A couple of weeks ago, I asked you to put your hands in the ay-yer.  I think I only counted 12 people doing so.  Now, I don’t know if it’s that you can’t hear me, or if you’re just “not interested” but a slightly better attitude would be appreciated.  

Sycophants of the world, UNITE!

Why?

Because I TOLD YOU TO!

A very useful engine

Many of you know that Thomas the Tank Engine is a “very useful engine”. Jaden loves Thomas movies, action figures, train sets, computer games, and I blogged last year about the Day Out With Thomas, which he and I both loved immensely.

But this post isn’t about Thomas, as much as it’s about a “very useful computer gadget”

A co-worker of mine picked up a couple of these at Altex and I must say, it’s gotta win some kind of product award. It’s incredible!

For those of you who do computer support, you’ve  probably run into the problem where a hard drive won’t boot. It still spins up, and it still has data, but it just won’t boot for this reason or that reason, usually a problem with Windows.

In the past, we’ve just used some special hardware to try to slave or mount the drive on a desktop machine with ribbon cables and room for extra drives. This was easy with desktop drives, but we had to get a special adapter for the laptop drives. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

Then came along SATA, the way-faster and way-simpler connector but made it harder for us to do the drive slaving. We had to use a SATA desktop or one of the cool combo units Dell sold for a while that had both EIDE and SATA. But still, it was a pain, and generally involved “open heart surgery” on the PC we used as the diagnostic system.

This adapter he picked up allows for just a simple USB connection and it supports all desktop/laptop PC drives – desktop IDE, desktop SATA, laptop IDE and laptop SATA.   When connecting IDE, you don’t even need a separate power adapter!  For SATA, there is a separate power cable you have to plug in, but still, all of this beats doing it manually.  Best of all, since it’s USB, you don’t have to open up any PC’s.

Plus, it’s all hot-swappable.  With our old way of doing things, we’d have to shut down and reboot every time we disconnected or connected a drive.

Kudos, VANTEC!

Marching Band is still cool

Caitlin, our eldest, joined “the big time” this year by reaching freshman high school age. Now she’s with the Big Time band, the Cedar Park Timberwolves. This band is something else, lemme tell ya.

Last night was the “LISD Festival of Bands” where all the Leander Independent School District bands (middle school and high school) perform to a very populated football stadium.  I shot some video that I might upload at some point.  Let me know if interested.

Last year, the marching band put on a show called “Pursuit of Happiness” and even ended the show with a winking smiley face:

The official videos of this year’s band are still secure and for staff/band/family, so if you want to see them, get in touch with me directly and I’ll send a link.

 

Best of LOLCats

 

(note: this is my first time trying to publish a blog entry from Microsoft Word 2007 to Wordpress.  Yes, you heard me.  Using a Microsoft product to publish directly to an open source blog.  And I cannot believe how simple it was.  I’ll probably write a blog post on it.  From Word.)

Do you cross through your to-do list? Here’s why I ask.

I really like the To-Do Bar that Outlook 2007 has, especially when working on a laptop with a wide screen:

I’m a “bottom feeder” with email, which means I keep my newest items on the bottom of my inbox. I keep my folders way on the left, my headers and title information just to the right of that. I keep a healthy amount of real estate reserved right there in the middle to view the entire email.

The To-do Bar shows me a quick calendar, my upcoming appointments below that, and my to-do items, with flag and categorization colors. I’m pretty big on colors and formatting – you can see in my inbox, the items in blue were sent directly to me, while the items in black were part of a distro list. I also color emails from my boss(es) differently, and when I win the lottery, the computer actually pops out the CD-ROM drive and throws a disc at my face to make sure I’m paying attention.

However, one thing that always bugs me about the To-Do Bar is that it always defaults to a view that shows all my completed items with strikethroughs:

You see, these tasks being displayed are tasks I did more than a year ago. Some of them are 2 years old. I want them to go away! I completed you, oh vile task list of death!

