I never really realized how much of a night person I am until I came back to work this week.

During my vacation, I pretty much started inverting my schedule, staying up really late (well, 1:00a or thereabouts, which is late for me nowadays) and sleeping in. It was a very easy thing to do, staying up until then and getting up around 8 or 9 the next morning. But going back to the “wake up at 6:15a, in bed by 10:30p” routine is another matter entirely. I’m so beat on that schedule. I feel like it’s way too early when I wake up, and then I’m not tired when it’s time to sleep at night. I need to reset my body clock or something.

I’m reading this book Inside Delta Force by Eric L. Haney. It’s actually a really cool document of how they formed the counterterrorist unit of the US Army. The interesting thing about books like this is that I know I don’t have the physical or mental abilities it would take to do this stuff (but I like to sometimes imagine that I do) and reading about these guys in these dangerous situations, risking their lives for the civilian population and whatnot really makes me admire them for their efforts. Reading it, you almost feel like you’re there, right alongside the guy as he goes through the selection and training process and finally goes through various missions. Very interesting stuff.

I’ve spent all day at work today rebuilding servers. It’s tedious, time consuming crapwork and I’m really quite sick of it. The only redeeming factor is that it does give me a little reading time during the install process. Why am I rebuilding these machines? Glad you asked…

I am in charge of implementing this product called SharePoint Portal Server at work. I’ve talked about it before here. It’s sort of like a document management server that allows folks to collaborate on things and disseminate information in a convenient format. It’s a pretty nifty thing the way they tie a web front-end to the document management back-end to make it all one convenient package.

In my workings with it, though, it seems that everything we want to do with it is something “out of the ordinary” or not outside the normal scope of what they intended it to do. At least, that’s what I’m guessing because I seem to find all sorts of problems and holes in it all the time - almost on a weekly basis. I have more product and developer support calls open right now than I can shake a stick at.

One of the calls I’ve talked about is the IE6 SP1 issue - if you install IE6 SP1 on a SharePoint Portal Server, it breaks the server. I finally got an answer from Microsoft - the latest service pack for SharePoint Portal Server, not yet released, mind you, is supposed to fix it. To demonstrate, they sent me the production version of the service pack so that I could try it. It’s not even available yet, but I’ve got it so I can fix my stuff. Good deal, right?

SharePoint Portal Server SP2 breaks SharePoint Portal Server, even worse than IE6 SP1 does.

I mean, if you put IE6 SP1 on your Portal Server box, you could work around the problem while MS worked out a fix. If you put SPS SP2 on there, it breaks so much stuff, you’re really screwed. You can’t connect to it with development tools anymore, stuff stops showing up in the web view of things… it’s just really messed up. I’ve sent my findings to the “Critical Problem Resolution Team” and we’ll see what they say.

Portal Server Geeks: Before you ask, NO, I can’t send you the service pack, and NO, I don’t know where you can find it. Our agreement with MS specifically prohibits me from providing you the software, and it’s not available on their web site yet. Trust me, that’s a good thing.

Anyway, my day is going slower than slow and I think I’ll probably be doing this for a long time tomorrow, too. They should really allow drinking on the job or something here. :)