Tony Dye

Remembering Xenix

February 27, 1984.  Seattle.  I was working in an R&D department and we were looking at operating systems for X86 processors.  Microsoft sponsored an event to tell all about their future vision.  DOS was coming to an end (took a while, didn't it?) and Microsoft was announcing the future.  At the time, IBM was working on OS/2, which Microsoft was mostly saying less-than-favorable things about.  What was Microsoft's answer?  Probably not what you think.  In 1984, the future had SCO Xenix penciled in.

Fast forward to 1992/1993 and the early days of Microsoft Exchange.  One of Microsoft's biggest internal Exchange deployment problems at that time was the painful elimination of all the Xenix-based back-end servers.

Up through mid-1990, much of my job was actually based on working with Xenix, although there was very little Microsoft connection at the time.  Kind of surprisingly, I miss those days.

Playing Nicely Together

Once again, Scott Logan has set a high mark.  I appreciate his further comments on Mac Integration at Perimeter.

What do Mac Users Think of Standards?

Perimeter is a "PC Shop," no doubt about it.  And, like most other places, we get a lot of pressure for Mac support.  There is good argument that Macs are a lot better at many things, so there are times where a Mac makes sense.  But, back to my first statement, "Perimeter is a PC Shop."

I may be overstating this a bit, but there seems to be some correlation between being a Mac user and being a bit of the defiant/rebellious type.  Rules?  Who needs 'em?  However, to say that's true of all Mac users would be way out of line.  For instance, one of our Mac users went so far as to put a really nice post on his blog.  It's worth a read:

If you're a Mac user at Perimeter

Thanks Scott!

Message Archiving Meeting

Gary Nichols of InterDev has offered to lead a discussion on Message Archiving.  The meeting will be March 18 at Perimeter Church.  Time is not set yet, but we will *probably* begin around noon and go two, or even three hours, with plenty of Q&A time included.  I need an accurate headcount so we can provide lunches.

The origins of the meeting come from Gary's willingness to talk about the Barracuda Message Archiver, but Gary has agreed to go a bit further and touch into the more general message archiving situation.  This is not a confirmed agenda, but general areas that Gary is likely to address:

• Mailbox management: the challenges (storage, retrieval, legal, etc.)
• What should be saved, what should NOT be saved
• WHERE should items be saved
• Storage hierarchies vs. the Google model (search rather than hierarchies)
• Suggested practices
• Best practices
• Q&A

If this sounds interesting and you'd like to attend, please leave a comment here or send me an email.  We're expecting a group of about 15, but if we get a lot more response, we'll adjust our plans appropriately.

6 Weeks to GO: MinistryTECH and Spring CITRT

MinistryTECH and the Spring Church IT Roundtable are only SIX WEEKS AWAY!  You are registered, right?  If not, don't wait.  Each event has a capacity limit -- don't miss out.

MinistryTECH registration

Roundtable registration

Silly Question - FAXes

Do you include your FAX number on your business card?  If so, why?

(I guess I already asked about the same question back in July 2007)

Exceptional Customer Service

These are the roses I gave my wife Thursday evening for Valentine's day.  But, and this is a very important but, I did NOT buy my wife roses for Valentine's day! (there's another story about that, but for another time)  So what's going on?

Well, let me back up a bit.  Mark Higgins is our account rep. at  Clear Choice Telephones.  Clear Choice is who we use for our basic phone maintenance.  It's a rather interesting arrangement - we send them a check each month, and in return, they do pretty much absolutely nothing for us.  And we're very happy about it!  Now before you use this as the final proof that I'm crazy, let me explain a little.  Clear Choice takes the responsibility for our maintenance, but they rarely do any of the work themselves.  Instead, they've built relationships with lots of other vendors, and when we have an issue, they find the right person/company to solve it.  And it's all covered under our agreement.  It's been working well for us for quite a few years.

OK, so back to this Valentine's story.  Because Mark was seeing us on Valentine's day, and because he believes in "protecting" his customers, he protected me.  Automatically, just because he was coming to see us, and in case I'd forgotten (I hadn't) to buy flowers, he covered me.  WOW.  That's rather exceptional service from a guy (and company) that "don't do anything for us."  Let me know if you'd like me to make an introduction so he can do nothing for you, too.

Storage Management: Update

Jason Powell made an interesting comment on storage recently that is a good enough reason to update my Storage Management Brainstorming post.  His simple comment (not an exact quote):

Make sure you just have enough space

This is kind of a big duh, but yah, if you don't have the space for people to store *whatever* then you don't ever have a chance to manage it, or back it up, or whatever.  So thanks Jason, great comment well worth noting!

Happy Birthday YouTube

YouTube turns three today.  What did we do with all our spare time before we had this service?!

Valentine's Day Memory

Just a quick little personal story here.  Today, Valentine's Day, is Trisha's and my anniversary.  Our 25th!  Well...actually that's not exactly true.  Today is the 25th anniversary of our first date.  Yup, that's right, our first date was on Valentine's day.  There's part of this story that we'll never fully understand, but the short version is: we have an arranged marriage (and I can highly recommend arranged marriages).  Trisha's family and my family grew up in the same church.  We actually knew each other, barely, in our teenage years.  Somehow, and this is the part where the story isn't quite clear, her father, or my father, or possibly even the two of them together, conspired to have us go on a date, and the date they arranged was at their church, in front of people we had known all our lives.  Talk about pressure!

Well, somehow we suvived it.  And...the rest, as they say...is history...