Over the past several weeks I realized just how important Internet connectivity was to me.

On Feburary 8, after returning from my trip to Seattle, I discovered that my Internet connection at home was broken.  It started out the alarm light on my DSL modem.

I called support and walked through the normal questions of “Did you power cycle the modem?”, or “Is the modem plugged in?”

After we got passed that we thought it was a modem problem, so they arranged to have a modem dropped off at my house the next day.  The same problem persisted.

To make a long story short, we wound up dedicated a single pair of wire for  phone jack and used that pair strictly for the modem from the NID. 

Now I have new hardware, they put me on a new network with speeds about 3MB. 

I was offline for 11 days.  It was a long 11 days since it took all of my sites and email server offline.  I was stuck with tethering my cell phone to my PC for Internet access.  The Bluetooth works as a great alternative, but can be pretty slow.

Connectivity is one of those things that you don’t realize that you miss unless it isn’t there.  It’s just like dial-tone…You pick up a phone and expect to hear dial-tone.  I open a browser, I expect it to go to my favorite home page.  Nonetheless, I am back online!

Microsoft announced the release of Windows Mobile 6 this week at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

This newest release will contain the DirectPush technology that was introduced last year as well as Office Mobile, code name “Crossbow”.  As far as Office applications on your mobile device go, you’ll be able to use mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One cool thing to note about Outlook Mobile is that this newest version will allow you to view email in rich-text and HTML formats, enhancing the user experiencing and seeing a message as it was originally intended.

Now for all of the T-Mobile Dash users out there like myself, Microsoft also announced that the Dash will have a Windows Mobile 6 upgrade available in the next couple of months.  That is great news!  I’m looking forward to this update.

You can read the Microsoft press release on Windows Mobile 6 here.

A cool picture I took on a flight into Seattle...

ABE filters shared folders visible to a user based on that individual user's access rights, preventing the display of folders or other shared resources that the user does not have rights to access. ABE can be accessed via graphical user interface (GUI), command-line executable tool, and a robust advanced programming interface (API).

This functionality is something similar to what you see in a Novell environment. 

You can control the settings of ABE via Group Policy as well.

You can download the ABE GUI interface here.