Angela made me take the bus

I was all set to take my bike this morning, but Angela rang and said she could see the stormy rain coming and that I should bus instead.  Naively I believed her, and took the bus in through the bright, sunny weather.  It's COLD mind you.  Really cold.  Biting southerly cold.  And windy.  So windy that the flag on top of the beehive was a shredded scrap of rag this morning.

I went to my first NZTE French lesson today.  It was quite fun.  The girl who's teaching it is a native French speaker - which makes it fun because of course she doesn't know the grammar as well as someone who's had to learn it from scratch.  Things are are, because they are.  Now I know how to ask how much something is, and how to why someone is cooking.  And the difference between eclair (lightning - the lightning bolt itself) and foudre (lightning - but the place on the ground where the lightning strikes).

Angela is onto something about the Moss environment.  Install the first server in the farm, fully configure it, then add the servers as planned. That approach helped me isolate issues better.  Uncheck the Configuration wizard checkbox after the installation to catch your breath :) Make sure to run windows update to get the most recent updates to your MOSS installation bits.  Check the event logs on the first server and SQL Server before starting to configure your farm on Central Administration Web Site. Find out about the errors if you have any.  Follow the administrative tasks on the Central Admin Home page. (However, I have not yet added servers to the farm before configuring the first one.)  Start the required services. (I have not yet configured the Document Conversion service and load balancer.)  Start Excel Services if you did not start it yet. It will not consume much resources unless you use it, and it is a REQUIRED service in a MOSS farm.  Create the default SSP. Create MySites on a different web application during initial SSP configuration. Use the same service account for SSP Administration web site application pool identity, and SSP service.  Make sure the Server Configuration Not Complete warning goes away before you start joining servers to the farm.  If you still see it after completing everything above, try to mark one admin task as completed. You will most likely see an error message, and then the "Server Configuration Not Complete" message will go away...  After that, check your event logs again.  If you're still reading, then that was not supposed to make sense.   It came from the Sharepoint From the Field blog.