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A mixed assortment
Apr. 26th, 2007 08:53 pmFirstly, on the work front, the angsting is over!!! I have officially signed my acceptance of my permanent job offer. After telling them that I wouldn't accept less than the $70K level, they offered me the one below ($1500 less) as a final offer... except that I will be getting a salary review in July, and it is to be expected that I'll be moved to the increment I was asking for. I need to get the rest of the paperwork done (drug test and medical check, mainly), so my current contract is to be extended another month. This is good, because I've had a fairly poor couple of months, and it'll be nice to have another month of good $$$. But yay, it's all happening!
Again on the work front, it seems that we are going to become a Blackberry shop with external access to our Exchange email. Now, as I grizzled about at length here, the amount of consultation that has gone on with the mail team has solely consisted of the 10 minutes with an external "consultant". From Telstra. Who, guess what, are resellers of Blackberry solutions and software here in Oz. No-one internally has seen fit to discuss it with us, even when I specifically requested (via my manager) to be brought in on their discussions. There has been no consideration of implementing the Exchange 2003 push email solution, which would effectively be free. No. I need to learn about a third-party application, install and configure a new server, install and configure the Blackberry software, integrate it with our Exchange setup, move around mailboxes that will belong to the users (since I need to give additional and special permissions to the Blackberry account, I'm going to stick the mailboxes into their own special location for it to access them)... all by next Friday, because that is when the CEO told us he wants a pilot up and running. I heard about this (not even a hint of any unofficial warning) today.
You know, with Windows mobile services, we could tick a ticky box, publish it on an ISA proxy and have it up and running in a couple of hours. No special permissions, no need to install anything new, no new hardware, no need to move mailboxes around... ... I'm irked in that our "pilot" hasn't even tried the freely-available solution that happens to meet their requirements first. If it didn't meet the requirements, I'd have no problem whatsoever installing something that will work for them - but it isn't even being considered. You know, this totally fucks up any "project management" procedure that I've heard of. You're supposed to identify the need, then list and weigh up all the alternatives to satisfy those needs. Generally speaking, if you have a number of options that fulfil the functionality you want, you'd try the cheapest alternative or the one that is already available in house to see if it works before launching into spending $US3000 (+server hardware, +Windows 2003 licence, +$99 per client access licence). [I'd like to say I do like the fact RIM put their pricing on their website. All software vendors should do it.]
Don't worry, this is all "getting it off my chest" mode. Now that the decision has been made, despite the lack of consultation, despite the shonky process, it's good that we will finally be getting in a mobile email solution, as we have been recommending for the last two years. I just hate the fact that it is so blatant that they didn't listen to us two years ago and they apparently don't want to listen to their systems staff now (except to bypass them by getting the desktop team to "research" this project). Now I need to get into "suck it up" mode, implement the thing perfectly, and be grateful for the fact that they are not outsourcing this process, that our team will hopefully have oversight of it (we're having a meeting to thrash that out tomorrow... of course the week my boss is away, yay consultation again - I'm going to be so co-operative), and that after the dust settles, we should hopefully have a solution that works, and I'll have another nice line to add to my CV. Also, the advantage of going with a solution that they've specified from the outset is that we're not having to push something that they'd be more wary of. If the whole thing falls in a big smelly heap, at least they won't be wahing on about the crappy software that we recommended. I don't think it'll fall in a heap though. It looks fairly straightforward to implement.
On a completely different note, I read two of Tania Huff's vampire books, Blood Pact and Blood Debt. How bloody disappointed I was, given all the raves I've read about them. Ok, there's the lead character whose emotional range appears to be stony alternating with hissy-fits. There's the butch (male, alas), strong and silent cop. There's the much more chatty bisexual prince-of-the-dead vampire, who wears dressing gowns and is, of course, English. Butch bloke and bi-guy do a fey vs macho understated fight over the chickie, constantly. She fights with both of them, constantly. In fact, the entire dialogue appears to be bickering. She's actually more butch than bi-guy, because, you know, bi-guys aren't that manly. I didn't give a shit about the plots (vampires biting people and fighting over territory.... sigh. At least MaryJanice Davidson makes it humorous in her books about Betsy the vampire queen) or the characters. There's lots of stony stoicism alternating with screaming (you know, another fight, or the mother's been killed, or something). I was wishing that they'd all kill each other, but alas, they don't. 2/5? It's better than Thomas Covenant or Heinlein. Marginally.
