The Waldorf=Astoria

2012-01-08 23:29:37

Sometime in July, one of Laura’s long-time friends from England will be coming to visit New York City for some reason I can’t remember right now. So – that means a long weekend trip for us. So – I thought I’d cash in some points and stay at the historic Waldorf=Astoria hotel [I don’t know why there’s an “=” instead of a “-“, but that’s the way they print it]. I’ve always wanted to stay there and now I’ll get my chance – for free.

I’d better use up my points before they cancel my status – then, I won’t be “diamond” anymore… just lowly “gold”, “silver”, or even [gasp] … “blue”.

More Fun With Vista

I’ve decided to upgrade to a later build of the new [not yet released] Windows Vista. I’ve been running the official “beta 2” version, but now I’m going up several builds to a more current build to see what happens. Maybe I’ll get some more stability out of my machine.

Or – maybe it will explode and smoke will come out of the speakers… just maybe.

Certificates

Do you just love to work with X.509 Certificates? Well, I have just the job for you!

Actually, I’ve been learning a lot about certificates in Windows. This has been a long, but educational week at my customer. We are all learning about the different types of certificate authorities and certificates and templates, etc. I think we’ve got a handle on things now, but for a while there it was looking bad.

For those of you who don’t know, certificates are digital keys – they allow the encryption and decryption of information from one computer to another. And if you don’t care, well, that’s probably a good thing.

So Far So Good

The servers both seem to be behaving since I patched and updated the web server and fixed my SMTP problems on the email server. I’m hoping that the web dificulties don’t show up any more.

As for the email server, more dificulties will likely crop up since I’m using beta software and will upgrade it periodically. I hope it won’t cause you any problems… like bounced mail or anything.

Web Server Down?

Not anymore. It’s been down all day, but after updating some services last night and patching today with the critical updates from Microsoft, the server is back now. For a while at least. I’m still not sure what caused it to flake out like it’s been doing recently other than a possible Denial of Service attack from some mean spirited person [it’s not like the site produces any financial gain or anything, so there’s no real reason to hack me…]

So, I’ll leave it up and alone for a while instead of rebuilding from scratch like I was about to do this evening.

Of course, if it does it again tonight, there will be a rebuild in the very near future.

Exchange 12

I now have the new version of Exchange up and running. I’m only having some dificulty with certificates (except for the OWA certificate) but all else seems to be working fine. OWA looks much cleaner and has more features like the Outlook client has. I quite like it. I also don’t have to refresh the page to know if I have unread mail show up in sub-folders like I had to previously.

Anyway: so far, so good even with the encryption obstacles.

The Great Outdoors

It’s days like today that make me very glad I moved to Virginia. I can actually sit out on the back porch [which is where I am typing this from] and not die of heat stroke like I would have in Houston where it is in the 90s right now. Today here in Reston, it’s 72 and partly cloudy [or mostly sunny depending on how you look at it].

So – as I sit out here and type and watch Laura work in the yard, I’m really enjoying myself. I am so thankful for these kinds of days.

… and of course I get to take some pictures of flowers while I’m out there…