IT staff should always have one more monitor than other users. It helps show we're special. So once everyone else in the company has two, it's time to get yourself a third.

@scottalanmiller said:

Traditional hard drives are not supposed to spin down or take any temperature changes let alone experience external movement.

Not sure what you mean here. What's the difference between an external hard drive and an internal hard drive on a laptop. Both spin up and down, move around and experience temperature changes. I find it bizarre to have a market for external hard drives if they're not supposed to be portable. I expect hard drives to wear out quicker under these conditions, but I'm not using them much.

I worked for a Japanese company for a while, and many of the staff there would bring in sleeping bags and lie down on the floor in them at lunchtimes. That's some serious napping. I don't know if this a typical Japanese custom, or the company was just weird.

@SarawithanH said:

Can you explain to me a little bit more about how the log works? Is it a generalized one for all mailboxes or do you have to go search by mailbox user?

I can indeed.

You can do a wildcard search to search all mail, both incoming and outgoing. Here I'm searching for all e-mail with a sender domain of microsoft.com

This displays e-mail we've received, and indicates if it was filtered for spam or anything:

Generally, users will come to see me because a customer or vendor claims they sent an e-mail to us and we haven't received it. There are normally 5 possible reasons for this:

1. The customer is lying.
2. The customer has an error with their e-mail system.
3. The e-mail was marked as spam.
4. The user did receive it, but has lost it or accidentally deleted it without reading it.
5. The customer misspelt the user's e-mail address.

Users might be sceptical about the reliability of our internal Exchange, but they're normally more confident that if GFI says we never received the e-mail, then we never received it, because I explain that GFI is a massive specialist company used by thousands of companies around the world. The credibility of their system is important to me.

For you O365 admins, is there anything you can do when a user has this type of query?

Do any of you use journalling in O365 and if so, how's that working out for you?

The other thing I use it for is proving that outgoing e-mail reached it's destination. So a user will come to see to say that a customer or vendor has complained that they never received an e-mail we sent. I search the logs, find the e-mail and view the log record which will give me a 250 Message Queued log, which proves the e-mail reached it's destination server. What happened to it after that is beyond my control. I presume this type of query in O365 is fairly simple?

Oh man, you Americans. Go metric! We did, and we've never looked back!! Cups and pints suck.

I think one of the characteristics of you two is that you both seem to love IT. So IT isn't just a job, it's almost like a hobby. But for a lot people, and I probably include myself here, it is just a job. That makes it harder to find the motivation to learn the subject outside of work.

When I was in my twenties, my interests were music and football (and beer!). Everything in my life revolved around them, and a job in computing was just a way to fund my interests in them. I had no interest in studying.

I still don't have any interest in studying. I'll confess, I don't know much about DNS or VPNs. I've never read an IT book, I've never studied it at college and I have no certifications or qualifications in it. Despite my ignorance, I've still forged out a decent career as an IT manager, either because I have other valuable skills or because I'm good at blagging.

A lack of interest in the subject maybe doesn't matter as much in a large company, as they often provide decent training. But in the SMB world, a lot of companies offer no training at all.

If my work didn't provide me with IT equipment at home, I possibly wouldn't even bother owning a computer or a smart phone, it just doesn't interest me that much. I quite enjoy my job, but if I could earn the same money by being a lion tamer, I'd be just as happy to do that.

@scottalanmiller said:

Aren't you in England? Where Imperial units come from? And don't you still use pints there? I use pints when I am there.

For some reason, we still measure milk and draft beer in pints. Bottled beer is now metric. We also still use miles instead of kilometres. I don't know why we only partially went metric, probably to appease the traditionalists.

I think one of the biggest difference with IT and other white collar careers is the pace of change. If you compare it with accounting, the field of accountancy hasn't fundamentally changed that much in a century, it's still basically double-entry bookkeeping. Whereas IT changes constantly.

You could spend years learning Netware or Cobol or something and suddenly find your skills are now a highly niche market, if that. I know that accountants have to stay up to date with changes in the law and such like, but the bulk of their learning is done when they qualified, probably in their early twenties, and those skills remain useful for their entire 40+ year career. If you'd got an IT qualification in 1974, how useful do you think it would still be?

I know IT guys who suddenly find they're working in a company with physical servers running Server 2003, Office 2000, Windows XP, Blackberries and Exchange 2003 and they're struggling to find a new job because they're out-of-date, even though the technology they're using is only ten years old. The tech world has moved on. I'm embarrassed by my lack of Powershell skills, and yet that's only a few years old.

Sometimes I envy accountants. Tapping away on the same Excel spreadsheets year after year. The biggest obstacle most of them have had is re-writing their Louts 123 functions to work with Excel. It sometimes looks such a relaxing career.

On the other hand, I suspect I'd be bored out of my brains.

Adorkable

Yes, it is now a word:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/10/adorkable-collins-english-dictionary-twitter-print

If it makes you feel any better, I occupy the middle ground. I like you, but my feelings aren't that strong!

How did you cope with support before the internet? I remember phoning Microsoft a few times, but generally I can't really remember what I did. I'm sure that problems that take ten minutes to solve now could take a whole day back then.

@scottalanmiller said:

Awesome, though completely ridiculous that simple text files like html and php would mess up your sync program!!

Agreed. I'll repeat my original assertion on the original thread:

@Carnival-Boy said:

..it seems a bit crap and unreliable.

@garak0410 said:

I for one actually liked the game once I figured it out. I play it on an emulator once and a while.

Really? I've never seen it before, but it looks terrible:
Youtube Video

Also, amazing to think that the game orginally retailed at $50. That's over $120 in today's prices. My lad just can't believe how rubbish games were when I was a kid. Or that I'd have to save up my pocket money for weeks and weeks and weeks to buy them.

@scottalanmiller said:

If someone was to casually get someone else's password through normal transactions and later, maybe a year or two, became disgruntled, it is nice to know that the chances that the passwords that were incorrectly shared with them no longer work.

Yeah, that was AJ's point. But if that is an issue, the risk of it happening reduces the shorter your expiration time. So 90 days becomes better than 365 days, for example.

I appreciate it's finding a balance between all the different kinds of risks and trying to come up with a magic number.

The two main problems with internet ordering are:

• an inability to touch and feel the product before buying
• delivery - both the cost and the logistics

Some new feature on some new phone isn't going to solve those two problems and I don't see them ever being solved. I think Eli the Computer Guy lives on a different planet.

I tried this today and failed. I think you probably need a Chrome Device Management licence, which I don't have and is quite expensive.

The problem with advertising led content, like Eli's site, is that you can't say "New Amazon phone may have slightly interesting marginal impact on certain markets, possibly", as that won't attract the hits. So you have to say "New Amazon phone is a game changer that will destroy bricks and mortar retailing and cause world peace". Which is just silly. But I still end up watching!

I know. I've got the Pro models.

You should watch his video on how to build a lab for testing. Basically, you should avoid virtualisation because you'd need $10k for a SAN and instead should buy half a dozen laptops from flea markets and use those. Erm...interesting idea.

Don't know.

I was just wondering why anyone would want a 15 character min?

Password length is really only designed to prevent brute force attacks, right? How common are brute force attacks? And how much does a minimum length really protect you? After all, I imagine a long password like Password123 would be cracked with a dictionary attack way before something like gj4~3G is cracked by brute force.