Ode to a task that still shows up with strikethrough

Lo! Hear me. I thus did spake forcefully upon thee.
For that spaking I am remorseful. I did not see thee there.
Please to wipe my spittle off thy face.
To continue my rant, I speaketh of such divine divinity.
By this, I mean the stupidethness of the strikethrough format.
It has forced itself unto my task list, and displays as such!

Depart, oh Task That Has Completeness!
I have banished you unto the world of DoneDom.
Why do you torment me so?
You are not welcome.

Oh sure, I can right-click on the header, click “Custom” and add an advanced field filter that hides completed items

But it forgets the view sometimes. I don’t know how to make it the default! ARGH!

So, what about you? Do YOU track your tasks and to-do items and then show them with strikethrough font? Do you delete the task? I don’t like deleting things because even though I’ve completed the task, there might be information in the notes field I want to keep.

UPDATE: Wonderful Melissa - commenter below, and Microsoft employee - worked with me on some suggestions, and they worked like a champ!  Thank you Melissa. 

You can see in the comment below that she suggested to reset the to-do bar.  I tried that and no love.  Her next suggestion was to maybe “re-tag” the task as complete, because maybe the task was marked Completed in some offending or non-compliant way.  I tred right-clicking on the task to re-complete it, but it has “Mark Completed” greyed out. 

However, if I multi-selected the tasks and right-clicked, I got a “Mark Completed” option, and when I selected that, those tasks stopped showing up!  Will wonders never cease!?!!?

When you realize that this chat conversation concerns Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates and should involve things that are, um, well, SECURE, I don’t know whether to chuckle or cry.

(Thank you Peter for giving me fodder).

You have been connected to Them.
Them: Hello. How may I assist you?
Us: Hello’
Us: I received an email regarding my order that told me I needed to provide a name of a corporate contact
Us: What name was given on the order?
Them: What is your order number?
Us: USM******
Them: Please bear with me while I review your order information. It should just take a couple of minutes.
Us: thank you
Them: Under Corporate Contact: only (***wrong name***) listed.
Us: Ah , I see
Them: I am currently chatting with Richard Cecere on the other chat.
Us: Can you please change that to be **************
Them: Would you like me to end your chat? or his?
Us: Who is Richard Cecere?
Them: He is from the same company as you.
Us: No, there is nobody at my company with that name
Us: I would like you to chat with me regarding this issue
Us: I do not know who Richard Cecere is
Them: Ok
Them: Richard from the other chat claims he should be the contact.
Us: That is impossible - That person does not work for the same comapany as me
Us: we are talking about order USM******, correct?
Them: He is asking the same as well.
Us: what is the domain name he is asking about?
Them: Yes correct
Us: hostname
Them: Please confirm your domain name.
Us: (we give our domain name)
Them: ok, actually there was a mix up, please standbye, thank you.
Us: sure thing

Heya, Microsoft Developer people.  I just wanted to say that I really like Office 2007.  Oh, and Vista.  A Lot.

Thank you for your time.

–
Wayne

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oh wait, you’re still here?  Oh, then can I ask you a few questions, and maybe give you a couple suggestions?  They’re not big.

Where’s the keyboard shortcut for “Paste Unformatted”?

I use this a *lot*.  CTRL-C and CTRL-V are all fine and good, but there are so many times I use the clipboard between excel, word, the web, snagit, sharepoint designer, outlook, visio, picasa, etc that I REALLY want a keyboard shortcut for pasting unformatted text.  Maybe this isn’t even an Office issue but a XP/Vista request.  I don’t want to have to paste into notepad/vim and then re-paste into the app. 

Don’t get me wrong - I love the new dropdown on the Office Ribbon

It saves me some time.  But I want to save MORE time.

Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, where’s Mark as Read?

Outlook is awesome, really.  I use the “unread” search folder as my real inbox so I can manage all the various subfolders that have unread mail.  I used to have it set such that an item was marked read after a couple seconds of seeing it, but that got annoying because if unread was empty, and the item just popped up, then it was marked as read. I missed a lot of email that way.  So I set it to mark as read when I move away from it, and that works great, except for when I want to move it to a folder.  For some reason, the act of me moving an email to a folder keeps it’s read/unread status!  I want to be able to control this.  Sure, I can right-click and choose “mark as read” but I don’t like taking my hands off my keyboard (we’re very close).  So if I had a KB shortcut (or the ability to say that moving to a folder counts as “read”) that would fix that issue nicely.

