Category: Uncategorized

Exchange 2007 clustering advice

Posted on by ewand

I appreciate it’s been a while since I blogged last – a combination of "not much to talk about, really" with even more "no time to talk about it"… 🙁

Anyway, a few questions came in the other day from a reader:

–SCR and CCR seems to work with SAN and DAS. When DAS (direct attached or local storage) is used, and it most probably it’s attached to the Active node, how does the Passive node function if it hasn’t got connection to the DAS/Local storage of the Active node?

In CCR, it’s important to realise that the passive node has its *own* set of disks, which contain its *own* copy of the data – doesn’t really matter if they are DAS or SAN disks (at least not conceptually). So, in a CCR failover scenario, the (as was) passive node switches to being the active node and uses its own copy of the database (which by now becomes the main one). SCR is different in the way failover happens, but in principle it’s similar – the secondary copy of the data is brought online and takes over servicing the clients, but using its own copy of their database.

-Some clients are indicating that having CCR or SCR one wouldn’t have a need for Backup of mailbox servers. Do you have any comments?

Absolutely not. That’s like saying, because my car has an airbag, I don’t need to wear a seatbelt. Check out the High Availability Strategies section of the Exchange documentation for more detail on the options.

Having CCR gives you the ability to fail over in effectively real time, for the purposes of planned maintenance or after an unexpected failure. SCR adds the possibility of having another replica of the data, potentially in a different location, which can be brought online through a manual recovery process (whereas CCR will bring the data back automatically, since it’s part of a cluster).

Backup is still important (What happens if you lose all servers? What about long-term archival of data?) There’s always the possibility that databases could be corrupted or infected in some way, and if that happened, the replica(s) of the databases would also likely suffer the same fate … so taking regular backups would give you the ability to roll back to earlier versions of the database.

There’s always the scenario where users delete some information that needs to be brought back sometime in the future – there are various options around item recovery with Exchange 2007, but if it was deleted (say) a year ago, then you’d be looking at a backup as the means of recovery.

Data Protection Manager would be worth looking into, to help with backup requirements – it allows you to take regular snapshots of a running server, which can later be spooled out to offline storage.

– In SCR, is there a bandwidth utilization estimate used for replicating the Active and Standby/passive node? I understand that in CCR and SCR the log sizes are reduced to 1MB from standard 5MB though.

The log files in Exchange 2007 are reduced from 5Mb to 1Mb anyway – partly because of CCR and LCR (and later SCR), but even if you don’t configure any of the replication technology, you’ll still be on 1Mb logs.

As far as how much bandwidth you’re going to need between nodes for the purposes of replication, well that depends – if your servers are very busy, then they’ll obviously need to shift more data, and latency will come into play.

There is a detailed section in the Exchange TechCenter online documentation which covers planning for replication at a hardware, software configuration and network level.

Seadragon begets Silverlight “Deep Zoom”

Posted on by ewand

There’s a headline that might baffle…

Seadragon Inc was a Seattle-based software company who had done a load of work on handling vast quantities of imagery and being able to manipulate the data in real-time, on-screen. Microsoft acquired Seadragon and has been beavering away behind the scenes to finesse the technology further and to integrate it into other means of delivery – if you haven’t seen it, check out the awesome demo done by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at last year’s TED conference:

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Well, the Seadragon technology gets closer to being available as part of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, now referred to as "Deep Zoom". It was announced recently at Mix08, and I must have missed the significance of this piece but when I saw the first Deep Zoom demo site, I thought "Wow".

One of the demos at the Mix08 conference in Vegas last week, was of a pretty amazing site put up by Hard Rock Cafe, showcasing some of the rock memorabilia they have – mosey over to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com and you’ll get prompted to install Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 if you want.

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The Hard Rock site was built from the ground up in one month, and contains many gigabytes of visual imagery. Not that you’d notice when you visit for the first time having installed Silverlight 2.0…

The back end of the Memorabilia site uses Sharepoint for its content management, although the front end is all custom in Silverlight. There was a parallel announcement at MIX about the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, more details here.

