Ow. I hurt. I strained my neck a few weeks ago, and it’s been borderline since, so I’ve been going to see a massage therapist at the clinic Candice works at. It’s helpful, and it’s good hurt, but ow ow ow. Lots of deep work on my pecs to try to get my shoulders to go back and let my neck relax.

I went for a great ride tonight — between my back and a sprained ankle I’ve been sort of spotty on the bike lately. But unlike last time I went out after a week off, everything came back right away this time, which makes me think I’m finally getting the hang of it. I need to get a padded-laptop-sleeve backpack and a cargo net so I can start riding to work. Might try that this Friday, and will definitely be out on Ride to Work Day on July 20th, unless it’s pouring.

Tonight’s ride was my usual in-city circuit along the Ottawa River Parkway, Queen Elizabeth Driveway, and Island Park Drive. You can see the route here, provided I got the link right. It’s a nice evening cruise.

I figured out what I was trying to do in last night’s post. On Monday, I had the worst possible Microsoft support call ever. The problem was that we had a share in one domain and a domain-local group with access to it in another domain, and, yes, domain-local means what it sounds like. There wasn’t a lot of obfuscation on top of that, but there was enough historical damage that we didn’t see the problem at first and it looked like an ACL that just wasn’t being applied. So mid-afternoon Monday, we called Microsoft for support. Highlights:

• Support tech could not open a Visio file
• Entire first two hours of conversation, after describing our situation, involved clarifying things already clarified for 30 seconds followed by 10-15 minutes of on-hold while support tech talked to his tech lead
• Had us run a diagnostic program that produced a 16MB CAB file which we were to send to him, only to find that his mail server only accepts 10MB attachments
• When he wanted me to go to the LiveMeeting website, he asked me to “access the web server on the domain controller”, and did not realize that something was up when I told him that we were not running IIS
• While trying to make the CAB smaller via a LiveMeeting shared desktop (so he could just see which files were deletable and worth deleting), he couldn’t get a folder to open — it just kept switching between “selected” and “rename” mode, for about ten attempts, before he just asked us to open the folder
• Woops, didn’t need to be in that folder after all
• The reporting tool creates both a CAB file to mail and a directory full of the files in the CAB, un-cabbed for local reading; after the tech deleted a bunch of large but unnecessary files from that directory, he asked us to try mailing the CAB again, but hadn’t actually modified the contents of the CAB at all
• Didn’t figure out that a domain-local group in domain A can’t be used to apply permissions to a share in domain B

I do however have a “Please tell us how we did!” survey sitting in my inbox. That should be fun!