Mitch's Blog

I am going to try a post weekly about my experience with building my body with Wii Fit. but I want everyone to know that i am also changing my eating habits in order to lose the weight. This is also not just about losing weight but about gaining some flexibility back.

I am 42 years old and weigh in at around 237 lbs. I am an IT geek that works on computers all day long so I spend a lot of time sitting on my you know what. And eating junk food. Over the past year I have noticed that I am becoming more tired and less active. at the same time I started gaining more weight. All of this mixed together has made me more concerned with my health.

So I decided to start exercising this year and since we received a Wii and a wii fit for Christmas I thought  what a better way to start to gain some flexibility and possibly lose some weight.

We started Christmas night but due to family being in town we skipped a couple of nights. however i have been at it pretty regularly for the past 4 days and am doing at least 30 min a night 7 nights a week except when I travel (which is not often). And so far it has been a lot of fun.

So far I have not been able to figure out the Wii fit age formula because I have been as high as 56 and as low as 34 in wii fit age. My BMI has been pretty consistent every measurement. And I have steadily been going down. My goal is to loose 2 lbs a week. However that is not a hard set goal. My most important goal is to gain some flexibility and overall balance and strength that  i feel I have lost from sitting so much.

Over all right now I have already noticed an improvement in my general health and i am no longer tired in the morning and feel very alert most of the day instead of wanting to take a nap. I will admit I am hurting but that is a good sign.

we will just have to wait and see how it goes.

Well we received a WII for Christmas from Santa Claus. We also received a WII fit. and it is amazing how much fun we have had with it. instead of watching TV in the evenings we are bowling as a family. When the kids go to bed the wife an I are doing WII fit and believe me we are feeling it.

We have truly used this more then I thought we would. and it sure is a lot of fun.

All I have been fighting a battle with vista that has been killing me and many others. There are tons of posts about this issue but i think I have found it and it is an age long problem that has been around for years but we often forget about it.

How many of you have had the infamous I am typeing and it takes a while for the screen to catch up. or outlook hanging and saying "not responding" it seems now that I have found my problems. I was at a point that vista was almost unusable but I kept digging at it. and here is what I found.

First Turn off Aero it  seems to improve things considerably. I did find going to classic view helped a ton. But I still had problems with outlook and other things.

Second I went into Anti-virus and excluded scans on ost’s, pst’s, and I excluded the outlook.exe  executable.

I restarted my machine and what a surprise I have been functioning back at windows XP levels of speed again it is awesome. 

You know this seems to be a good idea. I would love to be able to obtain this certification but I am having a hard time justifiying the cost to my company. it is expensive and time consuming. To leave and not bill for 6 weeks (actually 7) is a long time and a huge cost to a company.

Plus the 25K it takes to get there then only having the odds of 2 in 14 pass that just is not good and a company has to see some true benefit. if someone could direct me to the value I would happily present it to my company.

Well i have always said that blue screen is caused by hardware and Vista SP1 shows this again. I have applied SP1 to 3 Machines a dell Latitude D620 and a Motion Computing LS800, and a home made PC that about 2 years old.

On the Motion and the Home made PC. I had Blue screens of death during the install. It was kind of ugly the Motion took 21 hours to finally finish. That was after 2 attempts. But after researching both Blue Screens I found that I had a Bad SD card reader in the Motion Tablet. (not sure it is bad but it never has worked) I had forgot about it.

And on the home computer I had an old hard drive that I have never removed it was just disabled. SP1 Reenabled it and of course it failed badly. once I removed the hard drive and disabled the card reader all seems really good.

Overall not a bad install if you think about the fact that in all cases I could get to the things I needed to to fix the problem. So not bad but you need to make sure your hardware is good if it is not you will have a few issues.

All

I undertook implementing SP1 last night. Wow that was very unproductive. My laptop took 3 hours to apply the Service pack. But it is working a lot better. The typing is much smoother and everything seems to be much faster so that is good

My tablet well that is another story After 3 hours  it crashed pretty hard. Kept restarting, So I was finally able to boot to safe mode. Once in safe mode it started the Installing Service pack:Stage 3 of 3 I am at 56% now that is 2 hours after I booted it to safe mode.

Finally finished with the SP1 Update Wow what an undertaking. I started on my dell and it worked fine but took for ever. Since it worked and seem to improve things I moved on to my tablet a Motion Computing LS800 that I had upgraded to Vista a couple of months back. I started the update off and it began working just fine. however when it hit stage 2 it failed. Blue screened and then locked up when it tried to reboot itself.