No more to say about this other than it’s really, really, cool. Combine the early delivery of stuff like the Hard Rock Cafe demo site, with Blaise’s idea in the TED Video about how this technology could be used to present information in a non-linear way – imagine being able to zoom into the full stop at the end of a sentence to get pages and pages more detail about what the sentence contained – and the future way that web pages could be delivered to us might be very different from the linear, monolithic way a lot of information is presented today.

Exciting, isn’t it?

More info on "Deep Zoom:

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/03/09/silverlight-deep-zoom-goodies.aspx

http://labs.live.com/Silverlight+2+Deep+Zoom.aspx

http://joestegman.members.winisp.net/DeepZoom/

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http://www.vertigo.com/DeepZoom.aspx

Deep Zoom composer tool preview

Windows Media Center query-based recording

Posted on by ewand

Here’s a tip for anyone running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions (the ones with Media Center functionality), if you have a suitable tuner set up and configured. I mentioned this in passing to someone who uses Media Center as their primary TV tuner, and they didn’t know it was possible – largely because it’s a bit obscure and not exactly easy to find.

I don’t use Media Center as my primary TV – we have a Sky HD box to do that, and although I’m generally happy with the functionality and reliability of the Sky box, its UI isn’t anywhere near as flexible as MC’s. The Guide is one example of that – Sky lets you browse the guide but the options to search it are a bit thin, so it’s OK if you know there’s something you want to record. MC allows you to query the schedules (including all the obscure channels you might never watch) to find specific named programs, or even ones where the metadata matches your search.

My PC in the study has a cheap Hauppauge USB Freeview tuner installed, and an XBox 360 in the living room allows us to watch stuff that gets recorded on the PC.

If you go to Recorded TV on the main MC menu, and select to Add a Recording, you get:

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… meaning, you can record something based on searching the Guide. If you choose the "Create a custom recording" feature, however, you can have MC automatically record a programme that isn’t scheduled yet, on the off-chance that it will be shown again at some point. Useful for catching up with old films that appear every few months.

In this example, maybe I want to record Ghostbusters. Select Keyword from the custom list:

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Now, selecting any of the first 4 options will search against the current guide, and if there’s nothing scheduled, you won’t be able to select it. If you pick Generic keyword, however, and you get a slightly different UI:

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Media Center will allow you to save your query, and will record anything that shows up in the guide at some future date, which features the word you just entered..

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If you want to check what custom recordings you have scheduled, start again from "Recorded TV", and select "View scheduled" – you’ll see a list of anything that’s set to record, but only if it exists already in the guide.

image To see what you have set to record on schedule, choose the "Series" option on the left, and anything that shows up as "ANY CH" means it will record whenever the guide can match your query.

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As I said, not exactly obvious… but very cool!

Virtuali(z)sation & datacenter power

Posted on by ewand

It’s been very quiet here on the Electric Wand for the last month or so:

  • I took a new job in December which means things have been pretty hectic at work. I’m now managing a new group, and lots of time spent building up a great team.
  • Just back from Seattle from a week’s Microsoft internal technical conference.
  • To be honest, I haven’t had much to talk about on the blog 🙂

The TechReady conference I went to in Seattle had a few interesting themes, but much of the technical stuff presented is still internal only so can’t be discussed (yet) online. A good chunk is probably "subject to change" anyway …

There are a few themes which were either covered in a number of different sessions, or which really made me think hard about the way IT is going – amongst them Virtualisation (I do hate using the "z", even though it’s technically OK – it just seems so un-British), the march towards multi-core parallelism (instead of clock speed race) and the whole Green IT agenda of power usage.

I’m planning to write a bit more about both these topics in current weeks, along with business case for Office Communications Server, but here’s some food for thought:

A major enterprise datacenter could well be consuming 10s of Megawatt/Hs of power – something that could be equated to many, many flights or other so-called demons of carbon emissions. A back-of-an-envelope calculation of all Microsoft’s own datacenter power usage (including all the online services) would equate to over 100 Jumbo Jet flights from London to Seattle every day. That’s 100 planes, not 100 passengers…

This power usage topic is one which is going to grow in importance – not just because power prices are rising (eg a 100 MW/h power usage for a large internet datacenter could easily cost more than £15m per annum in power costs alone). One project internally in Microsoft is looking at the actual power usage and the equivalent tonnes of CO2 emissions of all of its datacenters – a concept that’s surely to become more mainstream in the future.

