laurasaur

Those of you who are friends of me on facebook may have noticed already but for everyone else I’ve started a wee business called Squeakle! It’s basically just me trying to be crafty and selling handknits and bits and pieces I’ve sewn for babies/mums.

The website’s still in development but you are welcome to take a look at squeakle.co or join me on facebook where I’ve been listing all my products bit by bit. It’s been way more work than I thought and made me realise just how little time I actually do have in the day but so far I’m loving it and it’s been way more successful than I thought which is pretty cool too!

Its been a long long time since I have updated. I’m so slack. I don’t even have a good excuse.

I’m still a long way from the lovely country I call home, New Zealand. While everyone there enjoys stunning summer days and long evenings, we have rain, sleet, snow, and darkness at 4pm.  The last 6 months have brought an entirely new way of life for me, and one major unexpected change.

You know that saying about plans going astray, well, yeah, I can verify that is true Still, my life is very nice right now, just a bit different from our plans of just a few months ago. We always had planned on coming to London for a few years to work. We planned on having a baby at some stage and coming back to NZ to settle. Little did we know that I was already pregnant when we left glorious New Zealand! So that was one small spanner in the works. I looked for work solidly for a few months once we arrived, but there was just no software development jobs going. In hindsight I should have given up looking a lot earlier and worked in a cafe, but I didn’t, and well, then it became too late because I sprouted a somewhat huge baby bump. Thankfully my husband landed a sweet job very soon after we arrived (and they love him, he has just had a promotion!), otherwise we would have been on the next plane home.

on the tube, blissfully unaware of the baby growing in there

So, here I am, jobless, and growing a baby in my belly. People ask me what I do and I have a hard time answering – what on earth do I do? Well, I spend a lot of time on eBay, that’s for sure. Having a baby has increased my addiction even further and opened my eyes to the designer baby second hand clothing market. Thankfully we also bought a car that turned out to be a piece of crap, because I spend lots of time fixing it or visiting our mechanic, who I am getting to be quite good friends with haha. I go for walks, I go shopping and have hot chocolates, I cook and sometimes I even clean.

Yeah. My life is pretty sweet. And on top of this I seem to have been blessed with the worlds easiest pregnancy. I haven’t had any morning sickness, or anything weird like that, and I’m only just getting to the uncomfortable stage where I walk the poor baby into door frames and stuff.

31 weeks pregnant!

What else is going on….

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Bye bye to my work and my workmates.. it has been cool working with everyone from BCM.. I certainly have learnt a few things that I will take with me .. hehe… I will miss you all.

I have spent ages trying to figure out why I am getting this adequately useless error message:

Error: 0xC002F304 at Send Mail Task, Send Mail Task: An error occurred with the following error message: “Failure sending mail.”.
Task failed: Send Mail Task

Msdn provides a list of Integration services error and warning message definitions here, but check out the definition for this one:

DTS_E_ERROROCCURREDWITHFOLLOWINGMESSAGE An error occurred with the following error message: “%1″.

Wow.. an error occured with the following message, failure sending mail, so amazingly descriptive.

Anyway you know you are doing something severely wrong when you do a google search on SMTP Error: 0xC002F304 and only get back about 2 releveant results, and sure enough I was doing something majorly wrong.  Eventually I got so frustrated with the Send Mail task and its complete lack of error debugging information I decided to use the script task to see if that would give me any more.

So I added a new script task and ew put some VB code in and that gave me a different error that was no more descriptive than the last. Anyway that motivated me to open Visual Studio and try the same in goold old C# and sure enough…

My SMTP server was unable to relay to the recipient I had chosen (my personal email). Switched it to my work email and BOOYA all go.

I have already done a similar post on this but the basics are:

• turn on delay validation so you don’t have to enter an email address in the *to* field -> you can use expressions to read it from a table or recordset etc
• configure your exchange server like so
• Launch your Exchange System Manager
• Navigate to your server -> Administrative Groups -> Admin Group -> Server Name -> Protocols -> SMTP
• Right click on the “Default SMTP Virtual Server”
• Click the access tab
• Press the Relay button and add the IP of the machine that wishes to use this as their SMTP server.
• Fun times.