Do NOT fly Delta if you care about your bags

I'm sure there are the die hard Delta airlines acruing airpoints out there how won't like this. However I make no appologies for the most pathetic service I have ever seen in the world. Yes the world.

Valentine and I flew into Orlando yesterday, her bag didn't arrive, mine did.
OK, mistakes happen, we can all understand that. So after spending 2 extra hours at the airport filing a missing bag claim we left.
Today 11am: We're officially told, her bag has left Los Angeles it will arrive at 7pm
Today 7:50pm: We're officially told, sorry but the bag only just left Honolulu
Tonight 11:30pm The Call Center in India!!!! (Yes India, for all those of you unemployed in the USA) we're officially told, we cannot tell you where it is because, guess why? Because they're in India!!!!

We're still waiting for the bag...

Perhaps it has to goto India first?

Not impressed Delta

Peter

Exchange Connections - Orlando - April 1st 2007 - starts tomorrow

What a great show this is going to be.

I've just arrived in Orlando ready to present the Ex2007 workshops tomorrow. There's a whole raft of great speakers here again this year including, Jim McBee, Kieren McCorry, Brian Komar, Mark Manasi and all the regular gang....

Here's the link http://www.devconnections.com/shows/images/brochurepdfs/Sp07_Exch_Schedv1.pdf

Hope to see you here, drop me an email if you're here...

Cheers
Peter
http://www.blade.net.nz

Issues accessing OWA on EX2000/2003 with Vista?

I had this issue, it occurs because Vista no longer includes support for the ActiveX control that is used for HTML editing in Outlook Web Access.
If you see large red X's when replying to mail or creating a new mail item, you should read the following KB


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/911829

Cheers
Peter
www.blade.net.nz

If you can't trust Ribena, who can you trust?

Ribena.... Glaxo admitted that its cartoned Ready To Drink Ribena, which it claimed had 7mg of Vitamin C per 100ml, in fact had no detectable Vitamin C content.

What???
Ever since I can remember, I've bought Ribena as the 'healthy' drink. Whether I'm thirsty in a Services in the UK, or a petrol station in NZ, I have always bought Ribena, thinking it was the healthy choice. I avoided the Coca Cola, after all it's full of sugar.. Today in court it was proven that Ribena contains 40% more sugar than Coke and zero Vitamin C!

So who do we trust now???

Ribena stitched us up! Where do you go from there?

Peter

Carbon Neutral

Real buzz words at the moment. Carbon Neutral. Sites are popping up everywhere e.g. http://www.carbonneutral.com/ Yet how many of us come even close to achieving it?
At blade we've made a determined effort to be enviromentaly friendly, we recycle wherever possible etc... However recently it was brought to my attention just how carbon neutral we are at blade.
We've just released a product "Blade Transfer Services" http://www.blade.net.nz/BladeTransferServices.aspx that allows reliable uploads of large volumes of data. Currently this is being achieved by many companies by sending a DVD of data. I'm sure there are some statistics in here about how much 'carbon' we are saving, and if anyone has a formula I'd be happy to work it out. But let's look at it now. The DVD is made of plastic, it probably won't be re-used. There has to be some consumption of gasoline to get it to the location. Notwithstanding all of this there's a delay in productivity, it's far quicker to transfer over the wire. Is this an example of a win/win situation? One where by not only do we get performance benefits but we're also helping the environment!
There must be lots of these examples out there...
Comments welcome :)

Peter

Sunday's are special in New Zealand

Sunday,
It's always a lovely day here in New Zealand.

You see, Saturdays here are Friday in the USA and so I have to work on Saturdays with all my american collegues. Mondays here are Mondays here so I have to work with my Kiwi collegues. But Sunday is great, on a New Zealand Sunday, no-one in the world is working their regular week.
This is not true anywhere else in the world! Think about it you need to be a clear 24 hrs ahead of even the latest starting Saturday to claim this, and we're the only ones :)
Peter O'Dowd

My first blog

So finally I've done it, after a lot of requests, here it is, my own blog. Hopefully this will be an informative useful place for you guys to visit, at the least it will be a place for me to just get things out there!

There are quite a few things coming up over the next few months.

Firstly there is Exchange Connections starting next weekend. I'm running the 3 days of Exchange Server Troubleshooting labs AGAIN! It seems the world never tires of them. However this time I'm adding quite a bit of Exchange Server 2007 into the mix. For more info jump to here... http://www.devconnections.com/shows/SP2007EXCH/default.asp?s=94

This is a big week for us here at blade. We've finally released our very cool software package "Blade Transfer Services". You may download at 30 day trial here. http://www.blade.net.nz
This product was initially written for us, out of necessity. There’s a saying “Necessity is the mother of invention”. At Blade we have to upload files of up to 6GB, perhaps the result of a months worth of work, quickly to our customers. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, on the market that provided us with the reliability that we required in these days of closed firewalls. It was taking us days to get files to customers. Something had to be done, and it was clear we had to do it ourselves. The result far surpassed our expectations, finally we had something that could do exactly what we wanted when all else was failing around it. It’s given us the competitive edge and finally our customers trust us to deliver something that should in theory be straight forward, but in reality isn’t.

It's strange how there aren't any other products on the market that perform this function likes ours does. I think we're opening up a new paradigm of 'uploading'. It seems the world is used to downloading. So even if you're provding a service you get your customer to 'download' the deliverables. It's insane and hopefully we're going to start to change that a little.

Well that's my first blog. Here's to many more :)
Comments welcome

c'ya
Pete