Silly me – I always thought it was some sort of gravitational phenomenon 🙂

Seriously though – whilst I do this “blogging thing” for a bit of a laugh – you can tell how seriously I take it by the frequency of my posts!! – it’s be nice to cover some of my hosting costs (currently a few $ per month with CrystalTech) so I’ve opened an Adsense account with Google – I’ll see how it goes – any comments good or ad gratefully received!!  Enough feedback and I may even turn them off – I’m jus intrigued to see what sort of adds they provide and if I get any hits!

Anyway… more posts to come – there things at CES that I REALLY like the sound of…….  

 

As I hinted at here, I’ve been working on a mail related project…. Well it’s finally over and I’ve got some time to blog again… and it feels nice!

It’s been a busy few months, and December has been double-long (60+ extra hours in the first fortnight!!) but it’s been worth it. The new mail platform for Manx.net is done. I have to pass much thanks on to the team at Mirapoint here in the UK – they have been consummate professionals throughout the project and the positive feedback we’re getting now is proof that it’s been worth the effort.

I was given the project early in the year (within a month of starting) and it was no small project either – webmail and POP3 / IMAP access for ~27000 people all of whom live within 1 hours drive of me! The existing platform was becoming increasingly flaky and customer complaints were growing by the day.

There was no margin for error – the migration had to work and it had to work first time. As I mentioned living as I do, on the Isle of Man – no-one is more than an hour away by car – so the potential for “feedback” coming and biting me was very real and slightly terrifying.

As it turned out, it all went very well, we had a few issues and I’m sure there’s a couple of our customers who might disagree with me, but all in all it was a very smooth changeover. I’d make a couple of suggestions to anyone who is considering a major platform change like this in future…..

• Ensure you make sure your password policies are the same – so if your old platform is not case sensitive – make sure your new one isn’t! This caused a bit of pain…..
• Make sure the rest of your infrastructure is ready to handle the increased load. A change like this makes a lot of people “test” the new system out – so make sure your call centre staff have been trained on the basics and that support services such as DNS are fully specced to handle the load.

Over-all it was hard work but extremely rewarding – and not a fortnight I’d like to go through again any time soon 🙂

I’d just like to name a few people who deserve extra thanks for making it all go so well…. Tony, Kev, Steve, Dickie, Sarah – you all deserve medals – and the rest of you (you know who you are) – I couldn’t have done it without you!

Finally – there’s one person who deserves thanks more than anyone – my wonderful wife Becs – without your patience and understanding I think I’d have gone mad!

 

Right – back to normal service now – I’m promising myself that I’m going to blog more in 2007 – it won’t be hard to do more than 2006 – but I’m going to work on it…… 😉

Well, I’ve finally done it – I’ve upgraded to the latest build – and I’m doubling my chances of this all going a bit pearshaped by using Windows Live Writer to publish this post – the first time I’ve tried it…. so wish me luck!!

So far, I have to say that the experience has been good – the interface is nice and easy to use, it’s detected my blog settings (I hope) and it seems to allow me to create drafts easily – so I might actually post bits of interest more often – I’ll have to see how things go over the next couple of days…. if the integration with the Live toolbar works like I think it should, I should be able to flag stuff for posting later – save the drafts and write something meaningful about the link when I ahve time!

Anyway I going to try out a couple of the other features – such as images etc and see how it performs….

edit – images don’t work to wordpress – I think I need to do some more digging on that one…. bugger!

I’ve got some music reviews to do in the coming days – I’ve found a couple of great bands / artists that I want to get the word out about – so I’ll be testing the changes more in the coming days – in the meantime check out Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly! and YoYo Hearts – the YoYo’s are supporting GCWGF on the Island next month – can’t wait to see them both live…. There’s other stuff I want to review – but I need to find the links that lead me to them – so I can give “props” to the people who have pointed me in the right direction!