Citing datacenters by renewable energy sources (such as Google’s massive datacenter by the Colorado river in Oregon) makes the power usage more palatable, but it doesn’t remove the need to reduce heat (and air conditioning requirements) and overall power usage – even if it means employing people to physically go round pulling the plugs at night-time on the myriad rack servers.

Anyway, as I said, more on this topic in coming weeks – in the meantime, I’ve not gone away … just waiting for the right time to pipe up 🙂

The Firmware of Everyday Things

Posted on by ewand

(with apologies to Donald Norman, for paraphrasing his excellent book title)


As an IT person, I’m pretty used to the idea that I need to update software now and again. Sometimes, it’s to make it more secure (closing down vulnerabilities that afflict any software exposed to the outside world), fixing bugs (which affect all software, period) or adding new features and functionality (which maybe the designers of the software didn’t think of before, or which they just didn’t have time to implement). Maybe the update is the form of a patch, maybe it’s a whole new version that I will choose to buy.


As the reach of software gets more and more pervasive, it’s interesting to note the difference between what people will do in an IT world, and what they expect from the rest of the world around them.


Now, I spent a good chunk of the last weekend updating the firmware in my car, specifically the software which controls the entertainment systems, the Sat-Nav etc – in my case, it’s Audi’s excellent MMI system, but many other manufacturers are moving to some kind of multi-modal, software-based control mechanism for the myriad systems in the car.



BMW “popularised” such a system with it’s iDrive control technology, which seemingly took several revisions to be usable by any car reviewer, even though it made perfect sense to me.


Getting software upgrades for these things is far from easy: arguably, nor should it be. What business do ordinary consumers have in getting hold of low-cost or free updates, which they apply themselves, to make their ownership experience better?


As it happens, I heard about a series of updates which would make the navigation system built in to my car quite a bit better – and on asking, my dealer was more than happy to supply the software update for me and install it, for only £100+VAT to cover the labour involved.


I managed to find far more than I ever dreamt I needed to know, through various online forums – http://www.navplus.us/ particularly – that opened up a whole series of secret key-press combinations to bring up hidden menus, the part numbers of the CDs I’d need to order from the dealer (at about £1.50 each), and the procedures to upgrade the whole thing myself.


Here’s an example of just one such hidden menu…



So many other devices which previously would have been considered an appliance, now have the capability to be upgraded if only the suppliers embrace the idea and maybe even make it easy. Examples abound – the Philips Pronto universal remote control has spawned a huge user community to modifying the way it works, precisely because Philips made the software available to do so easily, and regularly updates the device’s capability based on user feedback.


I upgrade my mobile phone with beta software regularly, my Zune music player got a whole new look and feel courtesy of some free software and firmware upgrades. There are secret menus on my TV that show the software version, the satellite receiver downloads firmware updates automatically (even though sometimes it manages to crash when it tries to install them). Even the DVD drive that I fitted to my home PC has a little bit of software that checks online for updates to its firmware, and the PC into which I fitted it was having all sorts of trouble with its memory until I applied a BIOS update from the manufacturer.


Much of this stuff is very much beyond the ken of the man on the Clapham Omnibus, but as IT hardware awareness spreads out to the general public in time, maybe it’s not going to be too far in the future when people routinely expect improvements to come to any piece of electronic equipment through periodic updates.


Of course, it can all go horribly wrong – twice on Saturday, I got myself into a situation with the car where none of the MMI system worked, meaning I had no radio, no navigation, no GUI to any of the other systems like parking sensors or suspension settings etc… and it took a good deal of fuse-pulling and rebooting to get it all working again.


Maybe it’s better to just rely on someone to do it all for you …

Bird’s Eye view on Live maps – how cool is that?

Posted on by ewand

The Windows Live search team did a pretty major update (a few months ago) to a number of elements of the search engine at live.com, but one of the nicest is the maps integration. Type in a postcode, a place or business name and click on Maps and you’ll hopefully go straight there…

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As the Virtual Earth technology behind the Live Maps site improves, and as the quality of the data behind it gets better too, I’ve noticed quite a few sites shift to using it, sometime away from other mapping services like Google Maps or Multimap (which Microsoft recently acquired, so that may have something to do with it).

