All Office 365 with a side order of pulleys, Happy Birthday

So ever since my dad and step mom left I have been up to my ears in work, both the office variety (Office 365 to be exact) and the home variety.  I went into work Friday around 9AM and did not leave until close to 8:30 that night.   Friday was the day I picked to actually pull the trigger on our Office 365 migration, meaning our mail would start directing to Microsoft’s cloud servers.  During the day I checked and rechecked that my plan of action was sound.  It seemed to be.  Shortly before 4PM I made the change to our DNS MX record and waited for it to propagate.  A little after 5PM mail started flowing in it’s new direction and the fun began.

So we decided to not worry about rolling new versions of the Office applications until after we got the mail conversion done.  This meant we were doing the switch on mostly Office 2007 clients.  We quickly discovered that not all of our installations were Office 365 ready.  We had to apply SP3 and then one additional patch to allow 2007 to interact with the cloud based email correctly.  Once we got that figured out the rest of the time was spent updating all 50+ systems at our main office.  All in all it went pretty smooth.

On Saturday I spent over half the day continuing to work on the project albeit remotely.  The nice thing about a cloud based product is you can work on it pretty much anywhere you have an internet connection.  None of the work was all that difficult, it was mostly me trying to figure out how to do certain things we were already doing in Exchange 2010.  One of the bigger challenges was figuring out how to allow some of our internal applications and devices to send email via Office 365.  I accomplished this by configuring an IP restricted port 25 SMTP relay in Office 365, something I was not aware you could do.

During the remote work on Saturday I did take a short break to get outside and weed the yard.  It was nice to get away from a screen for a short while.  During the afternoon I decided to tackle the tractor repair.  My replacement idler pulleys had arrived on Friday.

I did a little research ahead of time on what I needed to do to replace the pulleys.  Of course I still had challenges along the way.  I could not believe how badly the pulleys were damaged.  Their plastic construction made them seen woefully ill equipped for their role.  One of them was particularly bad with most of the pulley surface destroyed.  No wonder the tractor was making such a horrible noise.

So after some struggles I had all three pulleys replaced.  The belt was not in good shape either but I hoped it would still serve it’s purpose to drive the transmission.  Well it did not.  Because of wear and stretching, the belt would simply fall off the pulleys when you engaged the brake.  I realized I was going to have to get another belt as well.

I had two options.  Order the belt at the same place online that I bought the pulleys from.  I may save a few bucks but I would be waiting another 3-4 days to get it.  Option two was to call Sears, see if they had the belt and possibly pay a little bit more for the convenience of getting it right away.  I called to verify they had the part, they did.  I hopped in the truck and headed right there, anxious to get my tractor woes behind me before the weekend was over.

I grabbed the new belt and on the way home stopped to pick up dinner at Tijuana Flats.  Cindy was really wanting Mexican food for some reason.  We enjoyed our meal while working to catch up on our huge backlog of X1 dvr’d content.  I was pooped from my non-stop day of stuff.

Despite a very busy previous 48 hours I still drug myself out of bed at 6AM Sunday morning to get out for a run at the track.  Cindy joined me this time.  We wound up putting in the most mileage of 2016, just under four and three quarter miles.  It feels good to get some more distance into my “long” run although the actual act of running still feels nowhere near good.

After getting home and tending to the chickens Cindy and I were happy that Katie agreed to go riding with us on the Segways.  Her and Cindy rode the Minipro’s while I rolled around on my single wheel.  Having Katie along made Cindy push to a new distance record on her bot of almost 7.5 miles.  Cindy and I both hope Katie joins us more often in the future.

During the morning I also headed back outside to install my replacement drive belt in the tractor.  Since I just ripped the tractor apart the day before, doing it a second time was much more time efficient.  The new belt fixed my issue, I was finally able to have the tractor move backward and forward under it’s own power.

So I tuned into the Eagles-Redskins game hoping that the sloppy performance against Detroit was just a bump in the road.  Well unfortunately the bump became a big nasty pothole.  There were some very glaring problems.  First of all, for the second game in a row the Eagles committed more than a dozen penalties which is inexcusable.  I saw some ridiculous stat that the eagles have not had this much penalty yardage in two consecutive games since 1952.

The defense, which had been very solid in the first three games was porous, getting beat equally by the run and the pass.  They basically did not stop the Redskins the entire game.  The offense was pretty awful as well, not scoring any touchdowns.  The biggest problem was the rookie they threw in there to replace Lane Johnson.  He got demolished, resulting in Carson Wentz getting smacked around all game long.  The Eagles wide receivers just are not impressive, they drop catchable balls routinely and don’t seem to scare anyone.

The game was not nearly as close as the final score.  The only reason it seemed competitive was the touchdown scored on an intercepted pass and kick off return.   All of a sudden that rising tide of enthusiasm has been subdued by two increasingly poor performances.  In the big picture my expectations were low to start the season so I can’t get too bent out of shape about it.  There is still no doubt that Carson Wentz has some very special qualities, they just need to get some better people to protect him and to throw to.

My Monday at work was still very much Office 365 consumed but it was all small minor details and problems that had to be ironed out.  I was very excited that FINALLY my 70 inch LG tv was scheduled to be fixed, two weeks plus from when I called it in.  The tech showed up an hour later than his original arrival window although he did call Cindy to let her know.   Cindy said he reeked of cigarettes and he left greasy finger prints all over the screen but at least the set worked.  When I got home I wasted no time getting my AV nook back to the way it was.

Yesterday was also Cindy’s birthday.  We went out to a birthday dinner with her family on Sunday night but Monday was the official date so I wanted to make sure we did something.  I sort of prepared dinner, Cindy pre-made some ravioli that I heated up and then I added garlic bread to the mix and made salad.  A birthday isn’t a birthday without a cake so I picked up a half of a chocolate cake at Publix on the way home.  Cindy’s daughter stopped by as well to make the celebration complete.  It was a simple but fun evening.

We discovered that our Amazon Echo has another amazing ability on top of it’s thousands of other existing ones, it can sing you happy birthday.  See for yourself.