Live Life. Life is Short. Life is an Adventure.

Some times I’m just disgusted to be involved in the IT Industry, due to the incompetence of others that then reflect poorly on everybody else.

In this case at a present client, a new company wide email implementation using Microsoft Outlook as the Email Client and most likely Exchange Server is occuring. It has been for some time, there have been several delays and a lot of problems!

A particular user’s email address has been configured with an asposthe (’). Now practically anybody with any system admin experience knows that an email address cannot contain this characters. Ok, well it’s not that bad, just correct it.

But what typifies this incompetence, is the rollout was done by IBM, not some new system admin that may have made a honest mistake. We are talking about a professional organisation that provides IT services. Ok, well let’s just say again it was a simple mistake, the bureaucratic side of my comment comes from the fact that the organisation where this email rollout was deployed has no ability to correct the problem (how can this be possible), and the resultant request made to the implementation company IBM, now wants to charge for the correction of there own incompetence.

The irony is I was the person that discovered it in a site wide rollout, and I only found it by doing a reply to an email (which is a common practice normally). Where was the checks and balances by all the people that have been involved in the process for sometime, and are supposed to be the experts? Where was the quality?

As I mentioned at the start of my post, I’m disgusted.

I’ve had a bit of a windfall of books in the past 2 weeks. I purchased 2 books for the flights to/from the US, picked up an Amazon order on some Database Reference Material for some writings I’m doing, and quite a bounty at the MySQL Users Conference.

• “Screw It, Lets’ Do It - Lessons in Life” by Richard Branson
• “Losing My Virginity - The Autobiography” by Richard Branson
• “An Introduction to Database Systems - Eighth Edition” by C.J. Date
• “Database in Depth - Relational Theory for Practitioners” by C.J. Date
• “The Database Relational Model - A Retrospective Review and Analysis” by C. J. Date
• “MySQL in a Nutshell”
• “PHP in a Nutshell”
• “MySQL Clustering”
• “MySQL Stored Procedures”
• “MySQL Administrator’s Guide and Language Reference”