Thread highlighting would be cool

It’s cool and all that Outlook lets you sort your inbox by conversation (thread), but sometimes that’s too much work for when dealing with hundreds of emails a day with lots of people.  I did say Outlook was awesome, didn’t I?  Help me, help you make it more awesomer-like.

So you know what I’m talking about, when I manage my email, I use the preview pane on the right with the folder list on the left:

And what I’m talking about is easily finding the related messages (ie, emails in the same thread) visually when you click on one message.  I also want a little indicator at top and bottom of header scroll pane to tell me if there are more above or below.

And then I guess my follow-up suggestion is a quick keyboard shortcut where you can auto-filter the header scroll pane to just that conversation (for quick delete / file) and then back to non-filtered.

Think of it as a graphical pivot-table filter for email.

I’m getting goosebumps just THINKING about how good my suggestion is.

Ooh, Ooooh!  It would be REALLY cool if it did different colors for different similarities!  Like emails in same thread would be pink, and emails from same sender would be green and emails with similar distribution lists (TO:)!  How cool would THAT be?!?!?

Sharing Calendars with others in Outlook 2007

At our company, we use “open calendaring” meaning just about everyone’s calendar is shared to the rest of the company.  If you have something private, mark it private.  This is more than just free/busy.

In Office 2003 and earlier, you could right-click on the Calendar, select Sharing or Properties, and then add a person or distribution group as a “Reviewer”.  This enables them to open your calendar and actually see the items on it. 

It’s real convenient when scheduling meetings because you can just hover over the “busy” time and see what they’re doing instead of just seeing that they’re busy:

But in Office 2007, this is NOT available any more.  At least, as far as I can find.  Nope, in Office 2007, you need to go to your calendar and select “Share My Calendar”.  When you do this, it brings up an EMAIL dialog box where you send a “sharing invitation” that allows the recipient to view your calendar and optionally asks to view their calendar.

This might be fine and good if you just want to share to one person, or maybe a couple.  But our standard is to share to ALL the company (”Company All”) and if we had every person sending an email to the whole company all the time (not to mention the request permission part), that would be pure pandemonium.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun to watch.

I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to be the one held responsible

---

ok, that’s all I got for now.  Anyone else have something they’d like to share?

No, I’m not blogging about the upcoming Fraggle Rock: The Movie, which will probably be awesome.   What I’m writing is WAY too geeky for Fraggles.  If a Fraggle read this post, it would blow up.  Fraggles are very Fragile.

If you use Microsoft Outlook in a corporate setting (ie, with an Exchange Server), and you have a LOT of email on the server, as in multiple gigabytes, AND you use Cached Exchange Mode, this post might be helpful to you.  If you’re a geek and like to know how some things work under the surface, this post might be helpful to you.  If you need help sleeping at night, and would like something to print out and read so you can actually get to sleep, this post might be helpful to you.

The plain truth is that although “defragging your hard drive” is way overrused as a troubleshooting step or performance tweak, there actually are times that it can be useful.  In this post, I go into the more targeted use of defrag tools and when I’ve found defragging to actually be helpful.

If your computer is running slower than normal all of a sudden, and your local geek wannabe tells you to defrag your hard drive as one of the first things you do, you can tell him/her that that would just be wasting your time.   There are times, however, like when you’ve filled up your hard drive all the way and also are working on big files, that may make defragging your drive in important step, but most slowdown problems now-adays are either due to spyware, viruses, or bugs.  You can take steps to determine what’s eating up the performance on your Windows XP box, but it probably won’t be a defrag that fixes the problem.

