Work Journal
For Week of July 19, 1999
Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM
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Shaw's mail server in Calgary continues to be unresponsive. I even when to the point of resetting my cable modem to see if that would do anything. Going on 24 hours without being able to get mail off the Calgary server. Luckily I remembered I have the server information for the mail server in Saskatoon. I created a new mail account in Outlook with which I can still get my mail at times like this.
So not to become complacent now that I have found a job. How complacent can I become when the job is only for one month? I have before even my first day of work begun working on my resume again. The rule seems to be that a resume should be no more than two pages plus a cover letter. Now with new information added I now have over three pages. Now I must work at shortening the details so they still show my experience but not lose anything at the same time. I have about 2 and 1/3 pages to reduce to two pages in length.
I printed out my resume started drawing lines through items I thought I could do without and have managed to get it back to two full pages.
I reworked my certification listing which I carry with me to interviews. Some people ask for dates in regards to certification and I find interviews are not a good time to be pulling the certification dates for achieving CNE and MCSE certification out of my memory. Its nice to be able to pull out a piece of paper which lists my certifications and the exams I passed for the certifications. Lately a few people have asked for a copy of the list to put in my file. Since the list was originally for my eyes only there were a few formatting inconsistencies I lived with, but now that I have been handing out copies, I figure this is a good time to clean things up.
Now that I have finished playing with Office 2000 installations I need to get back to my Exchange server project.
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Tom Syroid has some good points to add to my addition to his Outlook File Management tips.
In response to the article I ( Tom Syroid ) wrote for Shawn's site on Outlook File Management, John Doucette had this to add:
One tip on Outlook I have to add to Tom's. If you setup multiple PST files you can set which one new mail will go to. Right click on the Personal folder you want to make the recipient folder for mail. Select properties and at the bottom of the properties page you will find a check box by the option "Deliver POP mail to this personal folders file". Click on the check box next to put a check in the box and click on the OK button. Now the next time you open Outlook your default inbox will have changed. This Personal folder becomes the default folder for incoming mail, contacts, drafts etc..
This is true and a worthy point. I didn't mention it because I have always retained my "main" PST as my POP Inbox and the store where I keep my Contact records, Calendar, Sent Items, Tasks, etc. I use the other separate PSTs I create primarily for archive and organization.
There is a caveat to what John outlines however. Outlook will only allow one POP designated information store (or PST in this case). So if your current "main" PST is set to receive your incoming mail and you create another PST, then set this new PST as your POP store, then several things result. First, you will need to close and restart Outlook for this change to take effect. Second, when Outlook restarts, it will automatically create under that new POP designated PST, all the default system folders Outlook needs to function. (Calendar, Contacts, Drafts, Journal, Notes, Outbox, Sent Items, and Tasks). Third, in order to keep things in sync, you will then need to move all the items contained in these system folders to your new POP information store. And fourth, if you have Outlook set to hold your messages on your mail server for X days, then by creating this new POP store you will end up downloading however many message are sitting there since they were last cleared -- the record of what was already downloaded and what needs to be retrieved on a mail pickup is stored in the information store (PST) designated to receive mail.
The only reason I could see for wanting to do all this would be to start a "fresh" incoming mail store. And this would indeed be the way to do it. Then you could just transfer the information you wanted to carry over to that new store and leave the rest in your old PST. But if you do the regular maintenance on your PSTs that I suggest and archive material on a regular basis, creating a new POP store should never be necessary.
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I just had something interesting happen. I replied to a mail message and was able to send it. This in itself is not interesting, what is is that I still have no access to the Shaw mail server in Calgary and have not been able to send any new mail messages for over a day now.
I did a test reply to a message from another person and I could not send it. I then did another reply to the same person and checked the message options and found that I could specify which server the sent message would use. I changed the server to the Shaw server in Saskatoon and was able to send the message. A bit of testing shows that the server you receive mail from is the server that the reply message will use. The message I replied to I received today using the mail account I created using the Shaw Saskatoon mail server..
To use an alternate mail server to send a message you must create a mail account which uses that server. The message options will not allow you to manually enter a server to use, but provides you with a list of servers to use based on information your input when creating mail accounts. The server you choose also includes the user information for that mail account which goes out to the receiver of the reply message. What you are actually doing is telling Outlook to use another mail account. By simply changing the default mail account you accomplish the same thing.
Beware that if you have multiple mail accounts which use different servers and user information. If you change the default account, it is the default mail account information that will go out with your messages.
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In this weeks Chaos Manor Column on www.byte.com Jerry Pournelle mentions the Microsoft utility Regclean. Regclean is a utility which you can use to clean-up and reduce the size of the registry in Windows 95/NT. Microsoft documentation on Regclean can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q147/7/69.asp. I have found Regclean to be useful on a few occasions when I had done allot of testing on a PC and it was slowing down due to the registry getting too large. Regclean cleaned up and reduced the size of the registry which improved the performance of the PC.
I still cannot communicate with Shaw's mail server here in Calgary. I am starting to wonder if there is a problem with the DNS server. My reasoning for this is Shaw says to use "mail" as the name for the mail server. This is just an alias for a distinguished name such as shaw.mail.cal.ab.ca. I know I had the distinguished name written down somewhere but cannot find it. I would like to use the distinguished name in my mail setup to see if the problem is with DNS or the mail server itself. I can't see any ISP letting the mail server be down for 48 hours.
I finally found the mail server information and the problem is with DNS. If I use the distinguished name for the mail server I can communicate with it.
I have setup multiple accounts with different server configurations so that if one server is down I can get my mail through another server.
