Well, my late call got canceled.  Even though I was told that it was absolutely, vitally important that they be up and running before they open for business tomorrow…I am now being told that it isn’t such a big deal and they’d rather I showed up tomorrow afternoon.  So I don’t have to work late tonight, which is very nice.

Unfortunately, I’m having to deal with a client who is becoming very annoying.

It’s the same folks I’ve mentioned before…  The client that I recently installed Exchange 2007 SP1 on, that had some trouble with POP3 right afterwards.  Well, they’ve got a “computer guy” down at their head office who is now insisting that bot POP3 and OWA are not working, but he really can’t give me any more information than that.

Their local office is able to grab their email with POP3 just fine, I haven’t had a single complaint from anyone here.  One of the guys at the local office has a Blackberry too, and he’s able to use it with no trouble.  I’m able to connect to their mail server with Outlook and Outlook Express, as well as telnet, and I’m not seeing any errors at all.

I also tested OWA from about a dozen different locations and was able to connect with no trouble at all.  Pulled up the web page, logged in, sent and received messages just fine.

But their “computer guy” claims POP3 and OWA are not working.  Apparently they’ve got someone down at the head office who uses OWA from home, and POP3 on a Blackberry, and neither of those is working.

The frustrating part is that I’m having a very hard time getting useful information out of their “computer guy.”  He won’t tell me who the user is that’s having problems…  He won’t tell me their username…  He can’t tell me what URL they’re using to connect to OWA…  He doesn’t know if they’re actually trying to connect from home or from the office…  He tells me that the Blackberry uses POP3, but then explains that the web page isn’t coming up on it…

And, of course, both the home computer and the Blackberry are down at their head office - two hours away from here.

So I’m trying to troubleshoot a problem that I’m completely unable to reproduce, with insufficient information, without any of the hardware that’s actually having the problem.

This week is off to a worrisome start.

Despite the fact that it is officially Spring, we’re getting snow.  Not just a light dusting either - it’s coming down pretty hard at the moment.  Visibility is very limited.  I’m sick and tired of snow…  I want to see green again…  I want thunder storms, flowers, warm air…  And instead we’re getting more snow.

I also found a ton of messages waiting for me when I got in to work this morning.  All sorts of things decided to break over the weekend.  Remote work, on-site work, in-house work…  You name it, it’s broken.  So the next few days are looking plenty busy already.

And then one of my calls this morning just became an after-hours call.  I was supposed to be playing around with someone’s install of DacEasy this morning…  They’re switching over to a new bank, new checks, all sorts of new stuff tomorrow - and they must be able to do business.  The problem is that the things I need to change in DacEasy prevent people from doing any meaningful work in the software, and they’ve got a ton of things that need to be finalized/printed/whatever because it is the end of the month.  So I really can’t shut them down until 4:30 this afternoon.

Tomorrow is Monday…and for the first time in several weeks I am not dreading going back in to work.  For the first time in several weeks I feel sufficiently well-rested and healthy to face another week of work.  I doubt if I’ll feel the same in the morning…  I’m never terribly eager to get out of bed…  But, for now at least, I’m feeling pretty good about tomorrow.  And that’s a very nice feeling - I’ve been so over-worked and unhealthy lately that it’s been a challenge just showing up to work every day.

On a completely unrelated note - I have no idea what I said, but Akismet caught about 20 spam comments in the last day or two and they’re all sex/porn related.  Hooray for Akismet!

Ars Technica | PC Game Developer has a Radical Message: Ignore the Pirates

I’ve been saying this for years - the only people that are affected by copy protection are your paying customers.  Anyone who is going to pirate the game has already found a way around the copy protection.  There are plenty of websites out there with cracks for just about every game ever made.  And if you download your pirated software from an on-line source it’ll usually come pre-cracked.  All these expensive, time-consuming, annoying piracy countermeasures only affect your paying customers.

They have to put up with the annoyance of making sure the disc is in the drive.  They have to deal with flaky and incompatible drives that refuse to work with certain copy protection schemes.  And some portion of the money they’re paying for that shiny new game is actually going to pay for some crappy copy protection scheme.

And the pirates, meanwhile, don’t have to deal with it at all.  They get their game for free, and never have to deal with any of the annoyances of copy protection.  There’s a real problem when the pirates have a better product than your paying customers do.

Slashdot | A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports

C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that’s fairer.

Frankly, I’m surprised at some of the ports they picked…

Parallel and PS/2 are both listed.  I do agree that they’re basically obsolete and have been largely supplanted by USB, but I still see them on plenty of machines - even brand new ones.

Firewire is listed, despite its near ubiquity in high-end audio and video devices.  It’s nearly impossible to find a decent video camera without firewire.

What absolutely amazed me was the inclusion of SCSI on the list…  It is virtually impossible to build a server without SCSI.  High-end storage is still SCSI.  Sure, the cables have changed…  It’s serial attached SCSI now, instead of the old parallel ribbon cables…  But it’s still SCSI.  And I still wind up using the old parallel SCSI controllers for tape drives all the time.  SCSI is about as far from obsolete as you can get.