A Pleasant Vista

Started downloading the latest beta build of Microsoft Windows Vista earlier this morning. It's about a 2GB download, and will be over sometime after lunch, if all goes well, and I can curtail my web surfing long enough to get some work done. I have OnDemand users to set up, for cryin' out loud.

Although, I did make an Excel template for the user format file. I'd rather spend 5 minutes messing about with that than spend all day entering user accounts by hand, let me tell you.

I've done up a good bit of work in MS Project lately, specifically something I call 'Project 7'. It's a layout of everything I'm working on. I mean EVERYTHING. Home, work, life, relationships, projects... Everything. It's scary to look at sometimes, when I see how much I have going on, but I think it will be worth it to me to keep up with it, and see how it affects my ability to get things done. Interesting stuff so far. I find myself spending a lot of time on it. With that, and the new planner I came up with about a month ago, I'm feeling pretty on top of things lately.

Along those lines, yesterday was supposed to be the planning day, being the first day of the week. Sadly, I got little to no planning done, since I was playing catch-up a lot from the end of last week. Why catch-up? I was out for two days at SkillPath seminar on Windows 2003 Server. Let me tell you about that for a second.

SkillPath offers about a million different seminars on everything from Windows to Making Sales Brochures to Self-Improvement. I had only a couple issues with the seminar, but they were significant.

Overall, the class was good, and I got about three pages or so of ideas to play with. I have a lot to do to get ready for our 2000 to 2003 migration in the back room. Not to mention having a whole new operating system to play with. Most significantly, I got some good ideas on how to play with DFS and DNS CNAME records, allowing me to swap out entire servers without ever having to interrupt service, or even change server names. Fun. I also learned that even though I have some prep to do, I'm in pretty good shape for our eventual migration to Windows 2003 server in the back room.

So what didn't I like? Well, first off, there was a very wide range of skill levels in that room. We're talking all the way from my level, which was pretty high for the room, all the way down to, "How do I set permissions on a directory?" There are government agencies that are still on Windows 95 and NT Server. Yikes. Second of all, since there were so many different skill levels, we did a lot of backtracking, and as a result, we didn't actually complete the material. There was a whole section on IIS that we didn't end up covering. Since we paid for that (well, work did), I'm a little miffed about that, specifically. I work with IIS almost daily. I would have liked to have gone over any significant differences between the newer and older versions of IIS. Kind of irritated that we didn't.

I think the main problem was that they tried to cram in too much info in two days. We could have covered about 2/3 of that, more thoroughly. Ah, well. I take what I have and run with it. As I always do.

Speaking of which, off to work. Much planning to do. Hope you have a good day.