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It seems those of us with cable modem internet access no longer have the fastest residential internet connection. We have been out done by the Australians as reported in The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing Technology Journal July 19th edition.
It seems that Australian Capital Territory Electricity & Water is planning a test to bring fiber within 900 feet of homes, tackling the "last fifth-mile" using standard copper wire with "Very-high Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL) service (the high-speed big brother of the longer-distance and slower ADSL we're seeing in a growing number of areas). The result? 36 megabits/second to each home or office, with little "slow down" as the number of subscribers in an area increases, as might happen with cable TV service, since each fiber tendril feeds only about 30 to 50 end users...
The RCFoC ( Rapidly Changing Face of Technology ) is a weekly commentary on computing and technology by Jeffrey R. Harrow.
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I am trying a small change of format in the Work Journal to improve navigation. The heading for each days journal entry instead of being just the day of the week will list all the days of the week. Each day except for the current day is a link to entries for the other days of the week. The current day is all capital letters to make it standout. I don't think this looks as nice and clean as just listing the day of the week, but it makes navigating a weeks worth of entries easier.
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I just did the strangest Microsoft application installation ever. I bought the upgrade for FrontPage 2000 and during installation I would put in the product key when required and after the install program searched for an upgrade product it would produce an error message. After several tries I noticed that the "next" button was not grayed out on the screen where you are to input the product key. I clicked on the "next" button, was asked to accept the license agreement and the installation went merrily along. After a reboot I opened FrontPage and was asked for the product key which I entered. Now here I am merry typing away in FrontPage 2000. I did the installation onto a fresh installation of NT 4 Workstation with service pack 4. If FrontPage 2000 upgrade sees Windows NT Workstation or Server it will install without requiring an older version of FrontPage to be already installed on the PC.
I installed Office 2000 Professional next and was able to skip the product key entry which I had never tried before or knew was possible. Then the first time I opened one of the applications installed by Office 2000 I had to enter the product key.
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Last night I was having problems with Shaw's internet service. I could use FrontPage to upload changes to my web site but could not see my web site on the web via IE5. I tried Tom Syroid's site which is also on Shaw's network and could not view it either. Looks like www.shaw.ca maybe hosted by someone other than Shaw cause I can view it, and it loaded quickly. Tried my site again and part of it comes up then I get "The page cannot be displayed" message. Tried Tom's site again and it came up very slowly. Very odd behavior on the web tonight.
Today was the first day at my new job. My brain hurts from information overload. After two meetings, being introduced to new software such as Lotus Notes and Applix, plus pages of documentation to read my brain hurts. Fun day overall though as there is so much new stuff to see. There is a lot of good technology in the environment uses such as SMS for PC inventory and pushing out new software. As I get my hands dirty in the work environment and learn more I will try and make reports here in the Work Journal.
At noon I went for a walk in downtown Calgary along the Stephen Avenue Mall. Lots of people and street performers. There was a mime all painted gold who put on a great show.
The postings for the next few days likely will be a bit sparse as I adjust to my new schedule.
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At work I use IE4 and noticed that the background on my web pages is gray when it should be white. The background shows as white in FrontPage and in IE5 on my home PC. I went through the pages tonight and worked on the background colour. I'll check my changes from work tomorrow.
Interesting to see that I am not the only person experiencing slow downs in the internet lately. The other people I have heard of experiencing slow downs are not in my geographical part of the country (Calgary, Alberta).
I think I need to investigate how to make the full address on my web pages show up in the address field in web brewers. I have had references to my site posted on other peoples web sites and all they can do is make pointers to http://members.home.net/jhdoucette/ if they cut and paste the address out of the address field. If the full page address showed in the address field, i.e. http://members.home.net/jhdoucette/journal/0719wkof.htm#Wednesday. This points to yesterdays posting in a non frames instance of the page. People could then easily make references to a specific page or bookmark on a page if they wished.
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Eighteen of the computers I have to upgrade at work are scheduled to have the processors upgraded from Pentium 133 to 166, ram increased from 48 to 64 MB, and have a new Quantum 4.3 Gig hard drive installed as the master drive. All of these computers are of the same make and model, so today I took one of these computers which had a fresh install on it from and existing image on the network and verified that the operating system ( Windows NT4 ) and the software were up to date and made changes where required such as installing service pack 5. I then used Norton Ghost to make an image of the hard drive. I also used Ghost to prepare the new hard drives by doing a disk to disk copy of the verified hard drive to the new hard drives (took 6 minutes to copy 810 MB from one drive to another).
I did a dry run of an upgrade by upgrading the processor, ram and installing the new hard drive as the master drive and changing the existing hard drive to slave on the sample PC. I then booted the PC, NT ran an auto check of the new hard drive and rebooted. I then had to go into Control Panel - Network and change the computer name. After rebooting I added the computer to the domain, rebooted the PC and was able to log onto the Domain. Now with my preparations and testing done, tomorrow I can schedule upgrades with the users.
The Goodyear blimp Akron is in Winnipeg for the Pam Am Games. My father had the opportunity to go for a ride in the Akron yesterday and enjoyed it very much. The Akron has been specially painted for the Pan Am Games which added enough weight to the airship that it's carrying capacity has dropped by one person.
We never think about paint except that it make homes, cars etc. look nice. But in automobile racing it is not uncommon for racing teams to work with their sponsors to change paint schemes to reduce the amount of weight the paint will add to the race car.
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Day of much needed rest.
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My parents are dropping in days a head of schedule so this bachelor is in major cleaning mode.
My mom has finally agreed to buy herself a new laptop computer, and a reasonable budget for the purchase. Now I have to do some research so we can make a purchase this week while she is in town visiting.