Day 3 was pretty busy with lots of errands and work. We started out by running again over to Zhongguancun to try to find the video cable for the XBOX. After some looking around we found a vendor that wanted 165 YMB, but we were able to negotiate it down to 150, but based on what we had seen online this was still too high, so we walked around to competing vendors, and found prices ranging from 198 down to one that said 80. We took the one at 80 YMB, which was very good price. Around $12 US.

After leaving Zhongguancun, the market area, we went to the Microsoft Office, which was on the north east side of town. Here are some pictures from the 23rd floor where Microsoft Premier Field Engineering sits.

For lunch we ate at a local place right next to the Microsoft office, which served Shanghai style food, which is usually more sweet. It was quite good, including Beef, Chicken, and Squid.

After working at the office for a while, we took a taxi back to the apartment to see if we could finally get the XBOX working, and have some relax time before dinner. After getting everything hooked up, and getting the video configured, the XBOX seemed to be working, yahoo.... well that was until about 15 minutes later when the power converter got too hot, and shutdown. It seems the XBOX is drawing too much power, and is exceeding the 200W limit. Oh well, looks like we need to wait another day or two to get a larger power adapter.

So after the disappointment of not getting the XBOX to work, we met with Michael and went for dinner. This time they took me to a place on the west side of town, with an ethnic group that is Muslim/Turkish, called Uyghur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_people).

The food has a little more western feel, and taste, and one of the items was very much like Vanilla Yogurt. Much of the food is Lamb, Chicken and Beef, and 2 of the dishes we got were very spicy. The first picture here on the left, was almost exactly like Roast Beef, it was very tender, like it had been cooked in an oven for most of the day.

We wrapped up for the night and went back to the apartment. I made a call for work around 11pm, and went to bed finally at Midnight, since tomorrow is our first working day (16 hour shift), we have to be up and onsite by 6:30am to get breakfast.

-Chris

This is pretty neat to hear that Bill G. will be about 1 block from my apartment to watch the Olympic Games.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2008-07-23/09142345048.shtml

Bill had to drop about 1M RMB to rent the place, which makes it around $150,000 US, but this building by far has the best view of all the Olympic venues, such as Birds Nest, and the Water Aquatics building.

The building as of now is still being finished, and it seems construction is going very quickly so that it will be done in time for the games.

Good luck Bill, and hope the view is great.

-Chris

Well day 2 was pretty exciting, we started off pretty early with lots of errands, and other tasks that needed to be completed. in China if you are a foreign visitor that is not staying in a hotel you must register with the local police station. So since we are staying in an apartment I needed to go do that. So after some discussion with the police officer, which according to my colleagues, People in public offices, like the police are not that friendly and usually are completely driven by rules/laws, we found out that I needed to finish activating my Accreditation Card, so off to the Olympics building, BHQ, to complete that first. The activation took 5 minutes, but then we had to return to the police station to finish my registration, which was bout 20 minutes from the BHQ building.

After all that was complete, I was able to go to the DHQ building to meet a large portion of the team, which includes people from many different vendors, such as Linux, Windows, SQL, Oracle, Search Server, Network, and many other technologies. After asking my peers here, I'm unable to take any pictures of the Technology operations center, but I will say that it looks amazing, there are at least 300-400 people working on the 11th floor, and there are 3 tiers of support. Many of then engineers, and tech leads  joke that there should be nothing for the senior tier to work on if all goes well. I like to joke back that this is why I brought the XBOX 360 ;-).

After meeting the team, and the project lead, we left to go to Zhongguancun, a shopping market area, where we could get a 220v to 110v power convertor for the before said XBOX.  This market/store is like nothing I've seen before, it is about 5 or 6 floors in a very large building, and on each floor there are very small "cubes" of space where individual vendors can sell their products, so on each floor there are at least 1,000 vendors with a 10x10 space. So overall there must be at least 5,000-6,000 different unique businesses, and vendors working from this building. It was very overwhelming to see all of the people, and merchants, I think I could have spent hours and hours looking though this place. After some time, and asking around we made it to the 5th floor where we found a merchant that understood what we were asking for, and was able to provide the adapter. Hai-Jun, my peer from Shanghai, was able to negotiate the price from 65 Yen to 50, which makes this roughly $8 US, which is unheard of, when i was in Newark I looked at some adapters there and they wanted $50/US for the same thing. So needless to say I continued to look around the shops and everything was very inexpensive, and all major manufactures, as well, like Dell, HP, Canon, Sharp, Sony, etc. One last stop before we left included a quick purchase of a SIM Card, which actually ended up taking 45 minutes, by the time we figured out which one we needed, and tested it with my phone; which didn't work, since it seems my phone is still locked to Cingular. So now i have another task to work on. Before we left the market area we stopped for lunch in the "mall" like food court, and i was able to try some Goose, and Pork with Rice. Overall the pork was pretty good, and reminded me a lot of Chinese Barbeque Pork in the US, but I did not like the Goose at all, very strange flavor, and had very little meat. I was able to take a picture of the outside of the building (from floor 6), but what really caught my attention were all the bikes:

After finishing lunch we caught a taxi and went downtown to the forbidden city, which was absolutely amazing, it cost 60 Yen to get in, and we walked through it in about 1.5 hours, which was pretty fast. Here are a few pictures of the palace, and many of the places the Emperors worked, and lived.

