Quiescence

I ate whale stew. It was nummy. Whale meat has a texture rather like liver and tastes sort of like gamey beef with an edge of fish and a soupçon of crying americans.

I have defeated Slash on medium. I now, formally, ROCK.

So I was 30 on Thursday. I had a nice quiet day and got taken out for a family meal in the evening. All very nice.

odacamilla had asked me way back in August to keep this weekend free, so I did. She didn't, however, give me any idea what she had planned. So when I was bundled into a taxi on Friday having followed orders to get showered and dressed up, I had no idea what to expect.

( What happened next?! *gasp* )

I thought it was ManFlu. It was a sinus infection with a side order of chest infection. Amoxicillin to the rescue!

I still feel like crap :)

Has anyone ever used a CRM system or dealt with a CRM provider which did not suck donkey bits? I'm intrigued, as Microsoft seem unwilling to provide direct support of any quality for theirs and that essentially makes the entire product of zero value. Bit steep at 6 large a year, really.

Mac!

Anyone know of a decent Jabber client for Windows? I'm looking to replace our horrible Microsoft IM with something a bit more open (and platform independent) but it seems all the Windows clients are hideous. Anyone have any ideas?

We've recently installed Microsoft "Dynamics" CRM. Like many Microsofty things, it installs groups in the active directory to track who can do what, sort of thing. Unfortunately it was installed 3 times in the process of making it work, and the AD groups were put in a different location each time. The most recent install was performed by a colleague, who apparently thought a good place to dump the CRM data was the AD root. The fun bit is where I didn't know that, and assumed those groups in the root were leftover junk.

So CRM stops working. I can't reinstall it, because it says its groups haven't been created. A bit of investigation reveals that the database contains the GUIDs of the groups. Not the DN - that would make way too much sense in an LDAP database - no, these boys store the GUID. The row can't be deleted because of foreign key constraints (of which there are many), so I can't trick it into reinstalling. Might not work anyway.

So I did what any sensible person about to be stabbed to death by an army of angry salespeople would do. I hacked up a bit of C# (about 4 lines, as it turns out) to grab the GUIDs of the relevant groups for me and manually injected them into the SQL table. This didn't quite do the job, because for some reason the table also stores the names of two of the groups. Those grabbed, it reinstalled with nary a whinge and started up perfectly.

So, yeah, not all that dynamic. At least it was hackable. I'd wager MS support would have told me I had performed an illegal operation and would be shut down, or at least that I had to lose all the data. Full recovery from accidents is satisfying indeed!

( Tech bits )

Misquote (because I don't have it to hand) of person quoted in The Sun discussing John Smeaton:

"Only in Glagow could someone who started out on a holy jihad destined for a reward of 84 virgins end up on fire from head to toe getting malkied by a bystander."

Love it.

That's the Pile of Rotting Dingo's Kidneys Award, of course. Check this out for awesome behaviour!

Our Exchange server has been crashing the last couple of days. The information store service just locks up. I figured out today that this was at the same time as the backup of it failed. I had previously assumed the backup failed as a result, but no. For reasons best known to Microsoft, the Exchange server had decided that a full backup of the mailbox store had never been performed. As a result, it logged during the backup process that an incremental backup could not be performed until a full backup had been. Fair enough. Then it logged that the shadow backup process had returned a failure code. Again, fair enough. Then it crashed the information store. This seems an unusual way to contend with a backup failure. Am I expecting too much?

Someone broke into my car last night. They smashed the little side window. It’s possible they nicked a couple of CDs and some change, but I can’t actually remember whether there were any there. They ignored the iTrip and the stereo (which I hadn’t taken the front off, naughty me), and fortunately the £40-odd worth of Forth Road Bridge vouchers.

I’m now £50 poorer for my window repair excess, and quite irritated.

It's nice to see the interblag is keeping up its idiocy standards.

I've decided to blog this because I keep thinking of more people to contact and it's easier to just let everyone know. My stepfather, Peter, had a sudden heart attack on Saturday. An ambulance was called, but the paramedics were unable to resuscitate him, and he died.

I'll be at home all this week with my mum, so please feel free to get in touch with either of us if you'd like.

I am having the misfortune of using Windows Vista for the first time. Sadly it came preinstalled on a laptop, so I've had to use it just long enough to create recovery media before I wipe it and put XP on. This has been, however, more than long enough to get me irked.

For those who value prettiness above all else, it is pretty. Very pretty. Pretty like... hey, wait... what they've done, apparently, is blatantly steal the looks of both Mac OS X and, to a lesser extent, Gnome (themed a la Redhat and Ubuntu), and then expand slightly on these themes (translucent window borders with diffusion,  ooh wankity wank wank). Of course, they haven't made it so identical that there's any infringement - they have stolen the look, but not the feel. It feels like a shiny sheen stuck on underlying mank - stuck so it's tacky. It feels rather like KDE actually - very pretty with lots of good ideas about UI philosophy, but a shade too patronising and too clunky in use. The notion of asking me whether I want to run every program I click on just to mitigate against their inability to implement security is ridiculous, not to mention irritating as hell. I can't see why anyone would think it's a good idea to use something this annoying in a business environment, which is the only place Windows deserves to be at the best of times (gamers aside - but we don't care what the Windows UI looks like).

So, ya, back XP. When I have to, and I can't just use a Mac or install Ubuntu.

What I has mostly been playing recently looks like this.



There are simply no words for how cool this is.

Apologies to anyone who's friended my RSS feed from my Wordpress blog. For some reason unknown to me, LJ has decided today (presumably because of a new post) to pull all the articles for the past n months as if they were just posted. I'll just crosspost things to both blogs from now on, which is made pretty darned easy by Performancing (which is on the Firefox recommended add-ons page). I'd kick xanthspod_jb off your friends list, as you're liable to get 2 copies of any posts I make. Not that I make that many.

Thanks to hsw for pointing out the stupidity.

[Crossposted to LJ because my syndication seems to be broken. I think I'll just crosspost from now on and stop putting "Crossposted"]

Yes, you read right. I... am a Manager. I have a new job with an extremely cool company. The people appear to be just as ace as the folk at Former Employer Ltd., but the senior management team here doesn't seem to have any incompetent arseholes at all!

I know, impossible, you say. Well, I'm only just here so I'm not bedded in yet, but people seem genuine and forthright and I'm usually quite good at that sort of thing. I knew the primary arsehole at my previous job was such before I even accepted the role (which wasn't the one described, as it turned out). So it would seem that the best thing Former Employer Ltd. did for me was fire me.

Oh yeah, for those who didn't know, I was fired for the following alleged reasons:

( Stream of wah )

Still... I have a better job now in a nicer place. I even have a nicer drive to work over the Forth Road Bridge. So... I guess I ought to thank Former Employer Ltd. for getting me out of the crappy dead end corner they had me in and forcing me to go and look for actual opportunity. Thanks, guys!

[Edited for clarity and to alter names to protect those who would doubtless sue otherwise. You can ask me if you're interested.]

We made it back to civilisation *ducks* yesterday. We celebrated by ordering curry. In traditional British style, this meant we ate less than half of it, and some bits were completely untouched. Of course, the only thing better than curry for dinner is curry leftovers for breakfast, so WIN!

My girlfriend will put out for chillies.

Hasdfs sdfh sjhsd fmhjdf hjfh sf. Thdjh sdhf hdfh id fit isidj ijdf isjdf ijre hjhe.

Nå har jeg posta.