February 2009 - Posts
If another person texts me and makes some smart comment about England and my “ex pat” status…. I may just have to inflict some pain.
Let me make this clear… again…. I support Ireland when it comes to international rugby, I support Munster when it comes to provincial rugby.
To my English Friends and Family, deal with it…. You’ll get over it.
To my Irish Friends and Family. Ignore the English accent twang, and know this… today I will be on a British Airways flight proudly wearing my Irish Jersey. And for everyones enjoyment…… here is how happy I am about that :)
Crazy Eyes….
I am currently sitting at Cork International Airport, on route to the MVP Summit 2009 and the sad news is that one of our fellow SBS MVP’s will not be with us.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2009/02/27/thank-you-frank-you-were-a-diamond.aspx
http://msmvps.com/blogs/kwsupport/archive/2009/02/27/frank-mccallister-in-memoriam.aspx
http://blog.sbsfaq.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=269e4081%2Dac58%2D42a6%2D9a54%2D383a6a3fb0d8&ID=301
Frank was a guy that I knew not enough. The three or four times we met it always ended up being a conversation about his fighter pilot days. One comment, I think at last years summit on the bus back to the hotel, which made me giggle was:
“Nick… when you are over with those Flight Sim guys, see if you can make them put the guns back on the aircraft”
Rest in Peace Frank… but fly on.
In less than 24 hours I am leaving for the MVP summit 2009. I cannot wait, as this will be my only business trip this year due to the economic downturn! I am aiming to squeeze in as much as possible, including meeting the SBS / WHS teams, the remnants of the ACES team, fellow MVP’s and old friends.
Hopefully I will be able to post up something of interest over the summit, but if not…. see you on my return!
(I am going to bring a beating stick to see if we cannot at least get some updated development tools from the Flight Simulator team)
My Sales guy has been hassling me for a couple of weeks that his out of office has not been working in Outlook 2007. Frankly, I ignored him… because he should never be out of the office. It does however turn out to be a known issue that the Official SBS blog have just put up on the site.
The error is:
"Microsoft Office Outlook
----------------------------
Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later."
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2009/02/16/outlook-2007-out-of-office-feature-may-be-out-of-office.aspx
There was a good side to this not working for the Sales guy.. he found out that in Outlook Web Access you can now set out of office to automatically turn off after a set amount of time. Another thing I did not know until yesterday!
I keep getting emails from people asking what I think about the ACES studio closure… so I am going to give in and write this post to those that want my thoughts and ramblings.
Initially, I was devastated. I kept thinking about those on the team I now consider friends and how they were going to deal with the whole thing. Whatever the likes of you and I thought about it, I can guarantee those on the ACES team were in a much worse place that we ever were.
For a good few days after the event I kept finding myself going into daydreams about what this really meant for the community, for the simulator / game, for me personally, for the other MVP’s and for my general thoughts about Microsoft.
Me personally, I figured… hey, whilst it is horrible news, the fact of the matter is that my life would not end because there would not be a new version of Flight Simulator in the near future.
For the other MVP’s, I initially felt quite guilty, because it was I that gave the Game Studios a large nudge to get more MVP’s for the Games for Windows team at Microsoft…. but the fact is that the MVP award is based upon community efforts in the past, not the future.
The community, well…. that will keep going, I guarantee that! There is plenty of life left yet in Flight Simulator X and associated pay and free add-ons.
Then came the most important thing…. what cutting the ACES team did for my views on Microsoft as a company…. this part killed me. For the first time in ages I found myself thinking how can I like a company that essentially killed one of its “flagships” and at the same time support and push products like Zune… sheeeesh! Flight Simulator was essentially the reason I started loving what Microsoft do, and what is possible technically as a company. Killing the product for me, was like Google shelving Google Earth.
I ended up writing an email to Steve Ballmer on the whole thing… to which I got a response I wish I could share, but cannot. Suffice to say, I was not the only person that sent a mail to Steve and others high up the food chain in Microsoft…. in fact they got quite a lot of email, and I now know that the value of the brand is more understood by Microsoft management, which is good news for the future of the product, even if that product is different.
Let me end this with some information I do have and I can share without breaking NDA. Microsoft Game Studios is hiring and has hired a good few of the ACES members back and is now exploring possibilities for the future. That said, it is a smaller team… and that means that whilst there is hope, you cannot assume that a smaller team can just go ahead and build a new version of Flight Simulator!
there is a future….. it is just unclear right now…
Keep supporting the development team to management, it makes a difference what the community think!
OK, so today I got this error detailed on this EMEA SBS Team blogpost
http://blogs.technet.com/asksbs/archive/2009/01/26/sbs2008-cannot-configure-backup-schedule-error-when-you-run-configure-server-backup-wizard-on-small-business-server-2008.aspx
It turns out however that my problem was not what the EMEA team were reporting, my issue was that my Dell OEM preinstalled SBS2008 server had a FAT32 Partition on it that looked like this:
The fix for me was to convert the FAT32 drive to NTFS using the convert d:\ /fs:ntfs command.
I believe that the SBS documentation / support team are writing up some documentation on this right now 