Sadly, The Office is nearing the end. I will miss it greatly.

On Thursday, May 16, 2013, The last episode of The Office will air.  It will be a 75 minute show and, by all accounts, will wrap up the series nicely.

I have a passion for this show that boarders on the obsessive.  I watch it continually.  Every night, in fact.  I have seen each episode in seasons 1-7 at least a dozen times.  I finish watching them (in order, of course) and promptly start back at episode 1, season 1.  And then I watch straight through until season 8, episode 24.  Rinse.  Repeat.

So why this obsession with The Office?  Why do I love this series so much that most people are ambivalent to and some down right hate it?  I have contemplated this at length and I think it is the depth of the characters that really appeals to me and how each time I watch it, I learn something new about the characters and their relationship to one another.

I remember when I first watched the series it was about mid season in season two.  The was so much I missed the first time through that I can scarcely believe it.  For example, I remember when Jim caught Dwight and Angela going at it in the office.  I was as shocked as he was by this!  I missed all the signs and innuendo about them.  Upon review I was shocked that I missed it all.

Now as I rewatch each episode, I discover similar, if less pronounced, pieces of the puzzle as it were.

One thing that always astounds me is how Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) is such a buffoon 90% of the time, but when it counts, he is a genius.  After forming the Michael Scott Paper Company and he is negotiating with David Wallace he points out that his company doesn't need to survive that long, but only need to survive to the next Dunder Mifflin board meeting at which point David Wallace will be out of a job for letting their most successful branch fail.  Or when he throws Jan under the bus at the deposition when he realizes that she had already planned to do the same to him by bringing his diary to present as evidence in the lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin.

It is the writting and the actors that bring these character to life.  They make it more than a simple half-hour sitcom on Thursday nights.  They bring life and heart to the characters.  The bring a depth that can be easily overlooked or missed by the casual viewer.

Michael Scott always refered to the people in The Office as a family.  Over the years, despite their differences, the story grew to show how right he was: they did form a family.  A crazy, mixed up, mostly psychotic family, but a family none the less.

I will miss watching their antics.  It was always a bright spots of my week.

But I always have them on DVD.  And Netflix.  And Tuesday night on TBS, And on Hulu, and....

Michael Scarn lives!!!!

TaxAct vs TurboTax...My humble opinion

Like most people, I loathe doing taxes.  Getting the forms, collecting all the right paperwork, calling the different places for information that should have been given but wasn’t….always a headache.  But even more than doing the actual taxes is the fear of the dreaded audit.  The tax code in the U.S. is staggering in scope.   Even being as diligent as I can possibly can, there is always a fear that something is going to be forgotten or missed and thus triggering the infamous IRS audit.

To help me minimize the risk, I have been using TurboTax Online since 2007.  And while I love the software for its ease of use and support, one thing I didn’t like was the price.  For me it runs about $100 per year to do both state and federal returns.  And while I hated paying it, I would swallow it because it was just so quick and easy to use.

So this year I decided to try another programs to see if it was as good at a lower cost.  After reading a few reviews, I decided to try TaxAct.  It was pretty highly rated, and at 1/3 the cost of TurboTax Online, why not give it a shot?

I downloaded the stand alone TaxAct Deluxe with my state for about $30.  My initial impression was positive, but I had forgotten all of the things TurboTax automated from previous years.   Still it wasn’t too bad.

Then I came to the part where it asks for interest that was received.  I had a few bank accounts that I did not receive a 1099-INT because the total interest was less than $10.  Unlike TurboTax, which asks for the name of the institution and a few other items, TaxAct wanted me to fill out a 1099-INT.  And that’s fine too.  But the issue was I did not have a payee EID number for the banks.  (On a separate, but related, note, when I asked the banks for this information one of them said “Oh, we don’t give that information out.”  When I told them that I needed it to fill out a 1099-INT form for the IRS she told me that she couldn’t give that information out to “just anyone” and suggested I not even tell the IRS about it.  Good Grief!)

So this led me down the first of many wild goose chases with TaxAct that end up with me calling the IRS for advice/direction on three separate issues.  I have never needed to do that with TurboTax.

Another point of issue was on the charitable donation portion of Schedule A.  TurboTax prompts you to input the specific information (who, what, where, how much) for all the charities and keeps a record of it for your future use.   TaxAct simply asks for how much.  And while that might be fine for most purposes, if I need to go back and look at the details from a prior year, TurboTax makes this much easier through better record keeping.

And the final think that set me on edge was on the Illinois State form.  Illinois has a “Use Tax” for anything that you buy on the internet that doesn’t charge state sales tax (we’re looking at you, Amazon…)  TurboTax always used to calculate this for me, but TaxAct want me to get the form and calculate it myself.  This made me very nervous, especially considering I did not have the UT form they mentioned nor did I know where to get it.  Later I found out that it was simply the total amount purchase times the state sales take rate of 6.25%.  Duh!

