone… That’s right, we are always talking to someone so let that someone be you some of the time; I don’t call the gatherings “the circle of friends” for nothing. No I won’t be inviting you over for Thanksgiving dinner but I won’t bite either. All of my biting is done in private and only with Amica Maxima (best friends). 🙂  Oh the exception to this “come up and talk invitation”… This does not apply when I am in the restroom (lavatory, toilet, whatever you want to call it) or if I appear to be heading there. I do have to say that can be a bit annoying.

So I know what you are thinking…. Chicago…. At the beginning of March…. Seriously??? I know, me too… If you see Christine, Stella, or Gil… make sure to ask them for Mittens and Hot Cocoa and then say “joe says hi!”. I posted that request to ActiveDir.org too so I am hoping it happens a lot. I like to keep them on their toes. I also asked a favor, if you see Christine, Stella, or Gil looking for me… Misdirect them and let me know they are looking…  

If you find I am not talking much about Windows Server 2008, there is a reason, I haven’t been playing with it much at all and would rather not talk about something I am not really sure about. Just too busy with life and “my real job” to get the chance to play, trust me, it upsets me more than it upsets anyone else. I have this strong feeling of losing my relevance. I work with real live production systems when I work with any actual computers at all anymore and our customers are not running Windows Server 2008…yet. On the positive side, I know once I get to dive into it, I will spin up quickly and I will be just as geeky about it as I am about the other versions of Windows. Just not there yet. It does excite me terribly, this is the first Server OS that is truly under the secure by default banner like Vista for the desktop so I expect to see a lot of things break that likely should be broken. Anyway…

 

BTW, Dean and I are both quite disappointed that our cute and crazy Aussie friend will NOT be joining us in Chicago. Let us be the first to say… Katherine you suck. We miss you and wish you could be there. I expect that at least half the returnees to DEC from the past two years will miss you as well. When people come up to talk to Dean and I this year they will probably actually listen to us instead of you[1]… not sure if that is a good thing or bad thing. ;o)  I think I will try to keep a running tally though of how many people ask where you are this year.

Oh and while I am at it… We are both disappointed that we won’t be seeing Guido the killer pimp this year… A DEC without a Guido… Not sure how that will work out. You will be sorely missed as well Guido as I always liked going to your presentations because I actually learned things every single time. Even if it is learning how amazed I can be that an Italian speaking English with a German Accent can be understood better than I can be as an American speaking American with an American accent.

 

Have a great week everyone.

Work hard, play hard, try to smile at least once an hour even if you don’t know why, if you are quitting smoking keep it up, be different – look on the positive side of the world – anyone can look on the negative side.

 

   joe

 

[1] Only sort of joking… People listen to Dean because he is usually logging into their production networks and fixing stuff for them. People may be listening to me though I am usually listening to Kat so this year I will have to listen to myself as well. I certainly will not be breaking my streak of not logging into production networks and fixing anything… If you ask me I will refer you to the poorly dressed slovenly chap to my left drinking the cheap scotch and slurring his words. HAHAHA. [As Dean looks up to his right and asks me… hey I don’t get it, who is that you are referring to? Princess?][2]

[2] Oh my the sarcasm is just boiling out… DEC is going to be fun…. yet again.

[EOM]

I just got some in today that I ordered, they appear to be great quality and actually even came with the bags to throw them in the washer so they don’t get damaged. I was impressed since I got 5 at $19.99 a piece.

Go to www.feelingpampered.com to get some for yourself if you like.

 

One problem… I didn’t think and ordered Queen size and my pillows are gigantic. Though I think they are so gigantic King size may not fit well either so I will just go buy a couple of smaller pillows for them.

 

Why sillk pillow cases? The story is that it will make it so my hair isn’t all messed up like it is with my flannel pillow cases (I heart flannel)… I am not sure if that will work out or not but I guess it is worth a try. At the very least they feel nice and cool which is… welll cool. 🙂

 

Oops… I smell my chicken thighs burning which means my green beans are probably boiling over too… Later…