Are you a Quest employee visiting New York City?

Take my advice and do what I did - stay in our corporate apartment in Hoboken, NJ. I know, that was my first reaction: Hoboken? Why the heck would I want to stay there??!!

• It has an amazing view of the Manhattan skyline both day and, especially at night.
• It's on the Hudson River. Any more "on" and you'd be in it.
• It's "free", 3 bedroom, kitchen, TV, wi-fi, phone, multiple bathrooms and a balcony overlooking the river and the skyline.
• Grocery, liquor and drug store within a 2 minute walk.
• It's a $7 ferry ride from the foot of the apartment to Pier79 in Manhattan (39th Ave) or to the World Trade Center ferry terminal. Easy subway or cab from there. Free bus service from the ferry, too.
• Washington Street in Hoboken is a block away and it has lots of great restaurants and pizza places.
• Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken - if it was good enough for him...

Also, I was shocked when our corporate travel folks booked me in the Sheraton Suites in Weehawken, NJ at ~$450/night. Manhattan hotels were +++$650/night! Even on an expense account I cannot stomach paying this much for a hotel room.

Interested in checking it out? Shoot me an e-mail, I'll hook you up!

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Quest Software

PassGo, Forrester, New York City & food poisoning

So much news and so little time to write but a deluge is coming...

- Quest to acquire PassGo

I am SUPER EXCITED about this acquisition!

- Forrester shows Quest Software as leader in their Active Directory Management Solutions wave

Nice proof point of the innovation and fine work that our product management team has been doing over the last few years.

- Lots of notes from my meetings in New York City including my bout with food poisoning (redacted version).

More shortly!

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Quest Software, Active Directory, identity management, PassGo

Would you help me? My PC is...

I'm sure we've all heard this. Yesterday, I spent about 2.5 hours at a friends house working on her PC problem. She's a semi-pro photographer and makes a decent living from taking pictures of the kids in the local schools and selling the shots to the parents.

The situation for her was that she had some kind of a trojan that kept telling her machine was infected, slow or hijacked and then it would bring up a web browser that pointed to a site to download some software to solve the problem. I'm sure there's no connection between the trojan and the site/software that is brought up in the browser. Some interesting reminders came out of the house call:

1. People, if you don't have an AV (anti-virus) program installed you are nuts. Get with the program. There are two types of computer users: Those that have been affected by a virus/trojan/malware and those that are about to be.
2. Are you doing backups? If not why not?
3. Are you checking that your backups actually work? Try restoring a file sometime and see what happens.

Oh, and a rant for Norton's product: I told my friend to drive over to Circuit City, grab Norton, install it and she'd be okay. I was wrong. COME ON YOU GUYS! Don't sit there telling me that the "hijack" has been taken care of and then have it pop right back up again. Idiots.

Raves for Microsoft. I went to their web site where they offered me a virus scan. They found the problem and eliminated it - for FREE. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Thompson (CEO, Symantec) - looks like Microsoft one-upped you in your own back yard.

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Microsoft, Symantec

December is announced with snow in Seattle

Technically, this is a picture taken in Bellevue, WA which is east of Seattle and closer to the mountains. However, it is very uncommon for us to get snow. That said, it was very nice to wake up to this scene.

I wonder if this winter we will see much more snow?