Whilst shooting the breeze on the web the other day, I thought I’d check out Rightmove to nose through a list of property that’s for sale near my home (having found Rightmove and PropertyFinder, Google Earth and Virtual Earth so valuable when I was house-hunting a couple of years ago). Rightmove now has a service called "AboutMyPlace" which is shown in response to searches of an area, but also pinpointing the exact location of specific property that’s for sale.

Anyway, I found a house not far from mine which was for sale; on the AboutMyPlace site, I was quite impressed to see their use of Virtual Earth, then saw that Bird’s Eye view was available…

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View from AboutMyPlace, showing the Virtual Earth UI

I hadn’t realised that Bird’s Eye view had been improved so much, or that its reach had been so expanded – previously, it was really just major cities and the likes which got it, but during last summer, it’s clear that planes have been criss-crossing the UK and taking some really good quality pictures from multiple angles (so you can rotate the view)…

Now I can see my own house (and all of the neighbours’ too!) in a while new way – it’s  amazing, and can drain hours out of your day if you’re not careful.

Here’s Microsoft’s TVP just as one example (try it for yourself by searching for RG6 1WG and clicking on Bird’s Eye view)

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Now isn’t that good?

I need some Flo Control – or Arnie Control, more like

Posted on by ewand

Regulars may remember the trouble my PC was having with Arnie the cat… well I could use some more technology in and around the house to solve another little problem.

Arnie & his sister have now got quite big – they’re just over a year old, so fully-functional adult cats (well, not entirely fully functional, if you know what I mean), with a keen sense of how to catch, kill and sometimes eat quite a bit of the local rodent population (which given that we live in the country, is quite high).

Now it’s not much fun catching live mice that have been hauled in through the cat flap, it’s not a great deal better picking up the (sometimes partially consumed) cadavers of others, and I’m sure it’s not exactly a great time for the poor little meeces either.

Today, we spent some time dragging the fridge out to locate where the stink was coming from – and eventually located a long-dead mouse underneath. Less than an hour later, whilst we were sitting in the kitchen having lunch, Arnie came steaming through the flap with his latest victim in his gob – prompting stern and immediate attention, in slamming doors, shooing him back outside again etc.

So, a solution must be found.

A few years ago, I came across an intriguing project called Flo Control, where someone had rigged up a PC to the cat flap and performed facial recognition on the cat that was trying to come into the house – in this case, a cat called Flo. If Flo was alone, the flap would open, but if she was carrying anything in her mouth, it would stay resolutely shut.

It seems the guys behind Flo Control think that processor technology has come on so much in recent times, that it will be possible to release a box that fits to the door, without needing the PC attached.

The current solution looks pretty cumbersome – not just with the PC attached, but the box on the other side of the door.  It essentially takes a snapshot of the silhouette of whatever sticks it head towards the flap, and then uses shape recognition technology to decide whether to open the door or not…

All clear, Flo Not so fast, buster…

I Want one of those

This kind of idea could even be a winner for the likes of Dragons’ Den – I’d be quite happy (as a consumer) to pay ~£100 for something like this, and since there are reckoned to be more than 6 million cat owning households in the UK, there’s clearly an opportunity in this country alone. Magnetic flaps which only allow a cat wearing a specific collar to come in & out cost about £40, so it’s not outrageous to think people would spend a good bit more.

A basic device would have a mini-USB port that could take a laptop controlling it (to check on settings etc), would have a rechargeable battery and a simple training mechanism where the cat is plonked on the other side, and (like those fingerprint recognition devices) a few attempts of cat coming in are used to let the device’s cheapo camera figure out what “normal” looks like.

Deluxe editions might be inobtrusively mains-powered, offering the delight of being able WiFi attached, so you could help train it, provide a log of when the cat came in & out (and even which cat it was, if you have a collection) etc etc. Even get alerted on your PC if the cat’s trying to come in but the flap’s not sure if he is solo or accompanied…

Added finesse could even be automatic timing control – eg. cats can’t leave the flap after 9pm but if they’re still outside, then can come in until 11pm after which it closes for the night…

Is this a great example of a techy toy, or something that only a techie could dream up but which could find a following in the general populace? Or another “seems like a good idea at the time” gadget that would gather dust in one of those catalogues full of things you didn’t know you needed, that fall out of the Sunday papers..?

