I was just browsing through my last few months of posts and realized two things:

1) That I haven’t written nearly as much as I should… as usual…
and
2) That I haven’t said anything about my work situation since I had a “positive” interview back in mid December.

Well, let me tell you.

I had three more interviews at the same venue over the course of a little over two months. Then they decided to go in another direction. At first I shrugged it off and said to myself “better luck next time”, but honestly – that was just rude. Don’t waste two months of my life if you’re not fully intending to follow through.

Disillusioned, I decided the only person I could rely on professionally was myself, so I decided to strike out on my own. Right now the focus of my business is mobile tech work, which I will write about (and have written about already) as it comes along. Programming will likely be less frequent but it’ll still happen.

In the meantime I’m keeping very busy promoting my business by day and delivering pizza by night to fill the gaps.

I recently had the pleasure of working on a particularly stubborn issue between a Windows Vista and a Windows 7 PC.

I used Microsoft’s “Easy Transfer” program to capture the profiles from an older XP system, then applied it to their brand-new Windows 7 system. Easy as pie.

The problem presented when I tried to reconfigure the printer and file sharing that had existed on the XP machine previously. I tried to connect via the network browser on a Vista laptop to the Windows 7 box, but was presented with a password dialogue box. I couldn’t very well leave it in a state where the printer doesn’t work over the network until you login first, so of course I immediately went to the “password protected file sharing” option in the “Network and Sharing Center”, and disabled it.

The problem persisted.

After a while I was getting annoyed. They were both in the same workgroup, no firewall issues, nothing came to mind. After a bit of reading on Google it appeared as if the Guest account may have somehow picked up a password (which was a possibility since the XP  machine was a bit of a mess). So I went in and reset the password to blank.

Still, the problem persisted.

I knew it had to have something to do with the profiles I migrated over. I could feel it instinctively.

What I eventually realized was that the laptop I was currently on had the same username as one of the accounts on the PC did, however they both had different passwords. So when I tried to connect, the remote system recognized the user but not the password, and so prompted me to fill out my username and password.

There wasn’t much on Google that addressed my situation but I now suspect that it must be fairly common, so I felt obliged to document my experience.