July 2009 Archives

To those of you who have left me a voicemail on my cellphone from your cellphone, I’m glad to have saved you some money.

Microsloth has a bad habit of knowing what we need as users better than we do. Hence there are wonderful notifications like “There are unused icons on your desktop. Click here…”

Fortunately, there’s a way to turn this off, as detailed in this posting.

But why the horribly complex, roundabout way to find it? And how about that for an unintuitively-placed preference?!

It’s my not-so-humble opinion that any time you have an alert that pops up regularly, it should also tell you either how to disable it or allow you to disable it right on the spot. But that’s just me. I’m spoiled.

It sounds vaguely disgusting, doesn’t it, having one’s GAL broken?

I don’t know what’s going on. I use MSO2008 with Entourage in a corporate environment, and up until yesterday, I had no trouble whatsoever accessing my company’s global address list (GAL), which is something done via LDAP. After the update to 12.2.0, I could no longer access that GAL.

After much frustration in changing LDAP server settings, rebooting, etc., just because I thought it was my company’s fault, I decided that it might be the update that was responsible.

Fortunately, I have Time Machine running. So I first tried to revert to yesterday’s version of Entourage, but that crashed each time I launched it. Figuring that Microsoft can’t build a monolithic application to save its life and that there might be other things in the MSO 2008 folder that Entourage depends on, too, I reverted the whole folder and, guess what?

Entourage GAL access now works.

My conclusion is that the Entourage 12.2.0 update breaks GAL access somehow. I kept the updated MSO folder by renaming it “Microsoft Office 2008 12.2.0” and then restoring the older version, so I am able to keep using the new version of Word (speedier!) and Excel (tastier!).

Your milage may vary. Please comment if you have similar experiences.

Again, Tolland makes the list of Best Places to Live.. I love it here.

Yes, taxes are high. And getting higher. But compared to income taxes, they’re nothing. At least the money we pay gets put into things we use.

And yes, the roads wind around and some are dangerous as hell, thanks to SUV-driving, cellphone-toting soccer moms (and dads) and troopers whizzing around to make it from Troop C to arrest criminals or whatever it is they do at high speed.

But has it lost its charm? I’d argue “No.” You see, there are still a helluva’ lot of trees in Tolland. And the subdivision rate seems to be decreasing dramatically, except for Capstone Builder’s apparent “subdivide even if nobody’s buying my houses” approach. But he’s just one guy trying to make a living.

The schools are good. The neighbors are nice… if you can see your neighbors, that is, since we all seem to have good elbow room here. Town services are just fine. Did I mention that the schools are good?

And being 20 minutes from Hartford is nice, or an hour from Boston is great, or a short drive plus a train hop from Broadway is really cool. But, quite frankly, none of that will make a difference to you if you don’t get out and do it. And that can be said of living in Manhattan.

Buy a bike from Tolland Bicycle, ride at Crandall’s Park. Take a stroll on the hundreds of acres of town-preserved greenspace. Swim in the ponds. Play tennis. Walk to the library.

Or sit on your steadily-increasing-in-size butt and ignore the world around you, complain bitterly about it, and eventually leave. Good riddance.

Us? We’ve been here for 10 years next month, and look forward to the decades to come.

I wonder what they did to rack up a $1.4M bill for the Jackson funeral.

This article says that the bill was $1,400,000. That’s a lot of money.

It also says that there were 17,000 people who “flocked” to downtown LA to witness the spectacle.

Hmm. $82 per person spent by the city. What’d the city do, hold a wine and cheese party? Give out Jackson Memorial Clown Noses? Did they at least give out bottled water?

Did anybody in the city look at the costs and wonder “Hey, where’d the money go?”

And you wonder why California’s budget is in such trouble…

Just like in my previous post, the latest MacOS X Server update, 10.5.7, doesn’t fix the problem with exclusion of the contents of /var/spool from Time Machine backups, either.

I keep forgetting about this topic, hot though it may be, because I’m usually more aware of the PHP problem.

Thanks, DS!

Wow. It takes all kinds.