Recently I’ve had a number of performance problems on my Windows XP machine, and most of the issues were Outlook-related.  When Outlook was doing it’s thing - send/receive, sync, opening up email windows, etc - it basically locked up the whole machine for a few seconds.  My eventual “fix” was to uninstall Office 2007 and re-install, with a service pack that fixes a key problem with large PST/OST files, but one of the steps I took along the way was to defrag my Outlook OST file.  This can help tremendously when you A) don’t want to rebuild the OST from scratch over VPN and B) don’t want to defrag the entire drive.

More details are included in the extended entry, below.  Read them Live free or die.

(more…)

Don’t you hate it when something eludes you for a long time?  And you spend lots of time trying to fix it?  You ask for help, get nowhere.  And then you just learn to live with it?  And it annoys you AT EVERY TURN and you STILL just let it sit, etching away at your sanity a few seconds at a time?

That’s how it’s been for me with this annoying piece of my blog - at some point after a ton of customization early on, my sidebar decided to display BELOW the post and comment form instead of where it belongs - (dramatic pause) ON THE SIDE.

This was so annoying I can’t even tell you.  I had asked a few friends about it too, over the past few months.  I was convinced it was either too many DIV tags or not enough DIV tags.  So I spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME counting, recounting, and looking for tools that would tell me if I have too many nested tags, and then playing with the tools, and then forgetting about the whole dang thing.

The thing’s been like that for over a year.  GEWEEEEESH.

So recently, that same consultant who helped me with SharePoint pointed me in the direction of a nifty little tool called the IE Developer Toolbar.  And this tool pointed to what the problem was, which in my case was a simple error in pixels and the browser being forced to “wrap” the next section down a row.  So it’s not that I had the wrong tags at all - something in the middle column was too fat, so the sidebar was forced down.

Once I fixed that, I got a much better looking blog entry page:

I have more technical detail in the extended entry below for those interested.

(more…)

Did you know that Austin’s bloggers rock? 

I set twitter to “track austin” which means it’ll notify me of any “tweets” that contain the word “Austin”.  It’s another one of those cool things twitter can do - keep up to date on specific topics, cities, things, people, etc.  I choose to get it sent to my AIM client instead of a ton of SMS messages, so it’s pretty passive.

I’ve seen some interesting stuff so far.  Here’s a little screenshot of what it looks like from AIM (Trillian)

 

As you can see from the topmost tweet - one of the items that popped up was a blog entry posting about Austin’s bloggers from a local blogger named Alex Jones.  (Note to self: check out twitterwhere… that sounds cool)

The article points to a Wired article about a new report from Scarborough about how Austin leads the pack in terms of percentage of people who read or write blogs.  We’re #1!  With 15% of residents either writing or commenting on blogs, Austin shows it’s got the technologically-enabled folks.  That number really does seem high when I think about it - that’s 1 in 6, right?  I would have thought half of that as the maximum to expect, so I’m pleasantly surprised.

I wish the report gave more detail on how many people they surveyed, what the responses were like, what the questions were, etc.  I just inherently distrust surveys that don’t disclose EVERYTHING.  Anything can be twisted and would rather have the facts so I can twist them myself.

I got an ad email from Thinkgeek about a really cool new shirt

This really cool bad boy actually lights up when a wifi signal is near, and increases in intensity with the signal level.  It’s going near the top of my wish list.

It got me thinking about twitter, tho (and I’ve been thinking about it a LOT since joining up and playing with it).  I can see GPS-enabled twitter notifications, twitter dating, tweets helping out with disasters (like they are with the sandiego fires right now), people using tweets to help them with their dieting, humor tweets that could be subscription based, and so many other uses for twittering.

And then I thought of a shirt - the coolest shirt EVER.  The shirt would be an LCD display that would automatically display the tweets that are geographically near it.

Have you tried twitter yet?  Have you thought of some really nifty things you can do with it, or might be done in the future?

As someone who uses a dual-monitor setup most of the time, I’ve collected a bit of experience.  When I’m at work, my setup of choice is the laptop sitting opened up on a D-View stand with a 21″ CRT next to it.  This gives me dual-monitor functionality by using the laptop’s screen as one of the displays.  At home it’s pretty near the same, sans the D-View stand.  Even when I’m mobile and in a conference room temporarily, I will hunt for a 2nd monitor to set up if I’ll be there more than 30 minutes or so.

