The last episode of In The Trenches has been posted online now and my interview with Kevin Devin is included. I actually volunteered to do the interview about a year ago but we’ve only just got around to recording and uploading it to the website. The entire podcast is worth listening to, but I appear 22 minutes in.
Google Sync for the Blackberry is now available – a program that synchronises your Google calendar(s) with the one on your phone which in turn is probably synchronised with your Exchange or Lotus Notes calendar. I installed this yesterday as this would mean I would have my work, personal and wife’s calendar all in one place so I could keep up to date with my availability.
The install took ages to download and run – about 30 minutes in total and a synchronisation was made successfully. However 10 minutes later the Blackberry rebooted. I wasn’t surprised as it has been doing this about once a day for the past week. After the 15 minutes passed for the Blackberry to reboot and come back to life everything was good for about 10 minutes……then it happened again – another reboot. After about 90 minutes of this I decided to remove Google Sync and the phone has stayed online ever since (or at least it’s not rebooted every 10 minutes!)
In summary, a great product when it works but totally useless after the initial sync is done. I’m really hoping the next version will be stable. Needless to say this is only my experience – I’ve not had anyone else in the team try this yet – they probably wont as we can’t really afford the phones to be out of action whilst we test it. I was fortunate yesterday in that I was already on the office phone so couldn’t use the blackberry for incoming calls anyway.
I’ve been in this house for almost two years and today my ip address changed with RoadRunner. I only noticed as the router didn’t have connectivity this morning when I woke up. A reboot later and I’m on a completely different subnet. I was 65.24.119 but now have a 75.185 address. Interesting that the change of ip address happened at the same time I lost connectivity – you would have thought that the proper use of dhcp would have prevented this from happening. With dyndns.org I can still reach the computer by its homeip.net and that was working less than 20 seconds after reconnecting. Good old dd-wrt!
Thanks to the post from Danalive on the sql msdn forums by adding the characters ReportServer between the ReportServerVirtualDirectory tags in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config the error message of “The reportservervirtualdirectory element is missing” disappeared and I could access the Reporting Services homepage.
This weekend I had to rename the server as part of the GoLive procedure with this server. Sure enough, the rename of the server caused a lot more errors. There are a couple of pages on the MSDN site with instructions – Basic overview and instructions for renaming SQL2005 and Renaming a Report Server.
So far I’ve had several issues with this server – SQL2005 seems to have the buggiest and most unstable installation routine I’ve ever seen.
I entered a competition for A Couple of Admins podcast which is one of the tech podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis. I submitted a review to ITunes and won a $25 gift voucher to Borders. I’m not sure which book I’m going to get from them just yet – there are several tech books that I’ve had my eye on.
Update The actual podcast with the drawing is #27
Got a 900 score this morning – the passmark was 700 so I am very pleased. I tick off the number of questions that I *know* I have correct (32), the number of simulations (3) and the number of questions that I’m not sure if the answer is correct (9). Any question that I’m not sure about I make my best answer too, mark the question for review and go on to the next question. Sim’s I immediately mark for review and go onto the next question. At the end of all the questions I go back and finish off all the review questions.
The exam was 4.25 hours long for 46 questions – I took about 90 minutes – the longest I’ve had so far I think.
This marks the end of my quest for MCSA certification – now I start on the remaining questions to get the MCSE certification.
I woke up early this morning (3am!) and it was light outside – not sure if it was the brightness in the room or the cheese I had at the works Christmas do last night. It had snowed overnight (and still continues to snow). After about an hour lying in bed I got up and caught up on some blog reading and patched some customer servers and did some reboots. I then went into work early to beat the mad traffic rush – I’m glad I did as one guy took an hour to drive his normal 3 minute route to work!
I’ve finished the 70-291 book now – this past week has put a slowdown in the study so I had been stuck with just one more chapter to go. It was by far the easiest chapter – troubleshooting as it is something I do everyday and the troubleshooting section was pretty basic to be honest. I’ll be spending the rest of the week going through the practice questions ready for the test on Friday morning.
I’ve scheduled my 291 exam for 7th December just to give me a deadline. As usual with prometric, scheduling this was horrendous. The website refused to acknowledge the email that it used to send me the exam confirmation last time and I had to call Prometric. After listening to the awful “Did you know you can use our website” automated recording (Yes I do know and I really would do so if the system recognised my user id!) I eventually got to a customer service rep. Prometric still have my email address, phone number and address from the UK. They wanted to clarify my phone number for identity purposes and none of my US ones worked. She read out the first 3 digits and after a couple of seconds I realised they were referring to my old UK employer! This was meant to have been changed when I first took my US exams in 2005 and they still hadn’t updated the system!
Anyway, the exams booked – now I just hope I get the chance to study for it – this week has been really busy and I’ve not felt like studying – a 15 hour work day on Monday did not start the week off well…. Meanwhile my colleague is trying to find out what his MCP ID number is so he can register for the 2nd chance promotion and *then* go through the prometric hurdles. He is doing the same exam so there is nothing like a bit of friendly rivalry to persuade us to study.
I was using my paypal fob to sign into my MovableType 4 test installation and I entered the 6 digit code. I was surprised to see that Verisign rejected it. “That’s odd” I thought until I realised I was holding the fob upside down and the numbers just happened to be readable that way up too! It is obviously too early in the morning to be debugging css code – so sorry Neil!