Time off
Imagine doing whatever you love most, 24 hours a day - how long would you be able to stay awake? My body and mind defenitely needed a good rest. Summer 2007 was the WORST summer I can remember. The first day my Wife (who has an ordinary job as a mech. constructor) got off for vacation was nice, but the following five weeks - the rain was pouring down. So I worked.... - This winter wasn't any better. The WARMEST winter ever in Sweden overall. Meaning, instead of snow we got .. - you guessed it - RAIN.
The day we left was finally a day of snow. Winter has normally passed by march 17th, but not this year. So on slippery summer tires, the car drove slowly at 0300h towards Copenhagen Airport. We we're going to Tenerife!
Of course the flight was delayed! What do you do with three small children (2,5,9 & ½all), and a wife who is terrified of flying, in an airport, when they are over-tired from having gotten up at 2.30 am - when your flight is delayed until lunch?
Yep: You let them sleep on the floor !!! - at the gate!
Well, once we got there it took a good week for us all to unwind, and another to recharge. One can say a lot about going on a charter trip, with Coco the clown entertaining the kids at 2000h - it is relaxing - especially since the TV is dubbed in a completely incomprehensible language (Spanish). What you do is fall asleep with the kids, in the middle of a bed time story, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far faaaaar aaaahhhh.....
At the firm we're not too many people, and my responsibility lies with the servers. Compared to the early 90s properly configured servers aren't likely to crash from hardware issues. It certainly pays off to get fault tolerant memory, redundant disks and redundant networking. Above all, is to stray off from wanting to put too much into one single server. Therefore on our E-Mail servers we tend to put nothing else, than just Windows, Windows Firewall, and an Antiviral program (currently NOD32). We also limit the rights of the auto-login account, so that it can't do any harm to the rest. Besides this we have a separate inbound email server that does all the anti-spam and anti-viral treatment. By far the Mercury/32 we run today is the steadiest software I know.
However getting a Windows Mobile phone to work IMAP over GPRS wasn't all that easy, I can see that as a pro on the road a lot. It will be convenient to work the Mercury/32 server with a simple web interface. Currently our add-on system lets me configure nearly all aspects, but I can't do the more server based tasks - like adding or altering a filter for both local delivery and forward to a customer in China. Nor can I work IMAP if something goes wrong. So in a Mobile world a lot remains to be done.
The creative side finally started to work again and I don't know if you guys think it is a good idea to have a specialized IMAP forum - sinze I believe this will be the key most important issue as the world goes more and more mobile. I had a number of problems, mostly due to that Microsoft Mobile Outlook 6 doesn't behave well. When f.ex. "standard" folders aren't there, the folders are not created - and to know this - when you're thousands of miles away - and only get a "Synchronization error" - there isn't much to do about it.
Finally if you have ideas on how we should develop the community, please let me know what you think. Also, if you have the chance to get some free time - take time off - it is truly vitalizing!
Cheers / Peter S.
ps - Thanks dad for celebrating your birthday by a pool side, sorry I beat you in Golf though... - ds