After finishing the forbidden city, we took the train a little further to the east from the Tian'Amen West to Wangfujing, where we stopped for a quick Starbucks, and walked further down to an ice cream place, where we waited for our peer, Michael to wrap up for the day. When we was finished, and on his way to went over to a place for dinner, over in the Gongyuan area, the restaurant we went took last night was called GongYuan ShuLou, which means The Sicuan restaurant in the Gongyuan area. At the restaurant we ordered several dishes with Beef, Chicken, Fish and vegetables, and some were very spicy, 3 stars or 4 stars, which I thought were just excellent. Here is a picture of one of the dishes that is made up of Chicken and Peppers.

After a very filling dinner, we hailed a taxi, and returned back to the apartment, where we finished unpacking from the day, and I started to setup the XBOX (very important), after setting it all up, I realized I didn't have the AV cable, since i used HDMI at home, I forgot to pack it. So tomorrow we will have to take another visit to Zhongguancun to purchase another one. I think we will be able to find them since I can find them on EBay, and EachNet (EBay in China). The good news is that it appears the power adapter is working though. ;-)

After setting up our new wireless router, and getting all packed in for the night, i finally called it at around Midnight.

One last note on some things I've noticed around in China is that everyone seems very excited and supportive for the Olympics, it's advertised on almost every building and corner, it's usually printed on most documents, and receipts, and seems to really be something that China is very proud of being able to host. I can't wait to see it in action in about 15 days.

I'll update again tomorrow morning, for now it's off to breakfast, and Zhonguancun to find the AV cable.

-Chris @ 9:15AM Thursday

Well this day started way too early. After wrapping up some necessary work on Certified Masters, I was finally able to pack up and call it a night at around midnight. 3:45am CST came really quick. Getting to the plane was easy, and the first leg of the flight was easy going, San Antonio to Newark runs around 3.5 hours. After a very short layover of about 15 minutes, it's onto the B777-200 I go. Luckily I was able to use miles to bump to business first, which added a lot more food/meals, and a few extra's, like the leg room, and the almost lay flat seats. The flight left Newark at around Noon EST (Midnight Beijing time).

This flight actually goes direct from Newark right to Beijing, but goes up over the North Arctic, and down over Russia/Siberia. Outside of the 12 hour change (which I'm sure I'll pay for tomorrow), the flight was fantastic. Meals included: Nuts, Salmon, Soya braised chicken, Fresh greens salad with goat cheese, and pecans. I had the Stir-fried beef for dinner, and right after that came the fruit and cheese cart, and the dessert, ice cream sundae, with Caramel, Nuts, and even a cherry. Later that evening (morning Beijing time), Had some Char siu pork and egg noodle soup, and some cheesecake. Before landing we even had a breakfast, I picked the cereal.

After landing I went through customs, and immigration, it was actually quite simple, they sent me straight through with very little checking on my paperwork. The terminal we landed in I think is new, because it looked fantastic, reminded me a bit of Houston's E terminal.

After meeting up with some of my colleagues we took the subway/train to SanYuanQiao, where we transferred to the blue line and went to Jiandemen, where we got a taxi to take us the the apartment. Our apartment is located right across from the Aquatics center, and Digital Beijing Building (DHQ). During the time on the train, I was able to get a very good view of Beijing (northwest corner anyway), and it was very impressive. Talking to my peers here it sounds like there have been significant changes, and construction over the last 2-3 years, so much of Beijing is different then it was in the past.

After getting into the Apartment, we unpacked, a bit, and then left to go see what was close, and we ended up eating at this great restaurant, known for it's Duck. I sat back, and let the experts order, and about half of which I wouldn't be able to tell you what it was, but the parts that were the best were the Spicy Tofu, and of course the Duck. Here is a picture of the front of the building:

After dinner, we went over to the "office" to take a look around, and it was very impressive. The building is so much bigger in person.

Most of the pictures I took were late at night, and my camera isn't very good at that, because if I disable the flash it turns of picture stabilization, so I'm going to have to take more pictures during the day.