By the time I was finished, I was very nervous about the tax information I was about to submit.  So I decided that, since TurboTax doesn’t charge until I file, I would run it all through TurboTax and see what the difference was. 

It took me about 35 minutes to do both state and federal taxes using TurboTax.  I whipped through it like a hot knife through butter.  And I got that warm, fuzzy feeling that everything was going to be okay.  Well, as warm and fuzzy a feeling as you can get while doing taxes.  I finally reached the end and the verdict was in…

It turns of that my refund amounts for both state and federal taxes were identical for both pieces of software.  I felt relieved that TaxAct did not lead me astray after all.  The main differences were:

• ·         TurboTax was easier and more friendly to use
• ·         TurboTax was faster, but that might have been because it had historic data to go by
• ·         TaxAct was much cheaper.  $30 vs $90 for TurboTax Deluxe with State.

So which will I use next year?  I don’t know.  I really like the price of TaxAct, but I miss the reassurance I always felt with TurboTax.  Is that extra money worth that feeling and the slicker interface?

I guess I have a year to decide.

Evil Dead 2013...what fun!

I love horror movies.  I can be a bit selective as I don't enjoy "torture" movies like Saw and Hostel.  But in general, the old time monster/killer/demon/undead movies are right up my alley.  So it was with great excitement that, with the blessing of Sam Rami, Evil Dead was being remade.  But with that excitement came a bit of trepidation: would it be as good as the original?

A word however to those that have not watched the original Evil Dead or its spawn, Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.  They are an acquired taste.  Most people would probably not enjoy them.  They are over the top.  And that it is their actual charm.  They are silly and preposterous and just barely take themselves seriously enough that most viewers don’t get the joke.

So when I learned it was coming out, I knew I had to go see it with one of my two cohorts in horror movie crime, my oldest daughter.  (My youngest daughter is just a little too young to see this one.  Even I have my limits.) 

I have to say upfront that this was not my proudest parenting moment (but it may have been one of the funnest.)  My oldest daughter is 14 and we’ve been watching horror movies together for a few years now.  I usually do quite a bit of research on horror movies before I let her see them, and this one was no exception.  Still, I don’t expect many fathers would take a 14 year old girl to see the Evil Dead, nor do I condone, endorse or approve of this movie for anybody but myself and my daughter.  Your mileage may vary.

In preparation for the new version, I watched the original with her.  She liked it and so the wheels were set in motion to see the new one.

It was awesome.  It was everything I had hoped it would be and then some.  At one point we were both laughing out loud hysterically.  It was awkward because nobody else in the theater seemed to get the jokes.  But when the movie was over, I felt that director Fede Alvarez did a fine job capturing the spirit and feel of the original and yet bringing it into the 21^st century.

****SPOILER ALERT*****

The only disappointment was that Bruce Campbell did not make a cameo in this movie.

****END SPOILER ALERT*****

If you have ever wistfully wondered if you can get enough “chainsaw in the mouth” action, then this is the movie for you.  My daughter and I left the theater feeling that we got our money’s worth from Evil Dead.  We’re looking forward to the sequel and I am looking forward to a director’s cut DVD.

The Frustation of the trailing space...

I spent a good chunk of time today trying to delete a folder from a Windows 2008 R2 server that I could not get to go away.  What I finally discovered was that the folder name had a trailing space at the end of the name.  What I thought was the name "New" was actually "New " (please note the space) and the system truncated that space when it went to delete the folder, thus trying to delete "New" which did not exist.

So in order to delete this puppy, I needed to find the the 8.3 file name.  Using the command prompt, I navigated to the directory that contained this foul beast and ran a dir /x, which returned the result of "New~1" as the file name.  Then it was simply a matter of clearing out the files "New~1" contained (which it turns out was another folder with a trailing space) and then running a simple rmdir "New~1" and I was back in business.

Way too much time for something so simple.

MDM Solution: Air-Watch and mobilEcho implementation

Over the past few months I have been working on a system to unify the management of our mobile devices and allow a BYOD policy at the same time. Currently we do not allow Androids in our business because of the security risk associated with them. But there is a lot of drive from our employees to go to them, as well as some good business reasons to do so as well. These reasons include the wide selection of carriers and the relative low cost of both the phones and the tablets. This makes the Android a very attractive platform. The security and fragmentation of the platform, however, have made it kind of hard to make a jump to the Android OS company-wide.

And being a small IT department of two people managing 300+ users, I didn't want to manage another device or server to accomplish these goals.

So with that in mind, I began looking for a MDM solution that would meet the following criteria:

The solution should

1) Manage multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry.

2) Be easy to use. I don't want to go through six weeks of training just to figure out how to use it.

3) Allow apps to be rolled out en masse.

