Chris Miller Blog

I still hate them.

But not as much as I did.  With a massive computer upgrade they're now performing tolerably.  Not great, but tolerably.  They use something like 118 mb of RAM and take forever to load, but not as long a forever as it used to be.  I still think there should be a quick to load lightweight easy to use query tool.  I just want something to pull up a query window with load/save file options and a quick link in a menu to books online.

The inconsistency of the UI still amazes me.  So let's see…if I double-click a maintenance plan, it comes up in a tabbed view, but an error log comes up in a new, floating window. 

That said the error log viewer is now actually usable, which is good because my sysadmin hasn't quite figured out how to add me to the remote desktop user's group on the servers I'm managing.  That's OK though, the same folks run the phone system, I've been here or a week and my phone doesn't work yet either.  Unfortunately these are the same people responsible for my tape backups, so (1) I have to be nice to them, and (2) I'm going to be checking my tape backups every week or so because if they can't get a phone (150 year old technology) working what are the chances the tape drives (which are finicky unreliable horrible tech at best) to work reliably.  I'm going to be pushing for a backup-to-disk solution soon I think, at least for the database servers.  Gimme a half dozen of those old-school removable slide-in-slide-out Serial ATA trays and a bunch of the new 1 terabyte disks and I'll just do it old school anyway.