After walking around on the 11th floor (top floor) of the building, we wandered around the test of the OCD (Olympic Green Common Domain), and took pictures of all the buildings, It was really great to be out looking at all the different venues, especially since the whole area was pretty much empty. I can see there is much work still being done, as almost every building has some type of construction, clean up or Landscaping being completed before the Olympics start.

Here are a few of the pictures that came out well last night:

Anyway, so after coming back to the apartment around 11pm, I called back home over Unified Communications (thank you MSIT), and called it a night around 12:30. I have been up for around 60 hours now with only 6 hours of semi sleep in between.

BTW it's REALLY HOT over here in the 90's but very humid, and I thought Texas was hot...

More to come after today is done (since it's 9am here)...

Glad to hear that China is getting prepped for the potential of terrorists during the Olympics, but it's still not a very promising statement...

"Remain calm, don’t fight back and try to send a text message to the police.

That’s how Chinese police have advised people to respond if captured by terrorists during next month’s Olympic Games, the official Xinhua News Agency said Friday."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25735129/

Here is a pretty cool view of Mars in Widescreen Panorama using Microsoft Research HDView.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/11/1195385.aspx

The new guide for Repadmin use has been released and covers some great scenarios around monitoring, and troubleshooting. This is a great guide to keep in your tool kit. Notice the date says 2007, but that is wrong, this was released yesterday.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122830

Well one less thing to worry about ;-)

"BEIJING - Canine cuisine is being sent to the doghouse during next month’s Beijing Olympic Games.

Dog meat has been struck from the menus of officially designated Olympic restaurants, and Beijing tourism officials are telling other outlets to discourage consumers from ordering dishes made from dogs, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25633945/

Here is a 10,000 ft view of China (well around that I think).

Here are all of the buildings around the Olympic Sports Center, including (1 Olympic Sports Center, 2 Beijing Jilin Mansion, 3 National Indoor Stadium, 4 National Stadium, 5 National Natatorium, 6 National Convention Center Fencing Hall, 7 Olympic Green, 8 Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium, 9 Ying Tung Natatorium, 10 Olympic Sports Center Stadium):

The building i'll mostly be working from is call the Digital Beijing Building, which looks like this at night, and up close, this building is right around the corner for the Birds Nest (National Stadium):

Well it's more official every day, I received my Beijing Olympic Committee accreditation card yesterday in the mail. This will provide me access into China, and around the Buildings.

I'll update more soon with maps, etc of the places I'll be.

So I go my XBOX replacement back a few weeks ago, and we were having some issues getting downloaded games and content to work on profiles other than the one that downloaded it the first time. To fix this it required a restore of the licenses by simply following these steps:

1) After your drive is in, and your console on, sign into the XBOX as the original Live Account.

2) Go to Marketplace, and select Account Management, then Download History.

3) Select any items and then chose Download Again.

Well we finally stretched the walls at the house, and squeezed in some friends and their families, about 40 people total. Had all the TV's,  and XBOX's going (Guitar Hero, Halo, and Lego Indiana Jones were the hits), and the back yard was full with kids left and right.

I think we grilled more food at once then ever before (around 20 steaks, some chicken, 20 hamburgers, 2 packs of hot dogs, bratwurst , sausage, and shrimp on the barbie) and made good use of the new deck cover...

Wish I had taken some pictures, but there was way too much going on ;-)

Till next year...

Hope you had a Happy Independence Day!

Well we barely made it. 4pm came up fast on Friday, but around 3 we were all wrapped up, backyard cleaned, pergola finished, and we were ready for a house full of visitors.

Here we are about 95% wrapped up, just a few more touch ups this next week, but ready enough for the party.

Overall heat reduction on the deck is at least 10 degrees, but we will give it some more break in throughout the week to learn better.

Grand total for the project:

$150 for Tools and Misc Supplies

$437 for the Big Lumber beams, headers, and top.

$302 for Lumber, other tools, and Misc supplies

$70 for the U-Haul (with gas fill).

Total $959

Well it's been a crazy week, last Saturday Sarah and I had the grand idea to finish up the patio with a cover.

The deck is around 16x16, so after some math, and a few renderings we picked a 20x20 header, and cross top with posts on the 16ft corners. It took us a UHAUL rental, and a stop at around 3 different places to grab all the materials.

Here we are late on the first night, first post is up, and the header beam is started.

Here we are after night #2, with the next set of posts and headers mostly finished.

And Night #3, the header board on the wall is almost finished, and the first cross beam in in place.

Tonight will be the huge rush, as we have to finish all 23-24 cross header boards, finish locking in the wall board with the anchors, and then come back and finish up all of the cross supports on each of the upper corners. CRAZY work to get done before Friday around Noon.

