Magic Weaver’s Lair

This morning while I was doing my usual news feed runs I came across the new that Gary Gygax, also known as the father of RPG and co-creator of the “Dungeons & Dragons” game, has passed on.

You see Gygax holds a special place in all the hearts of nerds, geeks and gamers all around the world who have rolled something more esoteric than 6 sided die. For us all he introduced us to the world of fantasy and imagination, never mind we never got to see the outside world much less the sun much, but through his creation we had the opportunity to interact with like minded people and explore our interest.

As I sit down writing this, it is the eve of Christmas and things of the season start to enter my thoughts. When I became a Christian over 13 years ago, I started to learn more and more of the true meaning of Christmas especially to us Christians. As I learned more and more I discovered that modern day Christmas has been over commercialised and worst still that the Christmas we constantly associate with “white snow” and being at the end of the year on December 25 isn’t true at all.

Right about now you’re probably going “Whoa! This is getting really cynical isn’t he?”.

Well since my last blog entry I haven’t made any new entries because working life has really sucked a ton of my time and creative processes out of me. You’re probably wondering how could work do that to a person, well as some of you might know (if you actually read my about page you’ll know) I work for a British university as a IT administrator for one of its faculty. The problem was that right after I came back from Microsoft Tech-Ed my one and only staff decided to tender his resignation leaving me to become, once again, an army of one with a bigger battle field to manage.

Second last day of Tech-Ed SEA 2007, today’s Windows infrastructure track focuses on things such as Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and what it will entail (there’s a more or less confirmed release date for this which I will get to later), data security particularly for mobile computing, use of IPSec within a corporation network besides for VPN, Windows Vista Compatibility and Application Toolkit and finally a talk on how Microsoft can help secure perimeter connections.

It’s day 2 at the Microsoft Tech-Ed SEA 2007 and it’s basically more “brain washing” session by the various speakers from Microsoft, but in all fairness not all the speakers are from Microsoft and some of them are experts from various tech companies which happen to be able to work out good solutions using Microsoft products. This gives me a good opportunity to look at the way other people implement solutions to similar problems I have.