A while ago, I purchased a Mac. I love my Mac. It beats the crap out of any Windows computer I have ever owned. I do have one problem, though, and it deals with Entourage and VPN, which may actually be something I could just blame on Microsoft.

At work, we are still using the dinosaur Exchange 2000 for our email. We have a “new” server sitting around, and when I say new I mean hardly even used because we have had it for almost a year and a half, bur out network administrator has yet to get it totally up and running. Part of the problem is his decision to move from the old 32 bit architecture to the 64 bit and the ensuing problems with upgrading from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007. Some day I am sure he will finally get it up and running (and he damn well better before Snow Leopard comes out in September with integrated Exchange 2007 support in Apple Mail!) but, much like what was said at the end of Conan the Barbarian, that is a story for another day. Because of this, my options are currently very limited with regards to email clients.

I could use Apple Mail or Thunderbird, but neither one of them has MAPI support, so I would be without my calendar and contacts being updated on my Blackberry. This leaves me with Entourage.

Overall, I do like Entourage. It reminds me a good deal of Outlook, only without some of the bloated crap in that particular PIM (does anyone actually use the journal?). My main gripe deals with trying to connect to our Exchange server when I am away from the office.

Entourage has built in support for OWA. One would think that, since we have OWA access, I should be able to easily connect to the server and be done without. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I get the feeling that forms login is all that is supported, and we, unfortunately, are still using pop up login. Maybe, in the near future, this could be fixed with our upgrade, but like I said, when that happens I am switching to Apple Mail.

The only other option available is to connect to the network at work via VPN and access the Exchange server that way. While this sounds good in theory, I have found that it does not work very well in practice. For some reason, when I start the VPN tunnel, Entourage refuses to connect. Every other email account works without any issues what so ever, but for some reason it refuses to find our Exchange server.

I have tried using the IP address, using the server name, using the fully qualified server name with the domain, and I get nothing. It feels almost like I picked the box on Wheel of Fish and Kuni just yelled, “Nothing! Absolutely Nothing!! STUPID!!! YOU SO STUUPPIIIDDD!!!!”

Hopefully, someone who actually knows what my problem is will stumble across this soon and perhaps, if I am truly lucky, give me some ideas about what may be causing Entourage to not like my VPN tunnel. Perhaps I have set something up that won’t allow it to connect? Maybe Entourage just hates VPN tunnels? I definitely have run out of ideas.

For almost three months now, or basically since the realization was reached that my marriage was totally over (still need to get that totally resolved) I have been seeing one of the women I work with.

While I have heard people say this is a bad thing, and have always thought it was myself, it has actually been working out very well.

Last week, on Memorial Day, my sister had a birthday party for her daughter that a number of our family members attended. One of my cousins asked me, “How did you get her.” I replied with a snide comment about seeing her on the shelf at the store, price being reasonable, and decided to go ahead and buy her. A few chuckles from those around for my lame joke, by I then said that we worked together. She threw out some figure about 78% of people getting married these days are with coworkers (not sure where she got that figure, probably from one of her college classes) and this made me think a little more about how we are able to make this work out for the two of us.

The number one thing we do is to keep our personal lives and work lives as separate as possible. When we are at work, we do not talk about outside work. When we are together outside work, we do not talk about work. Those are two different aspects of our lives and should not be intertwined at all. There are some exceptions, of course, where she may have had a bad day, or I may have had a bad day, and since I used to do the job she does now I understand fully what her frustrations are.

We also try to not spend a lot of time together when we are working. Work is for work. It is not social hour. Luckily, we do not do work very closely together. While we both are in the office, she performs customer service and I do IT work. I do not give her preferential treatment if she has a problem, I try my best to treat everyone as equally as possible. The only time we ever really talk is when we go outside to smoke, so for maybe 30 minutes out of the entire day. Doing this allows us to enjoy the time we spend together away from work since we are not in each other’s space all day long.

The only problem I have with the entire situation are my other coworkers. I don’t have an issue with people knowing that we are seeing each other. The issue I have is when people start talking about something that is not there business. Some of the women here scream about their personal lives on the phone where you actually know every little thing that is happening in their lives. We are not like that. If I do not broadcast anything about my personal life, then it isn’t any of their business, nor should it be something that they need to discuss. I do not know if we are a topic of conversation, and I really do not care in the long run, but I have always preferred if someone has a question about my life, then they should come to me directly and ask me about it as opposed to someone who isn’t even involved.

Actually, on second thought, that is not my “only” problem. The biggest problem is vacation time. We do not perform the same job, if I am gone she does not cover my desk and vice versa. On Saturday, I am leaving with my family for the Outer Banks and we invited her to go with us. I told my mother (who, incidentally, also works with me) that it was going to be an uphill battle with management, but I managed to get my girl friend to go ahead and put in her vacation request. Two weeks later, it was actually approved, much to my surprise, and after much debate amongst management and talks they had with the office staff. How exactly was it any of the office staffs business? Why did they feel the need to ask them if it was alright? Despite all that, though, she will be coming with us and I am extremely happy about that.