Tracking my activity for health and creepiness

On the one hand, it annoys me the GPS couldn't figure out I walked in a straight line along 4th, as opposed to weaving through the buildings using my mutant powers.

On the other hand, it kind of freaks me out that this device was able to pinpoint and record my exact location to within a few hundred feet.

And I voluntarily carry this thing around in my pocket.

Microsoft Volume Licensing - reflections on managing the VAMT

Like everyone who has ever tried to read a software license agreement, let alone figure out how to pay for it, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, and especially their Volume Activation Management Tool.

Volume licensing can be a real time saver, especially in organizations where machines are rebuilt frequently.  However, it's also finicky and a royal pain in the ass.

Well, turns out J. Decker agreed, and she has written a VAMT Technical Reference.  I'm not sure how "VAMT" might be pronounced, but every rendering in my head sounds exactly like a swear word.

(Image poached from)

Also potentially useful is the Microsoft Licensing Review (old, but still useful to grasping some of the basic nonsense concepts).

An article discussing Microsoft licensing in the Amazon cloud hosting service.  This is specifically for AWS, but the general concepts of "software in the cloud," are still potentially useful.

Finding a Help Desk Ticketing System

So, I'm tasked with pre-screening helpdesk ticketing systems, because my new employer is ready to make the jump to Something Better.  Here's what I've discovered.

SysAid - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

ConnectWise - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

Autotask - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

JIRA - I could not figure out how the Hell to get to a person. I could demo the product, and a-la-carte order anything I wanted, or view demo video, after demo video to my heart's content, all through the website, but pre-sales human?  Yeah, this one dropped right off my list.

Manage Engine - Look, I know India has a lot of really brilliant people, and they will eventually compete with China as the two Superpowers (displacing the current UN Security Council entirely),  but outsourcing your pre-sales demo to India?  Come on.  I need a sales person who can tell me how the product will work for ME, and my "special needs," not walk me through one of the online videos, and choke if I try to go off-script.  The online demo is absolutely brilliant - I've shared it to show what a real "activity management" product should be.  But, that's about the limit of what I want from Manage Engine right now.

Request Tracker - just don't do it.

Spammers not even trying

Except for the part where this spam message appears to have actually originated from a Microsoft server (OOPS), these spammers aren't really even trying.

Dreams and Dragons: The Cursed-Disco-Ball-McGuffin Adventure!

I love computers; they are literally completely brain dead. 

For example, I just posted a comment to Dreams and Dragons: The Cursed-Disco-Ball-McGuffin Adventure! and the entire text of my remark was "A fun read :)"

The brain dead computer prompted me: "Prove you're not a robot. Enter the text from the image."

No worries, of course, and I'm not criticizing the Google programmers or program managers for such a brain dead algorithm - let's face it - spambots are a huge problem. I'm merely poking fun at how dumb computers are.

Now, I expect that before my child graduates high school, optical character recognition algorithms will have advanced to the point they can defeat these human-readable, but not machine-readable, images.

But, that's a different problem.

Virtual visit to India - way too much quality time with tech support

Here is a virtual visit. I spent a LOT of time today on the phone with Microsoft tech support engineers in Pune, India. Very nice people, one woman and one man. The woman was on the graveyard shift until around 6 AM local time, and then the fellow took over.

So, while we were on the phone (waiting for a messed up Windows 2008 server to reboot slooooooowly again and again) we talked a lot. Pune is surrounded by medium-size mountains, they have lots of parks and greenery, they speak very good English (which I am grateful for, since I speak none of the 108 languages of India), and they have a Big Barn Burger Cafe. The gent has never been there, but he recognized the place. I suspect the young woman before him had never heard of it until I read it to her off the Google Maps.

Pune is three hours from Mumbai. If you look at the Google map, you will see that, on the scale of india, Mumbai is a stone's throw away. That distance is about the Seattle-Portland run. In other words, India is friggin' HUGE.

So, there you go. The world is smaller than you think :)