ETA: I remembered the other thing I was going to blurble about! It's great to know that Australia's security forces are vigilant about keeping national monuments and nuclear reactors safe from "suspicious characters"... but apparently not "American Tourists" (link to YouTube).
Again on the work front, it seems that we are going to become a Blackberry shop with external access to our Exchange email. Now, as I grizzled about at length here, the amount of consultation that has gone on with the mail team has solely consisted of the 10 minutes with an external "consultant". From Telstra. Who, guess what, are resellers of Blackberry solutions and software here in Oz. No-one internally has seen fit to discuss it with us, even when I specifically requested (via my manager) to be brought in on their discussions. There has been no consideration of implementing the Exchange 2003 push email solution, which would effectively be free. No. I need to learn about a third-party application, install and configure a new server, install and configure the Blackberry software, integrate it with our Exchange setup, move around mailboxes that will belong to the users (since I need to give additional and special permissions to the Blackberry account, I'm going to stick the mailboxes into their own special location for it to access them)... all by next Friday, because that is when the CEO told us he wants a pilot up and running. I heard about this (not even a hint of any unofficial warning) today.
You know, with Windows mobile services, we could tick a ticky box, publish it on an ISA proxy and have it up and running in a couple of hours. No special permissions, no need to install anything new, no new hardware, no need to move mailboxes around... ... I'm irked in that our "pilot" hasn't even tried the freely-available solution that happens to meet their requirements first. If it didn't meet the requirements, I'd have no problem whatsoever installing something that will work for them - but it isn't even being considered. You know, this totally fucks up any "project management" procedure that I've heard of. You're supposed to identify the need, then list and weigh up all the alternatives to satisfy those needs. Generally speaking, if you have a number of options that fulfil the functionality you want, you'd try the cheapest alternative or the one that is already available in house to see if it works before launching into spending $US3000 (+server hardware, +Windows 2003 licence, +$99 per client access licence). [I'd like to say I do like the fact RIM put their pricing on their website. All software vendors should do it.]
Don't worry, this is all "getting it off my chest" mode. Now that the decision has been made, despite the lack of consultation, despite the shonky process, it's good that we will finally be getting in a mobile email solution, as we have been recommending for the last two years. I just hate the fact that it is so blatant that they didn't listen to us two years ago and they apparently don't want to listen to their systems staff now (except to bypass them by getting the desktop team to "research" this project). Now I need to get into "suck it up" mode, implement the thing perfectly, and be grateful for the fact that they are not outsourcing this process, that our team will hopefully have oversight of it (we're having a meeting to thrash that out tomorrow... of course the week my boss is away, yay consultation again - I'm going to be so co-operative), and that after the dust settles, we should hopefully have a solution that works, and I'll have another nice line to add to my CV. Also, the advantage of going with a solution that they've specified from the outset is that we're not having to push something that they'd be more wary of. If the whole thing falls in a big smelly heap, at least they won't be wahing on about the crappy software that we recommended. I don't think it'll fall in a heap though. It looks fairly straightforward to implement.
On a completely different note, I read two of Tania Huff's vampire books, Blood Pact and Blood Debt. How bloody disappointed I was, given all the raves I've read about them. Ok, there's the lead character whose emotional range appears to be stony alternating with hissy-fits. There's the butch (male, alas), strong and silent cop. There's the much more chatty bisexual prince-of-the-dead vampire, who wears dressing gowns and is, of course, English. Butch bloke and bi-guy do a fey vs macho understated fight over the chickie, constantly. She fights with both of them, constantly. In fact, the entire dialogue appears to be bickering. She's actually more butch than bi-guy, because, you know, bi-guys aren't that manly. I didn't give a shit about the plots (vampires biting people and fighting over territory.... sigh. At least MaryJanice Davidson makes it humorous in her books about Betsy the vampire queen) or the characters. There's lots of stony stoicism alternating with screaming (you know, another fight, or the mother's been killed, or something). I was wishing that they'd all kill each other, but alas, they don't. 2/5? It's better than Thomas Covenant or Heinlein. Marginally.
ETA: I remembered the other thing I was going to blurble about! It's great to know that Australia's security forces are vigilant about keeping national monuments and nuclear reactors safe from "suspicious characters"... but apparently not "American Tourists" (link to YouTube).
