Major pouting over non-technical stuff

Last night I was having a major pity party, throwing a bit of a tantrum and in tears. I received devastating (well, for me it was devastating) news yesterday afternoon that the axle that we had a line on for my old Bubba truck wasn't the correct one. At best, we can hope for an axle rebuild, should we be able to find the parts.

Thank to the efforts of my state's idiot Senators (yes, Debbie Stabenow you are one of the guilty!) push to pass "Cash for Clunkers" in an effort to boost auto sales, there are far fewer replacement parts for vehicles of all ages.  Even more so for a 22 year old pickup.  My beloved Bubba truck isa victim of that *oh-so-brilliant-move* (can you hear the sarcasm dripping here?).

Fast forward to this morning, when I did just what the idioticlegislation wanted me to do all along, and I "replaced" Bubba with a new vehicle. But not quite in the way they'd hoped for. My new vehicle is a new Ford F-150.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I may have bowed to buying a new vehicle, but no I did not spend the extra $3K to get the new Eco-boost V6 Ford is so proud of. Nope. I got me a big honking V8 that gets an estimated 14mpg and 19mpg. Which is far less than Bubba's 22 and 24.  Bwahahaha!!!

Fortunately for my old beloved Bubba truck, it's not completely falling victim to the evil plans of DC.  Instead, it's becoming my project truck. My poor hubby bowed to my pouting and shouts of "I don't want to get rid of Bubba truck!" and we will slowly get it restored as funds and parts cooperate.

If you happen to live in the Greater Grand Rapids Michigan area, I highly recommend Tony Betten & Sons Ford. They let me take off with the keys and drive the new beastie around sans sales guy, got it all washed and shiny, gassed it up, and dug for every rebate and discount possible for me. Had Bubba been 5 years newer, I would have gotten another rebate, but alas, no go.  As it was he found us over $4K in discounts to go with our X-plan discounts.

Novell North America Tour 2012

Novell is running their re-connect tour and is coming to - of all places - Grand Rapids.  Why did no one at Novell let me know!?

Anyway, they're coming - woo-hoo!  Way better than hitting Detroit.

For those in Grand Rapids, here's the link to the tour page, just look for Grand Rapids on the right and click to register.  It's being held at the JW Marriott in downtown, quite a lovely place, once you find parking and which floor the party's on.  :)

http://www.novell.com/events/tour2012.html


BTW - Novell, have you contacted your few partners in town? Have you contact your customers? Please do!

ZCM and new phone keeping me busy

My new gig is in health care, where we are pushing ZCM to it's limits, working closely with Novell to resolve a bundle of issues related to how we are specifically using ZCM.  That along with learning all the ins-and-outs of a big project that I was hired into the middle of has kept me very busy and off the GroupWise administrative side of things.

What I can tell you about ZCM at this point is - patch to the latest version before calling Novell. Chances are we've run into the problem and Novell's already fixed it with a patch or FTF. It might save you a headache, and a wasted SR.

Now on the totally unrelated topic of cell phones. I absolutely love, love, love my Nextel Blackberry Curve. But after nearly 5 years of abuse - including drops down stairs, drops in parking lots where it's skittered under more than one car, getting chewed and slobbered on by big puppies, and drops on concrete - the jack for a wired headset is broken, making it hard on my work from home days to handle conference calls and still get other stuff done easily.

I caved, gave in and picked up the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G (or whatever order those words go in) running the Gingerbread version of Android.  I'm liking it "ok". I still despise the touch keyboards as I have fingers that are apparently "too fat" for touchscreens. I'm constantly having to correct and I hate not being able to simply tap on a space between 2 letters to correct a word, rather than having to backspace over everything else that was spelled correctly and reenter it all. That's where the Blackberry kicks butt over everything else for me.

We don't have 4G at my house, and the Sprint coverage is worse than I had on my Nextel Blackberry, but it seems to work okay at this point. I'm giving it 2 weeks to decided if I'm staying with Sprint or dumping it all and moving to Verizon - which does have 4G at my house but not unlimited data and will cost me $30/month more than my current Sprint contract discounts. I'm okay without 4G at home as I can just jump on our wireless and I do have 4G at work.

For those that may ask why I didn't go with iPhone? Well, to be blunt, it cost a hell of a lot more to get the equivalent "power" in the iPhone over the Samsung. $150 more to be exact. (And it's not 4G ready.) That's because the local Sprint store was having an in-store special making the Samsung drop to $49.95 if you bought an accessorie (which I needed anyway). Walking out the door with a new bluetooth headset and a case, I was still $30 under the cost of the Samsung if there wasn't a special.

I do still have my Blackberry - I love the password manager on it and have so many on there it'll be a pain to transfer, so it's staying until I've completely decided which way I'm going yet. We'll see, two weeks to go. If I haven't thrown the phone across the room by then, I guess I'll keep it.

Call for Conferences

If you'd like your upcoming conference listed on my blog, please let me know, I'm happy to help spread the word.

Mind you, I will give preferential treatment to user group organized events and things that include Novell products.  :)

Heads-up MidWesterners!

Sorry for being so absent here, but wanted to make sure this gets posted.

IVNUA's Spring Conference is being sponsored by Novell this year. This annual Training Conference is being held on May 3 & 4 in Utica, Il.

They have big names coming! Laura Chappell, Doc Hodges, Loyal Moses, and Jeremy Moskowitz are a few of the presenters.

Check out www.ivnua.org for more info, and let Bill know I sent you.  ;)

GroupWise 2012

Well, GroupWise 2012 is here - yay! - and reports are that it's a smooth upgrade. Better yet, after "chatting" with Dean Lythgoe, the apparent client push woes with ZCM have been resolved.

The team put in a lot of work during the beta phase of GW 2012 and - if you're using the latest ZCM - the push issues appear to have been resolved.  There is also the GWTuner which can be used to modify the .msi file.

I haven't had my hands on it yet, I'm hoping to build a sandbox with GW installed this weekend - given I can find enough hours in the day - so I can post what I find here.

Also, new job has me in the ZCM realm so expect to see more about ZCM in future posts.

Windows StickyNotes

Because this came up at work today, I figured I'd post a portion of a post I did on different blog.

On my Windows 7 boxes, and my SUSE Linux boxes, I love the StickyNotes / TomBoy apps. StickyNotes showed up first in the Linux world and I fell in love immediately. How cool to be able to pull up a virtual StickyNote, jot down some info, and place it somewhere on your screen, or close the app but not lose the data. In Windows 7, not only can you drag the notes around on the screen, stack them on top of each other, but you can also change the colors. This helps me keep track of notes for my different book series. For instance, the first series gets Purple, second gets Green, fourth gets Yellow, third gets Pink, and my blog post notes get White.

The only problem with the StickyNotes on Windows 7 is that most backup solutions won't copy it because it doesn't reside in the Documents folder, and many users have no idea where the little data file is stored. That means, if you're machine has to be re-imaged (i.e. Windows has to be installed from scratch) you may lose that data. The good news is that all of your StickyNotes are in one little file and that can simply be copied to an external drive, USB stick, or CD; take your pick. The file name is StickyNotes.snt and it sits in the c:\Users\curentusername\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft (where currentusername is who you log in as).

Another issue is you when you click on what is normally the "close" button in the top right corner (the "X"), it deletes the note rather than close it down. So to close your StickyNotes you actually have to go to the taskbar, right click on the StickyNotes icon and select "Close Window". Your notes will be saved and reopened next time you launch StickyNotes