Happy New Year!

The lost art of the OOF

Posted on by ewand

Some time ago, I posted about how the ".sig" has faded from grandeur. I’d like to add the somewhat terminal dryness of the OOF message to that list, and propose a solution.

OOF is a Microsoft term for Out of Office. It should really be OOO, but is stuck in the days of the predecessor to MS Mail and Exchange. See http://msexchangeteam.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=oof for myriad stuff on OOFs, and here (on why it’s OOF and not OOO) for one of the first – and for a while, most-read – blog posts on the Exchange team blog.

I’ve seen a lot of OOFs in my time, and many are of a hugely unimaginative nature. Some are kind-of smart in that they convey the most information in the shortest amount of characters (eg "oof til 7/1 – mail jbloggs if urgent") whereas some have clearly been lovingly hand crafted.

When I worked in the Exchange product group, I sent a mail to one particular guy (who is ex-pat Brit but had been over in Redmond for some time) on the 16th December. Turns out, he’d gone "home" for "the holidays" and I got:

I am so on vacation. By the time I get back, I expect things will look different. See you on 1/17/05. I probably won’t ever read your email. Sorry.

There’s something refreshingly honest about that – it’s admitting that he’s not going to be on email for at least a month, by which time, anything he got sent in email will be out of date. Brilliant. Helps build a case for Instant Messaging if you ask me.

Probably the best OOF I’ve seen came from a somewhat eccentric Canadian (who once replied when I mentioned I’d seen him the previous evening in New Orleans, clearly having a Nice Time), "oh yeah… any night when I don’t end up in jail has to be a good night"). Enjoy…

It happened. I knew it would happen some day, but never dreamed it would happen so soon. I tried to hide it from everyone, but word got out and boy did I catch hell for it. Yes, as embarrassing as it is, I must confess before God and country that I was caught, red-handed, Getting Productive Work Done In The Office!

People, please: do try to control your Shock and Horror. I know we used to do real work Long Ago, but we’ve moved past that, haven’t we? It was an honest mistake; an accident in the truest sense of the word. I did my best to hide it from everyone and thought I was successful around the children and my more-dense co-workers. But there is only so long one can live a charade, and in the end, like a house of cards in a hurricane it came down, down, down…

To pay for my egregious act of productivity and practical effort, I’ve been sentenced to two days of offsite meetings by a jury of my direct management.

Yes, kiddies, that is Two Whole Days of unbridled Tag-Teaming, Outlining, Problem-Solving, Situation-Analysing, Team-Building, Proactively-Leveraging, Federating, Brainstorming Facilitation and Group Contemplation. Unpack the markers and the big pads of paper, Martha: we is gonna have an offsite!!

Can you already feel the sweat drip slowly down ewers of water; the ice cubes grumbling with frustration at their inevitable doom in a pastel room filled with inoffensive Corporate Art? Can you see the elegant buffet of Northwest Grilled Salmon Medallions lounging in a Light Cream Sauce over chirping steam trays, accented by a tossed salad of Garden Fresh Greens? Can you hear that first person raise their hand to state, two hours into to the discussion, that "Before we go any further, we need to define the problem" only to be followed seconds later by another person wondering "what are the criteria for success?"

Do you get the idea that at some point on the first day, I’ll be screaming out "BINGO!" to a very confused audience?

Ah; they’re used to it…

A co-worker once told me you could solve any team problem with a case of malt liquor, an afternoon of skeet shooting and a strip club. He’s no longer employed at the company (something to do with an offsite of his own gone terribly awry near the Montana state border) but I think he was on the right track.

Where I am going, there are no visiting hours, and even worse: no conjugal visits. I might be reachable at <number>. Heck, if it’s really important, email or text me. Rumour has it the gardener can smuggle those in hidden in his watering can…

See you on The Other Side,

ian

Now I ask only one thing. We must all put some degree of (professionally relevant) imagination into our OOFs. It’s only respectful to the poor sods still at work who’re sending us email whilst we enjoy a few days out, isn’t it?