So I rebooted and put it in safe mode then the tablet said it was finishing updates stage 3 of 3 so that went on for about 2 more hours. it finally hit 100% and I thought great it made it through it any way. Low and be hold no.

When it rebooted it came back and Said Vista SP1 Failed and was returning to previous state. So here I go now I want to know what is causing the problem and how I can fix it. So needless to say I turned off my anti-virus, disabled it, and then removed all of the usb devices and I had a SD memory card in the card reader that has not functioned since upgrading to Vista (motion has not released a new bio’s and they have known about the problem for at least a year)

then i ran through the Vista SP1 install again. It did blue screen in between stage 2 and stage 3 but this time in completed and said finished with out error. Most things seem to work until I plug in thee SD card in the bad slot. That causes an immediate blue screen.

So My theory is DO NOT LEAVE THE MEMORY CARD IN PLACE

Sunday, January 27, 2008, 9:30:32 PM | nospam@example.com (Mitch Roberson)

WOW what a week. I recently had to do an exchange 2007 single server migration from 2003 to 2007 it was great but there are some things that one must think about when doing this kind of deployment. one of the most important pieces is certificates. if you are putting multiple roles on the same server ie. mailbox/hubtransport/Clientaccess then you really need to think about certificates in depth.
when you have a domain that is named differently then your external domain name then you may have some issues with TLS especially if you are using outlook 2007. if your internal server name is exch.domain.local and your external is webmail.domain.com then you may have an issue maintaining TLS internally for owa and for autodiscover.
in order for outlook anywhere to work over the internet with tls the certificate has to match the website name you use. i.e. webmail.domain.com so if you purchase a public certificate they only allow subject alternative names for the same domain you are purchasing in most cases. So now when outlook tries to connect with TLS on the inside of your network. it will fail or come up with an error.
you can turn off the use encryption for outlook 2007 and it will keep you from getting the popup. So you just need to plan your deployment well. There are many steps to a migration and I will try to list some of the got you’s this week.

However there are other things to think about as well because exchange 2007 now has autodiscover services you need to ensure that the certificate and DNS are setup to handle this.

here is an excellent link that will help a lot.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/940726

Microsoft has done a great job with OCS and making setting up the certificates much easier. Which I think is fantastic but over the next couple of posts I want to talk about certificates and some of the misunderstandings i have found in the field and through my own experiences.

Some things I want to talk about are:

What is the difference between:             

o Self signed Certificates

o Private Certificates

o Public Certificates

o User certificates

o Computer Certificates

· Where does the public key come from

· Does PKI require proper DNS setup

· What is Subject alternative Names

· How to make windows 2003 CA allow Subject alternative names

· What is a Wild Card Certificate

· What is the difference between TLS and MTLS

· What does the root certificate have to do with this

· Difference between Enterprise Root CA and Standalone CA

· What kind of problems will this cause with monitoring solutions

· What are the ramifications for a company that has auditing requirements (this makes deploying PKI much different then what most are used to)

Recently I had a situation come up where someone had upgraded their network to all gig connections, all the way to the desktop. However they started having poor performance, and File transfer from a PC was Staggeringly slow. This is not the first time I have seen it but felt I should document a little of what I know because I see it so often.

Upgrading to Gig Ethernet not only makes the network faster it makes any problems you have increase as well. This is similar to upgrading from 10 mb to 100 mb Which would often show that you had cabling problems. Well with upgrading to GIG it will show problems in areas not seen before or maybe they were seen but were left as nothing to worry about because all is working fine.

NIC and NIC drivers seem to be one of the biggest culprits of Network speed degradation when moving to full Gig. When they have a problem the switch’s will not always record these errors so many network engineers miss the signs. This is often at the server level because it is the most taxed node on the network. If a choke point is added  between the server and the clients then the symptoms often disappear. However this is not the real solution. the solution is to find the culprit or actual problem.

A Sniffer is your friend and I am a firm believer in sniffing traffic. As I began to think about what was happening I became very curious. So I came home and began sniffing my network I was amazed to find out how many errors i was having on my network. Especially since I generally keep my Network card drivers semi updated. (they are updated once a year). As I dug into things more I found that I had 7 out of 10 NICS causing problems. so I started with Drivers and began updating them. I even found one network card that was bad. it was transmitting and working but had a lot of errors and TCP RETRANSMITS, AND Window RESIZEING going on. I upgraded it’s Drivers which did not help then changed NIC cards and all is well.

My network performance has increased as well. Now understand I did not have a problem at least one that I noticed so Now I am wondering if this is more common then I thought. I have seen it at multiple clients in the past 2 years but still I would be interested in knowing if more people had the same problem.

Thanks