Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Losing faith in HP laptops

    My faith in HP laptops is going through a crisis of confidence due to a series of failures or faults experienced by the collection of laptops within the family as well as my top comparison gaming laptops. In the last few months, we have had: A DV2000 model whose motherboard…

  • Making salt from sea water

    An article in the Irish Times (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2010/0703/1224273550711.html) provoked a thought that we should take advantage of being close to the Atlantic Ocean and bring some salt water home to see if we could make some sea salt. I duly went down to the Coral Strand near Clifden and filled bottles…

  • Exchange 2010 Best Practices Book now available

    Microsoft Press/O’Reilly have just published the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Best Practices (also available from Amazon.co.uk) book by Siegfried Jagott and Joel Stidley. I had some involvement in this book as I was the technical editor for roughly half the chapters, a task that filled many interesting hours over the…

  • Ailebrack

    Some folks from California arrived to visit us in Ireland and created the immediate question of “what to do”? As we live in Dublin, it’s an easy call to have them spend a day looking around the city but Dublin has become increasingly like other European cities over the last…

  • A small increase

    As discussed in earlier posts, Microsoft Press had some concern about the size of my Exchange 2010 SP1 book as the submitted manuscript amounted to some 1,600 pages. They asked me to reduce the size to 1,100 pages and I started on the task of cutting complete chapters, sections, and…

  • Some good French restaurants

    A number of excellent dinners in restaurants across France enlivened our trip as we meandered from Normandy to Paris to Chamonix to the Cote d’Azur and back again. In date order these were: Le Mascaret in Blainville –sur-Mer (Normandy): This is a Michelin one-star restaurant in a small and sleepy…

  • VM machine requirements for Exchange 2010 training

    Some people who have browsed the announcement of the Exchange 2010 training that Paul Robichaux and I are doing in Boston and Anaheim in October (http://events.left-brain.com/EssentialsWorkshops/Exchange2010.aspx?code=WP520XAT) have noted this small but very important section at the end of the page: IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING SECTION CAREFULLY Due to the…

  • Selecting a book about technology

    Recently, a question was posed on the Exchange MVP mailing list about what books people would recommend to help technologists get up to speed with Exchange 2010. Clearly this is a topic that I am both interested in and have an opinion, so I made a contribution. Thinking about the…

  • Exchange 2010 (SP1) Training in Boston and Anaheim

    The first Exchange training that I organized was held in Dublin in 1996. On behalf of Digital Equipment’s European Messaging Team, I asked Microsoft to send over their best trainer and they obliged. The training was not a happy event because it was very much in the “click here and…

  • The cutting technique

    I blogged a few days ago about the need to reduce the size of my Exchange 2010 SP1 book to bring it down from the 1,600 or so pages that Microsoft Press has estimated its current size to something more reasonable of the order of 1,100 or so pages. Still…