More pictures to come as we get closer to wrapping up.

-Chris

Found a few articles that are pretty funny. Not quite sure how they all slipped through..

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310510

"Playback and Copy-Protection Issues When You Try to Play the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs DVD Movie"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/261186/en-us

"Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/276304

"Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/178748

"The Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) is a UNIX- based testing and reporting tool that collects a variety of information about networked hosts. SATAN will attempt to access many UDP and TCP ports across the network in a very short space of time."

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/228001

"Network Adapter Does Not Work if Unplugged"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/172653/en-us

"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own"

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/152698

"Paul Bunyan: The Story of Paul Bunyan"

It took 11 months, but I finally had my XBOX Red Ring of Death.

Luckily i'm close to the repair center, and got the replacement XBOX back in 4 days. Woo Hoo!

Here is a poor man's MOM/SCOM solution for seeing what is happening over time in DFSR (2003 R2 or 2008).

First schedule health reports to run periodically (during sourcing exercises I recommend every 15 minutes, but during production I would run this 2 or 3 a day).

1) Import 1 XML report to generate the XML based schema file

2) Verify the XML Map Properties (Schema settings); including the “Append new data” option.

3) Using the Developer import option, select all XML files desired (I have tested around 2,000 DFS Report XML’s). (the developer ribbon is enabled in the excel options dialog from the “main menu”)

4)

5) Review the import status (I found that it’s ok to get some Schema errors, as long as the Import Status states Complete)

6)

7) Data should now be imported (each DFSR health report takes about 10 rows in Excel)

8)

9) Adding a separate sheet with a pivot table will allow manipulation of the DFSR Health Reports:

10)

11) And tables/charts and all kinds of other cool things:

12)

Well it's finally out, Microsoft Certified Masters is opening to the world.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/master/default.mspx

So what is Microsoft Certified Masters? It's one of the new certifications being released by Microsoft Learning, and will be pushing the proof of skills and technical understanding to the limits. In the past there has been a huge gap between the level MCSE/MCITP tested at, and what the field felt was true testing of a senior engineer competencies. Microsoft Certified Masters will be one of the ways to tackle this by providing a top tier certification that tests book knowledge with real world applied skill set. Aligned with MCA (Microsoft Certified Architect), this will allow a true mapping of someone's skills, experience, and competencies to a field recognized certification, be it as an Architect (MCA) or an Engineer/Consultant (MCM).

MCM for Active Directory will be most likely opening the doors for the first public rotation in November, and content is targeted at heavy 300+ design/troubleshooting skill sets. With 3 weeks of some very intense training, written tests, and a pretty advanced lab certification, this will not be for the weak of heart.

Skills to be tested will range for AD Internals, such as AD Backup and DR, Kerberos/Auth, Client Logon/Interactions, AD Replication, Sites & Services design, deployments and troubleshooting, FRS, DFSR, Group Policy, DNS, RODC, Server Core, and of course the whole line up of AD products like Federated Services, Rights Management Services, Certificate Services, ADAM/LDS, and to finish it off, throw in some MOF/ITIL content, and that will make for a heck of long and hard 3 weeks.

The Masters training programs will be running $18,500, and will be based in Redmond for the first year. Worldwide training is expected the next year.

During the internal warm up sessions i was lucky enough to help gather and generate content for the training and certification labs, and it's actually quite a hard thing to find and build rock solid level 300-350 training content that is both challenging, and yet relevant. The program manager for MCM Directory, Walter Boyd, many others, and I are working hard to make the content killer, with the amount of content we have, and the talent we are coordinating, this should be a great program, we are pulling in some of the most talented trainers and engineers in the industry.

Hope to see you there in November...

Chris Ransom / MCM:Windows Directory 2008

Well it's close to official (I'm not really counting it until I'm on the plane), as I'm going to Beijing in August to represent Microsoft and to help support the Olympics.

http://en.beijing2008.cn/bocog/

Looks like I'll be heading over at the end of July, and not returning until Late August. I'll be part of a 6 person crew of senior exports supporting Windows/Active Directory, and SQL.

Pretty excited to see China for the first time, and to witness the Olympics first hand.

I'll update more as my trip starts...

-Chris Ransom / MCM: Windows 2008 Directory

REDMOND, Wash. – June 26, 2008 – Following the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft reached another milestone today with the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008. The nearly 1.5 million copies of the Hyper-V beta version that have been distributed demonstrate how customer interest in virtualization is moving from evaluation to production environment deployments.

https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/jun08/06-26hyperv.mspx

The download will be available on the website around noon today PST, and will be delivered via Windows Update on July 8th.