Don't Back Down

Okay, really I've just installed one dishwasher. But I did it. I took out the old one and installed the new one. Without electrocuting myself during either process. All in all, it wasn't too hard. Two screws holding it in, one pipe for incoming water, one pipe for outgoing water and a simple electrical connection. As long as you don't mix up those last three, you shouldn't have any difficulties.

I did end up replacing the water lines. The drain line came with the dishwasher, so I used it. The old copper tubing that supplied hot water to the dishwasher was, well, old copper tubing. So I ended up buying one of those no-burst types, with the braided metal look on the outside. Hooked everything up, turned the electric back on, and it worked! Woo-hoo! Anyone needs a dishwasher replaced, give me a call.

A story mentions that 4 minutes is all it takes for a computer when first connected to the Internet. Four minutes! That's not even enough time to download the latest patches that you need to protect you from those hackers.

I just read another story where this guy visited a single web site and it installed 16 different programs on his PC. All through security vulnerabilities present in an unpatched version of Internet Explorer. And this story talks about a vulnerability in Java that leaves even my beloved Firefox at risk. What am I to do?

For the first problem, I just pray a lot. For the second, I've stopped using IE except in rare situations, when I can be relatively certain that I won't have a problem. And for the third, I uninstalled the Java virtual machine from my PC. Probably not the best decision, but I'm curious to see how it goes. I survive perfectly fine without flash (for the most part). There are a few sites who use it in their navigation and don't offer alternatives, but most will allow you to get around even if you don't use flash. I'm hoping that I'll be okay without Java, but we'll have to wait and see.

I've been setting up three new domains on an Exchange 2003 server for a few days. It really isn't that difficult, but it's taken me a bit to get used to working with 2003. It's a lot different (a lot more integrated) than previously. Of course, 2000 versions may have been as well, but I've never - knowingly - worked on an Exchange 2000 system, so that could be part of it. Quite a jump from Exchange 5.5.

Anyway, it's never been particularly difficult to set up another domain on an Exchange server, and then to assign additional - or even different - domains to different email addresses, and on to users. But I had all that set up and it still wasn't working. Everything worked well internally, but when I tried to send email to one of these new domains from an external account (not on that server), it returned a dreaded 550: Unable to Relay error. I was stumped.

Read "Multiple Domains with Exchange 2003" »

Observant visitors to the site might notice a new link in the page banner today. It leads to the new contact page. This page is based very loosely - in the way that movies are based loosely on books - after Peter's contact page, and should provide you all sorts of ways to contact me. Enjoy.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the Inn and decided that we needed a car. The island isn't huge, and the city (Kralendijk) isn't that big, but it would help. So we had the innkeeper call a service for us. The promised rate was something around $25 USD, but as we traveled back to the airport, our driver informed us that those cars were not available, despite our innkeeper's reservations a few minutes earlier. While we appreciated the ride back to the airport for free, we decided we'd check out the competition and see what they offered, since this company didn't seem to want our business very badly.

Read "Bonaire Day Two" »