So far, I’ve written about how to fix the problem when an application displays on the wrong (or phantom) monitor display.  I’ve also penned a tip on how to avoid it in the first place.  I’ve given advice on how to find out why an application seems to “hang” if you’re typically running a dual-monitor setup.

Those are all great and good, but what if you want more power?

One handy little application that many people consider a “must have” is Ultramon.

Ultramon does many things that Windows won’t do for you, like controlling which monitor an application should use, perform mirroring for presentations, support multiple displays for screen savers (kiosk-style) and create pre-sets.  Probably the most convenient feature is the ability to create and save a DisplayProfile so that you can apply pre-configured scenarios that you run into most commonly.

While ultramon isn’t free, it is worth paying for if you find yourself struggling with the built-in support Windows offers.  TweakUI can do some things, but not enough.

I also have a complaint.  It involves something I call “Dual Monitor Hell”.  It’s a little area of space and time where your mouse gets stuck because there’s no trans-dimensional bridge to magically transport your cursor from one screen to another. 

What I want is for THE ENTIRE EDGE of each screen to be able to “catch the cursor” and move it onto the other screen.  Instead, however, if you get your mouse up in the corner shown above, it just sticks.  I think if you’re at the top of one screen and you move over, you end up at the top of the screen on the other display.

I’m pretty happy right now.  You might think I got a new toy or something (and there are some toys out there that would qualify) but mainly I just got my old and busted toy fixed.

As some of you know, I depend on my Blackberry 8700c - it’s my phone, my PDA, my email, calendar, tasks, contacts, SMS, picture browser, web browser, etc.  I’ve had it for a while - another friend of mine was able to snag one for me FREE at the RIM Launching event in San Francisco - Thanx guys!

Not only do I depend on the absolutely cool unit, I love it as well.  I love having one device on my belt (well, other than my SwissTool), having everything together, and having access to everything all the time - not to mention updating info/contacts and having immediate access to corporate and personal email.

However, recently I’ve had horrible cell phone reception.  The blackberry data service (EDGE in uppercaps vs edge in lowercase) worked fine, and I could always send/receive phone calls, but while I’m talking to someone I had horrible volume problems and every 2nd or 3rd word was interrupted/dropped or otherwise lost, so I did a lot of “what?” in most of my conversations.  And I don’t mean the type of “what?” I would say when I hear someone saying “I’m going to crawl through the phone and pull your nose hairs until I get the info I want, Mr. Hall”  I mean instead of that sentence I would hear something like “I’m (burble) to cr(burble) through (burble) own and pull (burble) airs until I get (burble) all”

I attribute the bad cell stuff to the incessent dropping that the unit has suffered under my hands.  I’m guessing the internal antenna has become dislodged or something so that the signal strength isn’t so good.  Also, the “water damage” indicator underneat the battery cover (small square that’s either red or white) says RED, meaning, it’s seen it’s share of moisture and the phone is no longer covered by insurance.  I don’t know how much I believe that sticker, but still, the manufacturer has to protect their interests too, I guess.

So now for the happy-happy-joy-joy part — I GOT A REPLACEMENT PHONE!  YAY!

And ooooh, the new one is chrome instead of dark grey.  Kind of looks better methinks.  Plus, the CPU seems faster, but that might be because I haven’t loaded it down with all my data.  Also seems lighter, but maybe it’ll get heavier when I load more email on it.

Here’s how it happened - another coworker needed a blackberry, so we ordered a new 8700c.  However, the person does NOT need a phone plan with it - just the blackberry.  And since my blackberry works fine as a blackberry but not-so-fine as a phone, this awesome person agreed to swap devices with me so I could have a WORKING PHONE.

THANK YOU BLACKBERRY GODS!

(plus, this person has promised me her McDonald’s Monopoly codes.  How much better could this person get?)