Just thought I’d post a follow up to the Movember post and let you all know that it was utterly horrendous having a moustache!  It felt horrible and looked almost as bad.  won’t be trying that again in a hurry.  Oh well, it was all in a good cause….

Hi All,During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’ll be growin a Mo. That’s right I’m bringing the Mo back because I’m passionate about men’s health and the fight against prostate cancer. Why…

• Every year in New Zealand 2,656 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 600 die of the disease, making prostate cancer the second largest cause of male cancer deaths, after lung cancer.
• The average life expectancy of a man in New Zealand is 4 years less than a woman.

To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/nz/donate, enter my registration number which is 159710 and your credit card details. Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the “Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand” clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 159710. Please mail cheques to: Movember, PO Box 87 150, Meadowbank 1742, Auckland. All donations over $5 are tax deductible.

All donations are made directly to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand who will use the funds to create awareness, increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer, fund research and scholarship programs.

For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the detail at: Fundraising Outcomes.

Movember culminates at the end of the month at the Gala Partés. These glamorous and groomed events will see Tom Selleck and Borat look-a-likes battle it out for their chance to take home the prestigious Man of Movember title. If you would like to be part of this great night you’ll need to purchase a Gala Parté ticket.
Thanks for your support

Brendon

More info is available at www.movember.com.

Movember is proudly grown by Holden, L&P, The Rock, Tui and Schick.

Movember a proud partner of the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand.

Back online again! My previous hosting provider decided to cancel the account and delete the site. Rather annoying but considering it was a free account I can't really complain too much. I hadn't been blogging much anyway. Too busy with my new company (which is going from strength to strength).  I've managed to recover most of the old posts, but I missed a few after early October.  Oh well…..

You may have noticed a slow down in my blogging recently. It’s due to the fact that I’ve just changed jobs!

I now run my own consulting company called IT Directions. We (me) are IT consultants with a focus on collaboration technologies (mainly Sharepoint at the moment), mobility (of course) and performance testing/performance management but we also do all the pre-requisite stuff that NZ companies have to do like general infrastructure stuff (storage, mail servers, firewalls, vpns), web design, etc.

Consequently, I’ve been rather busy with the intial startup stuff so blogging has taken a back seat. Also, it’s been a rather quiet time recently news-wise, as I prefer to not do the me-too type blogging that a lot of sites tend to do. I prefer to blog on things that aren’t widely known (or really interest me ).

Been reading a series of posts on Nic’s blog regarding the differences in the way people work and perceive their work. I have to say that I completely agree with his latest observation. I tend to get very distracted at work during the day, so I do my most productive work in the evening. Hence I tend not to get into the office until around 9:15 after dropping my daughter of at school. I also try to get away about 4:45 in the afternoon to try and beat the traffic. You get the impression that people think you are slacking off because you aren’t at work on the dot of 8:30 and leave before 5:00. No one seems to take into account the work done after 5:00 because it’s never seen. This really annoys me! I am much more productive in the evenings because there are far less distractions, so I tend to use the days to schedule meetings and catch up with people and do the work that can’t be done anywhere else (because of hardware requirements for example). I don’t see a lot of point in sitting at a desk accomplishing nothing just because you’re paid to work certain hours. It makes much more sense to measure performance on the quality of the work done rather than whether or not you are at your desk. I’m in total agreement with Nic – I prefer small companies, early in their life cycles or “startups”. The environment is much more conducive to the way I work… Hence the reason why I have quit my current role with a very large company to go into business for myself (contracting to start with, but things will grow from there).

You may have noticed that I\’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging front lately. I’ve been horrendously busy implementing a meta-directory for a client. This thing is an absolute beast – synchronising an SAP HR system with 3 (yes, 3!) Active Directories plus a bunch of other minor sync tasks. This makes for a hideously complex set of provisioning rules as you might imagine. We’ve been making use of Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server 2003 and been having some interesting experiences. More about this a bit later, I’m not quite up to talking about it yet. I will say that the product is really good and really frustrating all in one go! Really good in that it is incredibly easy to setup and get started and for simple attribute synchronisation between directories it’s great. The really hard yakka comes when you try to do something a little more advanced – like provision Exchange accounts for example. Now at this point you’re probably thinking “that’s sounds really easy. It should be able to do that” And I would agree with you. This is apparently one of it’s core functions. But do you think we can make it play nice. No! We’ve had to park the mailbox provisioning part of the project and come back to it later it’s just gotten too difficult. Now it’s probably something really simple that we’ve just gotten wrong somewhere and we’ll kick ourselves when we figure it out, but from research on the net it appears there’s an enourmous amount of confusion and pain around this very thing. Lot’s of posts with similar problems to ours… Oh well, we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully MS can come up with something that’ll help. The biggest problem is the shocking state of the documentation and examples around the product. MSDN is essentially useless when you’re trying to do more complex things with the product. The descriptions of the API functions are woefully inadequate and the API’s themselves are incredibly confusing. The CreateMailbox API call is overloaded with 6(!) slightly different calls and they all seem to do different things (but there’s nothing to say what those things are!). Sorry, don’t mean to rave on, but it’s hard going trying to decipher a product from the outside in

That’s nearly a hundred MB of extra storage in less than a month. I was going to have trouble filling the original 1GB they started with, let alone 2.2GB!

Found a really good blog from a post on Craig's blog. Working Smart is all about techniques for making your working life easier, Really good posts I've found here are:

Taming Your E-Mail Inbox, Tip #2
How to Start a Blog
Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2

Definitely a blog to keep an eye on. I've added it to my list

Link: Working Smart

A Japanese scientist has come up with a fuel cell that is powered by the glucose in your blood. This opens the door to powered implants that don’t need toxic chemicals to run the fuel cell. The current prototype generates 0.2mW. Not a lot but it’s a start.

[ Via IOL ]

Interesting article speculating on what direction humanities furture evolution might take. From Unihumans to Cyborgs to Astrans this covers a lot of possibilities. Makes you think…

[ Via MSNBC.com ]