Dumbest, Wal-mart walk, Exchange 2007 bear traps

So I have been trying to get through The Dumbest Generation, a book about how today’s young Americans have basically been stupefied by today’s digital, social networked, entertainment gorging society.  I found the premise of the book interesting, even though I am engulfed in much of what it claims to be evil.  Well the book so far has been in a word, boring.  I am about half way through it at this point.  I have skipped many pages along the way.

Each chapter goes pretty much like this.  A premise is laid out, for example, parents use the TV as a digital babysitter and in the process unknowingly enslave their child to the device.  The child becomes incapable of being by themselves without a TV turned on.  After the premise is laid out the next 25 pages list endless studies, surveys and statistics that would lend credence to that premise.  It’s an extremely dry read.  Sure it’s cool to back up your theories with facts but I think the book would be much more interesting with more real life examples of situations that illustrate the phenomenon.  It’s going to be a struggle to get through it.

Over the weekend mom and I were talking about the book and premise a bit.  Mom said that my generation were the pioneers for the dumbest generation.  Video games came into main stream while I was a child with the Atari 2600 leading the way. (I was an Intellivision geek)  She said how she remembered me spending hours on end playing a game to “beat” it.  There is no debating that video games were a big part of my childhood yet I don’t think it compares in the least to the digital immersion that is the norm today.

When I was a kid cell phones didn’t exist, there was no real internet, text messaging meant writing a note and handing it to your friend and if someone said MMORPG you would think he was trying to sound funny.  I can only imagine what my childhood would have been if I was born into this time of digital overload.  Would I have even pursued playing sports, climbing trees,  write simple poetry, draw, build extravagant Lego structures or even simply use my imagination for that matter? At the very least I am sure my outside interests would have been extremely diminished.  All I could hope for is my parents would be strict enough to see the danger in allowing a child to rely exclusively on digital media to stimulate their brains and entertain themselves.  Unfortunately that isn’t the case in many households.  I read somewhere that the average teen sends TWO THOUSAND text messages per MONTH.

Yesterday after work I hit Wal-mart looking for a couple items and wound up walking out of there carrying two arms full of stuff.  I stumbled across a shop vac brush attachment to replace ours that went MIA, a new filter for it too.  I also came across some $3 door sweeps that I plan to mutate to work on our lanai doors to help keep critters out.  I also snagged 2 or 3 other items that I didn’t expect to get but once I stumbled across them I realized I could use them.  Looks like I have a bunch of mini-projects to knock out this weekend.

Getting Exchange 2007 up and running in our existing Exchange 2003 system was relatively easy.   What hasn’t been easy is setting up some of the features of it like Outlook Anywhere and or do something as simple as back it up.  Microsoft did a number of things with Exchange 2007 that don’t make sense like remove functionality from the GUI console and make certain operations only possible using the powershell interface.  It’s also stupid that you can no longer back up Exchange with the Windows Server 2008 back up utility.  Who introduces new versions and strips out functionality??? 

Well I thought I had my bases covered from a backup perspective when we upgraded to BackupExec 12.5 which supports Exchange 2007.  I  figured I install the remote agent on the Exchange 07 server, add it to my back up job and bam, I am ready to go.  After all that is how it worked with Exchange 2003 and Backupexec. Wrong. 

Yesterday I was in Backup Exec for some reason and just happened to look at the selections for the Exchange 07 server.  I noticed that I no longer had the ability to restore individual mailboxes, just the entire information store, WTF?? So I am off to Google to see what the hell the deal is.  What I find is in order to restore mailboxes in Exchange 07 you need to have GRT(Granular Restore Technology)  working in Backup EXEC.  However it isn’t like you just turn it on.

In order to properly backup the information store you need to jump through a number of hoops like installing the Exchange 07 management console on the Backupexec server, install some MAPI Collaboration pack on the Exchange server and a bunch of tweaks to the groups the backupexec user is in.  That is annoying.  More annoying is there is no mention of it when you go to set up an Exchange 07 server in the backup job.  If I hadn’t stumbled across it I would have been SOL if I had the need to restore a mailbox.  I am still fighting with this config and have yet to get it to work correctly.  For what we paid for Backupexec and the various agents that you are required to buy ala carte I think it is bullshit that they make Exchange 2007 backup such a chore.