4) Allow enforcement of security policies.

5) Allow selective wipe of company data from personal phones.

6) Roll out company settings for mail, VPN, WiFi, etc.

I chose four different solutions to evaluate. (Well, technically five, but since the Apple Configurator won’t magange Androids, Blackberries and Windows phones, it was DOA.)

The first was MobileIron. I was enthralled by MobileIron, but that soon waned when I discovered that MobileIron was on "on-premises" box that would need to be configured and maintained. But I was still tempted. MobileIron definitely has the security nailed down. I liked how it could handle rouge apps and the management seemed very smooth and tuned.

Next I looked at Meraki. Meraki was just bought by Cisco and honestly that's the reason I took a look at them. And oddly, it was also the thing that drove me away from them. Right now, the price is free. Yup, free. However, while they state they have no intentions of changing that, I have seen things like this change dramatically shortly after the little fish is eaten by the big fish. This would force me to either reevaluate the MDM solution and possibly re-implement another MDM solution at some point in the future. Worse yet, they could discontinue it all together and leave me in the lurch. It is a fine solution, and spreads far beyond just mobile devices to include PCs and Macs, but I need to minimize disruptions to the employees and this uncertainty didn't leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.

The next two on my list were Air-watch and MaaS360, both at the recommendation of my CDW rep. After asking some folks I know at other companies and at the recommendation of some folks over at the IT Admin Forum at LinkedIn, I decided to try Air-watch first.

After they went through a short tutorial and got the initial test server configured, there were some minor issues but nothing huge. It did seem, at the beginning, that the profiles that Air-watch pushed out were hit or miss in regards to their implementation and their effectiveness. But after a while the basics were covered and everything was working fine. I was ready to broaden the test and implement an EIS (Enterprise Integration server) server internally and start rolling it out to some test users. Now I know, dear reader, that this flies in the face of my requirement of not having another server to manage, but please understand that this is merely a piece of software that runs on an existing server and has an agent that synchs Active directory information with the off-site Air-watch server. It also allows the Air-watch Secure Content Locker to map internal WebDAV shares, network shares, and Sharepoint Shares. This was going to be, for my company, the true selling point and power of Air-Watch.

Or so I thought. Initially everything worked fine. But then I started adding more shares and the problems began. Without getting into to gory of details, the shares that I had way exceed the normal capacity of Air-watch. And truthfully, even I was surprised by the quantity of documents we had and were trying to share. It turns out that in our main folder structure there were over 2,500,000 documents. It seems that currently (and I am speculating here because it is where AW stopped indexing the documents) that AW is limited to about 184,000 files. Which is probably fine for 99% of the users, but we needed either a) something that would get all of them, b) change the way the data is retained and structured or c) limit what we put in the SCL.

Before I continue, however, I want to take a moment to mention the customer support at Air-watch. From the sales rep to the tech support, they are one of the most dedicated group of folks I have ever seen in the industry. I could be cynical and say it was just because I was testing the software that they were so dedicated, but honestly the numbers just don't support such cynicism. We simply don't have a large enough user base for that to be true. So I feel they were doing it out of the commitment to the product and the customer. A number of times I had called it quits on AW because I didn't think it was going to be a good fit, but they worked with me and held my hand until I realized that it was a good fit and had a place in my organization. And more than that, they were going to help me make this MDM solution a success come hell or high-water. You don't find that often enough in IT companies.

Because of their dedication to product and customer, I never even made it to testing MaaS360.

So with the MDM solution secure, except for the ability to get network documents on the mobile devices, I decided to see if there as a piece of software dedicated to just that: putting data in network shares on mobile devices.

So after some investigation, I found MobileEcho by GroupLogic. Like AW, it also places a a few small files on the server (which I placed on the same server with the AW EIS software) and runs two services: one to index the files in the locations you want to share on the mobile device and the other to manage some extended permissions, handle wiping data, sending out enrolment notices, etc. All the management for the software, other than the indexing portion, is done through a simple but effective web interface.

Out of all the installations I have done and software I have implemented, I would have to say that this one of the simplest and easy to configure software packages I have ever seen. I had it up and running in about ten minutes. And the speed is incredible. Navigating the network shares on the mobile device is literally faster than doing it on the computer. I don't make this statement lightly: this software is amazing. The reaction from my test users were as follows:

"Wow!"

"Buy it."

"Holy S*%$"

"How can I get this on my PC?"

The only caveat to it, and this is really a matter of choice, is that we are not going to open it up on the firewall. So my end users will need to access it via VPN. That means there is an additional step or two they will need to do to get access to their data which they would not have needed to do using the AW SCL. But in the end, that's okay because the tradeoff is speed is well worth those couple of extra steps.

I am now working on getting a firm count on mobile devices and users and working out pricing. I think these two products are going to benefit my company enormously and increase our competitive edge in our market.