Posts by Ken Smith

Utter Shambles

This post has hit a raw nerve as I was banging my head against the shower of nonsense that new Outlook is last week while doing an e-mail migration for a client. They have several folders in New Outlook that, for some reason, won't sync with their existing IMAP service. Easy, set up new e-mail account alongside the old one and drag the few folder over. No way - that feature is not there. Oh and by the way, it won't let me set up both email accounts with the same name, old one alongside new one so, I resorted to subterfuge to make that happen. Export to .pst - nope. ffs. Oh and switch over to Classic Outlook and those folders don't show up either.

Contacting M'Soft support got this very amusing reply in one of their messages to me "since the new outlook is still under heavy development". And in a forum I found this wording from another M'Soft source "The new Outlook is not yet complete, and some options may not be available or work as expected. Many features of our current products are designed and upgraded based on customers’ feedback." I'll give you feedback alright.....on the other hand I've rather lost hope and will switch my client to Thunderbird.

So they have inflicted a "lunchtime hack" in their unsuspecting customers. Shocking. I really need to curtail my stream of expletives over this shower of utter garbage waste of disk space.

And .... Are they really saying that they will kill off Old Outlook. As in revoke, the licences for people who have paid for perpetual versions. Get a grip M'soft.

I'm so glad that all my production systems are Open Source and I've been using SeaMonkey (cousin of Thunderbird) for well over a decade without any issues at all,.

Take it apart

I recall trying to get a rack into an office on the 4th floor of a Victorian building near Leicester Square. It just would not go round the bends in the stairs. In the end we took the rack to bits and reassembled it in situ. Heaven help the poor guys who may eventually move it out of there. :-)

Just like the car industry

Make a good product, the MBA's/Spreadsheet monkeys arrive, cost cut and the demise of a good brand is inevitable.

Gas Pipe

Myself and a colleague, who is African in colour, were drilling a rather large hole in a wall to run a bundle of Cat5. Nearby was a goods lift that made a hissing sound when it operated. Just as my colleague took a short break from blasting away with his STS drill and he heard this "hissing" sound. My colleague literally went white thinking he'd hit a gas pipe!

Nonsense

This is another example of centralist government. "We know better and you proles can just suck it up". Not just in this RF spectrum space but in many other spheres. EG: The role of teachers is being undermined by centralist policies. My daughter is an experienced school teacher and the "rules" often get in the way of her "doing the right thing" as a professionally qualified teacher. A robot could do the job! Then we wonder why we have some of the social problems we have.

The Health&Safety fanaticism makes blaming someone else endemic and that culture seeps into other spheres of life. In the US where speed limits can change every few hundred yards on rural roads, tends to take responsibility for proper use of speed away from drivers and gives it to absent regulators. Back in the day when I operated a Amateur Radio station I knew fully what my responsibilities were to not interfere with other spectrum users.

I'm all for sensible regulation and consequences for non compliance. For goodness sake treat us as the adults we are!

IBM in Hursley ran their backup generators once a week when I worked there. The noise near my office was really irritating but the testing was worth it.

I have had servers at Memset for years and their service has always been top notch. This is the first outage of any consequence.

Some clients need sacked

I dumped a client once who had forwarded his e-mail to a personal pop3 e-mail account on his own Mac. So it downloads the e-mail to the Mac. Then the Mac had a hard disk fail and he lost his e-mail and he wasn't backing up his Mac. He blamed me quite aggressively that I hadn't backed up his Mac & e-mail. I concluded that he would blame us for everything and he knew enough about IT to dig a big hole and blame others that he couldn't get out of it.

Facebook working in Ismir

A friend has been posting through the night on Facebook in Ismir