It gets to me a bit you know, the inability to sing about achievments.
The company I work for, my day job, well lets say they like to do things quietly, generally they don’t speak out about things they do in IT, especially where Macs are concerned. I am not sure why, we could make great PR out of the stuff we do but they don’t like to talk about it, like its some kind of charity gig.

There is a press release going around at the moment regarding the Telford College in Edinburgh, who, according to MacWorlds “Edinbugh college makes massive Mac move” article have made a fabulous achievement. It turns out they moved building and in the process left the old Mac network of 60 machines behind and setup 160 new Macs in the new building so that they were waiting ready for when the students and faculty walked over. Apparently this is a “Massive Mac move”. Let me put this in perspective:

My team and I are just completing a project that replaced over 500 Macs (all of them in fact) located in 2 daily and 2 Sunday newspapers, weekly magazines, imaging departments, picture desks, online areas, marketing, advertising, training, basically across the entire business. We replaced ALL the software (over 150 new applications integrated), ALL the hardware (Macs, scanners etc.), most of the back end infrastructure, implemented remote software installation, remote support systems, font management, directory service integration with AD and OD, setup a managed preferences structure, rejigged printing, upgraded all the Ethershare file servers (and completely changed many of them), implemented SMB servers, implemented ISDN Stingray servers to replace 30+ ISDN macs, documented an entire support process, created a web based install process for building machines, set up a new Hotswap process for repairs, set up a Jabber video conferencing server and much much more.

We did this while still publishing the newspapers and magazines every day and providing third line support for legacy hardware and applications, providing new kit specifications and consultancy services to the business.

So when I Google’d my companies name +”Mac OS X”, I was more than a little disappointed when there were no hits.

The Mac team should be thoroughly proud of what we have achieved, in my opinion we deserve recognition for it.

I won’t say it has been an easy ride the initial apathy from management then the threat of impending doom for the Macs have been trying and there are still a few stalwarts that won’t accept the new systems, there always will be in a project this size. We wasted over a year waiting for someone else’s directory service to eventually not support our systems (we were kept hanging on a long string) and there were technical difficulties caused by an enforced 10BaseT network(yes, no kidding, we still have it), but we are more or less there.

You may be wondering how many of us are on this uber Mac team? Well there’s Ian and myself integrating the systems and Andy doing deployment (Andy hadn’t touched a Mac until 18 months ago and had just came out of the police force, he has certainly touched a few now), the Solaris based Ethershare servers were looked after by the rest of our Infrastructure team along with the system architect and finally our long suffering project manager Tony, poked us with sticks to move things along every now and then.

Go Mac team.

In the UK there is a rule about packaging and advertising where the description has to match what is in the container, an example of this might be that if a lemonade bottle has a picture of a lemon on it, the lemonade has to contain products derived from lemons and not concocted in a laboratory somewhere.
There is a company in Wales who’s spicy sausages are called “Dragon Pork Sausages” – referring to the emblem of a dragon on the Welsh flag. Trading standards have taken the company to task because as demanded by the rule I mentioned earlier, the sausages have to contain dragon meat or they have to change their name.
Perhaps they should include a tiny bit of Kimodo Dragon into the mix to comply with the law.

The Times newspaper has an article here

Now here’s a funny thing. The day work started on the then new US department of defence building – the Pentagon was September 11 1941 – 60 years to the day before it was bombed by its owners in conjunction with the CIA to destabilise the world and lead to the coming of the new world order. destroyed by extremist Muslim terrorists hell bent on persecuting those wonderful American cousins of ours and ruining their idillic Christian country.

Strange but true.

Designer of our favourite fruit flavoured electronics goods, Jonathan Ive, has been honoured by the Queen with a CBE for service to design. Good on ‘im. Not bad for a toilet designer from Chingford.

It is only when I am off work ill that I realise just how crap TV can be, it really is atrocious. The only saving grace is the discovery channel and my Mac.

I have the flu at the moment with all the associated nastiness of coughing, aches and pains, runny nose etc.
Wifey is being unusually sympathetic, she is a nurse (a sister in fact) and has seen most terminal and debilitating illnesses at first hand so anything I get (thankfully) pales into insignificance really. Although she loves me, from her perspective my piss-ant snivels aren’t much to write home about.
This time around she is being quite nice, I think it is because I caught it from her. Guilty conscience perhaps?

My longing for a replacement phone continues, the latest news from the iPhone rumour mill says that although 12 million of the devices are on order, we won’t see one until the end of Q1 07 at the earliest. This may be the clincher for me, I really wanted to be rid of my XDAIIi before the holidays.

I have a choice of either wait, the E61, something WM2005 or BlackBerry.

More homework is nessasary I think.

Welcome one and all (well one really – Ian) to the new home of PushingJelly.
With Google insisting on a google ID on Blogger and the fact that I have a perfectly good web presence in IdeasPlace it seemed an ideal fit.

WordPress looks great and has all the bits and pieces I need so far. I am looking forward to learning more about it as time goes on.

Hopefully we’ll get some more visitors too.

Thanks for sticking with it.

Well I think my fleeting bi-curious affair with the Sun’s mysun web site is over. I really don’t think what I was saying was appreciated very much and because o the implications of who runs it I have had to be a bit careful what I post.

Things are a bit exciting at the moment because I have setup my own business, a limited company no less.

I am tired of turning down private work because I don’t have a mechanism for processing all the cheques and tax etc., so all my private money can now go to the business.
Also I am developing a business idea, which I’m not going to go into now but its taking much of my non day job waking hours (and a lot of my sleeping too).

At work, the OS X project is drawing to a long overdue close. There are a few holdouts but we are getting there. I have somehow picked up another interesting project to provide a video and audio infrastructure for all titles, not a small thing. I guess I’ll be writing some more about this soon as it is going to take a lot of thought to plan it correctly.

My longing for a new phone is ongoing, apart from the Apple vapourware device, the Nokia E61 is still on the list but the new entry of Blackberry 8800 looks to be shaping up to be a real contender, if only it had a camera.

More soon.