Have a Happy New Year, everyone. And please, for the sake of the rest of us, make your OOFs mean something special. Or funny. Or whatever.

The downside of online shopping

Posted on by ewand

I bought myself an early Christmas present a few weeks ago. One Saturday morning, sitting at the home PC whilst noodling about on the web, I decided it was time to replace the old warhorse and get something a bit more modern.


So I surfed off to my favourite PC web emporium and specced up a nice new Shuttle box with a quad-core low voltage CPU, 2 GB RAM, 1Tb of disk and a half decent video card. A very good deal at less than £750 delivered, I thought. All from a trusted, well-used website that I’ve spent a small fortune with before.


Problem #1 came when the expected ship-date sailed into the past, and as time got nearer Christmas, I feared for getting hold of this new and shiny toy in time to give me an excuse to excuse myself from the washing-up on the big day.


Repeated attempts to contact the web-vendor failed – “you need to call the web-orders guy on this different number”, said the company’s ‘customer services’ people – and the web guy was either letting his phone ring out (and no voicemail) or was engaged. For two whole days.


Eventually (a week later than scheduled), the goods were showing as “shipped” on ‘reputed’ web company’s site.


This after the goods were showing as in stock on the day I ordered, that is, the day they charged my credit card. Oh, and to add insult to injury, they’d dropped the prices of some of the items the day before they shipped my order… which of course, I’d paid at the higher price.


Problem #2 came when the courier was showing the following day as being “with driver” – and yet nothing happened.


And the following day, it was still the same state.


And the next.


And when I left to take the 1.5 hour round-trip drive to their depot to find out what was going on… guess what… it was really out with the driver this time, and would be delivered before 5:30. REALLY? Yes, said the man. DEFINITELY? Of course.


At 5:20 and with no parcel in possession, I set off to the depot again. Arriving at (cough) 5:55, the nice man took the number of the consignment, checked where it was, and a mere 15 minutes later arrived with the parcel in his hand.


“Why was it not delivered today, as you promised?”, I asked.


“Oh, there’s a real backlog on that route and they didn’t get to deliver it today”, says he.


“And what would you do with that parcel now, had it not been delivered?”


Try again tomorrow. A Saturday. When there’s nobody in the office. And won’t be until the New Year, now. That is, at least a week later than it should have been delivered, according to plan.


And the delivery company says we have two days to pick the parcel up from them if they try to deliver it and nobody’s there, after which they return to sender (see Problem #1).


It’s all made MUCH worse by the fact that this particular courier firm (who I did not choose; the vendor did, because it suited them and was presumably cheaper) is a franchise operation so there’s no single “throat to choke” – they just put you through to the handling depot if there’s any problem. If the depot is incompetent and/or swamped there’s nothing you can do.


In the hour or so that I spent (in total) standing in the depot, the phone was ringing continuously and nobody was answering. There were people sitting at their desks doing “work”, and yellow-jacketed delivery guys hanging about, but nobody manning the phones.


So: I spent 2.5hrs on hold to these people; maybe 1 hour hanging  about waiting to be dealt with at the actual depot; 2.5 hours or so in total driving down and back to chase them up because they don’t answer the phone, don’t respond to faxes* and don’t have an email address…


I sometimes wonder: is e-commerce really worth the hassle, compared to going down to the local PC shop who can give you advice, sell you what they have in stock and let you take it away with you..?


Would I willingly use this same company again?


 


Damn. I’ve just ordered a couple of new bits for the new PC I have, from the same people – it’s easy, they’re cheap, and they promise to deliver by Christmas Eve.


Bets, anyone?



* This was a story from another guy in the queue. He worked for a different delivery company, yet he was picking something up from this one.


He said, his company get fined (internally) if they don’t answer the phone after a few rings. He spent 1.5 hours on hold to this company from 4:30pm to 6:00pm the night before. At 6:00pm the message changed from (and I kid you not) “There are MANY people ahead of your in the queue” to “The offices are now closed… try again tomorrow”).


He sent them a fax, but got no reply.


Merry Christmas, by the way.


Bah. Humbug.


🙂