Did I wake up in 1995, or is the SAAQ restricting my choices to two banks in Quebec?

I can renew my license plates online with a credit card, but for some reason, they seem to want to force me to either waste paper and a stamp, or to go to their location to pay.

And yes, paying at their location will cost you an extra $3 on top of that $86/year driver’s license.

Online service available

* Monday to Saturday 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.

* Sunday noon to 11:00 p.m.

Note: Any operation completed after 11:00 p.m. will not be recorded.

via Vehicle Storage | Online Services SAAQclic | SAAQ.

What ? The government computer only gets in at noon on Sundays ? ??

Trying to enable EFS on a specific OU, while it’s disable at the top of the structure or domain?
Recovery certificates from two different GPOs mixing up instead of being replaced?

Overall EFS GPOs looking like they aren’t merging properly?

Well, it’s not because EFS GPOs are supposed to behave like black magic. Turns out there’s a bug, Microsoft’s aware of it, but doesn’t think it would be a good idea to FIX IT on Windows XP and 2003.

Thankfully, all it means is you need to edit your GPOs from a Vista, 2008 or Windows 7 machine.

KB : EFS may not be enabled expectedly after you disable a policy and this policy turn off the EFS feature

Opening my EFS GPOs in Windows 7, switching the Allow/Don’t allow and applying the ‘change’ fixed my GPOs. A few minutes later, and stuff was behaving like it should’ve been… Can I have those wasted hours of my life back, Mr. Ballmer?

I own a copy of Office that is the download-able version. It is basically a selft-extracting exe that then runs a setup.

I had it stored in a SMB share on the Lacie drive. I ran it. The setup crashed. Then, AFP crashed on my NAS. Rebooting it made things worse. AFP wouldn’t start. Bonjour wouldn’t start. Not long after, SMB wouldn’t start.
Logfiles seemed to indicate that the system’s drive was full. I presume the system is stored on Flash storage in the NAS itself.

I contacted Lacie support. They could only instruct me to reset the unit to factory settings. At least, no data was lost.
I then asked if it could be related in any way to me running a setup file directly from the share, expecting them to tell me there is a known issue when reading a file and writing a lot at the same time or something similar..
Instead, I got this reply:

Tech Support dude.

Makes no sense
Posted: September 3, 2009 @ 7:23 AM

It was related to running the .exe file on the drive.  The file is proprietary to an OS such as XP, Vista, or Mac OS X.  Running the file on a non-conforming OS is going to create severe havoc and other issues.  I am glad the reset resolved the issue.

Regards,

Tech support dude

Sharepoint.

Mappoint.

Performancepoint (what the hell!).

Makes about as much sense as commercials with Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

Here’s a thread about the issue with some workarounds which involve messing with the host’s time. (Watch out not to sync your Domain controllers with the wrong time, or bye bye Kerberos!).

Also, today is patch Tuesday by Microsoft and I’m sure a lot of people will be installing critical security patches and rebooting Virtual Machines. That should be interesting…but hey, people will learn not to patch stuff too fast.

The real issue with this is that VMware, an enterprise solution, has built-in license management. How can companies not realize that schemes such as this always hurt the honest customer? The dishonest ones are probably running cracked versions that weren’t affected by this.

( http://xkcd.com/458/ )

I couldn’t resist.

Actual Numbers from Google (Canada)

“I should have kissed her” : 7730

“I shouldn’t have kissed her:” 806

Results from Cuil

I should have kissed her: 4

I shouldn’t have kissed her: 0

My regret is actually having wasted time to check this out. I actually feel guilty comparing anything to Cuil, since it might generate some “buzz” around it.

Does this make anyone want to buy it? Why would I want to buy an Identity Management solution when I see that? What, it’s so great the people who work with it have time to learn ballet instead of how to use it? Wow.

However, this is very amusing:

http://identityhero.sun.com/

Run over people to “provision them” , manage groups, give Single Sign on capability to users, burn auditors…

And the third weird to hell thing about this is the video about Federated Access/Web SSO. Yes, I said Federated, so an obvious bad pun would be…uh..this

How is someone supposed to trust having access to their money if needed when the banks are closed and the ATM’s crash all the time?