(posted at 10:10PM GMT) 
I'm currently enjoying my new self-employed status; as a direct result of all the extra time available to me, the development of the new dspam cluster is way ahead of schedule (originally specced for end of May but should be with spilsby.net customers by the beginning of April) with the new billing system ready by the beginning of March.
Once the dspam cluster is up and running, I'll be deactivating the spamassassin cluster once I am satisfied all is running okay.
It has now been just over a week since I officially left the ICT Department at Linkage and since then, the following systems are no longer working:
* OWA at Toynton Campus is broken (connections to the IIS service on that box are being rejected).
* General Internet access.
Also, someone really did the department proud by breaking automatic proxy detection (ever heard of option-252 ?) and I especially liked the mail which went out to everyone:
'If you can't access the Internet and your Automatic Proxy detection box is ticked, please untick it but if it is already unticked, please tick it.'
WTF !?!?!?!
As someone who worked on an ISP helldesk for three years, there is a far easier way of doing that without pissing off 1,000+ users in the process... ever heard of the IEAK ?
This is why Microsoft zealots really wind me up; they should at least have the decency to learn the tools of their trade and figure out how to get their workstations to auto-configure rather than ask the users to do it for them... or is it just because their learning curve is so limited and they are generally resistant to anything 'new' ?
I was also amazed to learn that someone in the department who shall remain nameless has been moving student mailboxes over to a Microsoft Exchange server that only has an ADSL connection with only 256Kbit/s upstream connectivity.
This was brought to my attention by one of my evening class students on Tuesday evening who had been complaining that his mail was taking forever to load now and apparently he didn't know that the server was on an ADSL connection, because, once I told him, his exact words were, "... but that's stupid!".
... and as for the comment in the mail about developing an in-house support tracking application, they really need to get their priorities straight:
FACT: They are short-staffed.
FACT: They have one individual doing the work of three people... an individual who recently collapsed during the working day, probably due to stress and exhaustion.
(EDIT: This has now been confirmed by a local hospital!)
... and their solution is to devote already scarce staffing resources to developing an application which makes it easier for other staff to pile even more work on to him!
The worst thing about this is that I initially felt guilty for leaving the ICT Department as I felt that if I had been there, he wouldn't have been overworked/stressed and therefore wouldn't have collapsed but in hindsight, I don't feel guilty, I feel anger towards the individual who 'managed' that workload onto him as the individual could have done a lot more to ease his burden.
Although, I'm quietly confident that some sanity, might, just might, be restored to the ICT Department very very soon... | 
