Returned from Germany

The actual flight back from Germany on Monday was easy, but getting acclimated to reality has been very challenging. This year the jetlag on the return home was almost non-existent, but I have been battling hardware issues, but fortunately this time I have experts helping me.

Tuesday and Wednesday I had a new server installed and setup by experts. I have been working on this for the last three months and really looking forward to getting the 80-some pound box installed. I built a special closet in the basement to host the machine which is serving as a file server, database server (SQL Server 2000 initially), Web server (IIS to host SharePoint and a wiki), source control server (VSS with SourceOffSite), and firewall (ISA). As you know, I really hate hardware and there is nothing worse than hardware with networking in my book. With this in mind hired experts. Under their recommendation I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 1800 with dual 3.2 ghz processors, 4GB of RAM, and 600GB drives using RAID 5. It is a lot of power for one geek, but I am preparing to grow White Light Computing in the future so I wanted enough horsepower in the shed when the time comes to add staff or more subcontractors.

The install went pretty smooth and everything is up and running thanks to Ted who stepped Windows Small Business Server 2003 through the various setup wizards. I knew the most difficult part for me is having my machine join a domain. The process of joining a domain is easy, but getting all the software use to running under a new login account is a PAIN IN THE NECK! Sorry for yelling. I have done this once before and it was too time consuming. At least this time I knew what I was in for, but it did not make the "experience" any more fun.

I still have not recovered everything. It took a lot of time just to get Outlook configured the way I like it. Why does Outlook keep its settings in so many different mostly hidden places? Why doesn't it store the configuration in the PST file, or make it simple to migrate the settings? I am not talking about just the email accounts (why I cannot export these is beyond me). I am referring to the favorites folders, the junk mail settings, the save senders list, the million choices on the options dialog, and the toolbar settings. The horror. I really like Outlook because it makes me more productive, but over the last couple of days it was killing my productivity.

I figure it will be weeks before everything is discovered and fixed. The shame of this is I have to go through it all again with a new laptop over Thanksgiving weekend.