Jason Dunn

I made the mistake of importing my OPML file (with about 150 feeds) into Internet Explorer 7 because I wanted to read my RSS feeds using Outlook 2007. That didn’t turn out so well, because Outlook 2007 has next to no tools for managing feeds – it looks like a last-minute add-on, lacking even basic features such as marking feed item as being read when you exit the feed. So I decided to switch back to using Feeddemon. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 have a symbiotic relationship to feed items – meaning that whatever you import into IE7’s RSS feed items will also show up in Outlook 2007. As Shakespeare would say, here’s the rub: there’s no way to select all the feed items in IE7. If you want delete them, you have to right-click on each item and delete each one. I thought there had to be a faster way, so after some research I discovered that the IE7 feed items are located here (you’ll need to turn on hidden files to see them):

C:\Users\Jason Dunn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

Now here’s the ugly part: Outlook 2007 creates a one-time, not a permanent link, with the RSS items in IE7. Meaning that even though I deleted all of the RSS items from IE7’s data store, they all still existed in Outlook 2007. 🙁 The slightly better news is that pressing the Delete and Yes key in rapid succession allowed me to get through them all pretty quickly. The ultra-ugly news was that even after deleting all the feeds, I still had 8500+ unread mail items in Outlook – and the only way to delete them was to delete them in groups, feed by feed. What a completely screwed up scenario this is…I hope I don’t have to repeat all these steps with Outlook on my main workstation (I did this all on my laptop).

When you work with computer hardware on a regular basis, building machines and swapping components in and out, you start to see patterns of hardware failure. Generally most hardware is reliable, but you’ll see more failures with components related to movement, power, and heat. Hard drives, system fans, power supplies and optical drives seem to have the highest failure rates, but video cards are failing more often than they used to as they run hotter, faster, and need more cooling. Things you don’t see spontaneously fail very often include CPUs, RAM, motherboards, and cables – sure, they can fail, but they usually require “help” from the owner or local power outlet.

Imagine my surprise when this week I had not one, but two bizarre failures of hardware that I’d never expect to fail. I booted up my Fujitsu P7010 laptop, a little 10.6″ screen job, that has 1 GB of RAM (2 x 512 MB) that I installed over a year ago. It’s run fine since then, but this week when I booted it up Vista wouldn’t load – I’d get a blue screen of death and an error related to memory. Because I had been running this hardware for so long (the laptop is a bit over two years old now) hardware failure was the furthest thing from my mind. I ran the Vista repair process (which is quite impressive) because that’s what the OS instructed me to do, but that didn’t work so I figured I’d run memtest86 and see if something was wrong. Below is a photo of what I saw (hint: red is bad).

I ran the test two more times, each with one of the 512 MB memory modules installed, and isolated it to one of the chips. I phoned Kingston, and was happy they had a lifetime warranty. The warranty process was amazingly fast and painless: no waiting on hold at all, the technician listened to me explain what I did and immediately agreed it was bad memory. A few minutes after that I had spoken to an RMA tech who took my credit card number so they could cross-ship me new RAM immediately, and as long as I return the defective RAM within ten days they won’t charge my credit card. Oh, and they also gave me their FedEx account number so I wouldn’t have to pay for return shipping. You never want RAM to go bad, but when it does happen, you can’t ask for anything more than a company that’s willing to make the replacement as fast and painless as possible.

Ok, so RAM can and does go bad. But when is the last time you heard of a coaxial cable spontaneously failing? Yesterday I was having massive trouble with my Internet connection, and I blamed it on my Netgear WPN824, which has been flaky since the day I bought it (mostly giving me random network failures that persist until I reboot it). I swapped in a D-Link DI-624, power-cycled everything including my cable modem, and assumed everything would work fine. I’ve swapped those routers in and out several time, with a Netgear router thrown in for good measure, because I can’t never seem to find one that’s stable 100% of the time. At any rate, my connection kept failing, so I looked at my SHAW cable modem with a critical eye. I have a 10 mbps downstream connection that’s been amazingly solid for the past two years (it was a bit rocky before that). Sure enough, I checked it and it wasn’t online. I’ve had a cable modem connection since 1995, so I’m very familiar with how they behave and know when something isn’t working right. I called SHAW tech support, he confirmed that it was disconnecting and re-connecting from the network, so I power cycled it one more time, and saw it lock in – and thought my problem was solved. I went back to work, only to lose my connection again. I went to my wiring area and watched the cable modem – it would lock in, all lights lit, then it would lose the network connection and everything would start blinking. And it would repeat that cycle every minute or so. What was going on?

I phoned SHAW tech support again, they said it must be a local problem with the wiring or the modem itself, and they’d have to book a service call – the best date they could do was a week down the road. I told him that if that was the case I’d be ordering DSL the next day – that rattled him, although I was mostly bluffing trying to get more immediate service (although I do still wonder about running cable and DSL together and bonding them together for a redundant and faster connection). I was suspicious of the cable modem rather than the household cable connection, because my SHAW digital phone (basically a private VOIP service) was working perfectly, as was my cable TV. My loving wife Ashley volunteered to drive to her parents house, borrow their cable modem, and bring it back so I could try a known good modem. I did, and it didn’t work. At this point I was starting to get really frustrated, and Ashley said “Did you try changing the cable that goes into the wall?”. I gave her one of those “Don’t be silly, that couldn’t possibly be the problem” looks, but having nothing to lose, I gave it a try – and it worked. What the hell…?

The cable in question is five years old, having been installed when we moved into our house. It’s plain old copper cable – how could it possibly fail? I don’t know how, but it did – and thanks to my wife, looking at a problem with a fresh set of eyes unfettered by assumptions, I’m back online.

Note to self: always check the obvious points of failure, even if you think they couldn’t possibly fail.

David Caulton over at Zunester (I site I often link to off Zune Thoughts) has put together a retro mish-mash of computer ads from circa 1989/1990. It’s amazing how far things have come in the past 15 years. Paying $2398 USD for a 33 mhz computer with 1 MB of RAM? Been there done that – when I was 18 years old, rather than get a loan to buy a used car like many of my friends, I took out a $3000 bank loan to buy a computer. Yeah, I was a geek. I’ll have to see if I can dig up the specs for that first machine…

Statistically, I didn’t think this was possible. First I get the defective Shuttle SD39P2 sent to me, then the video card I ordered wouldn’t fit in said Shuttle, and when I tried it in my full-sized PC it turned out to be defective. A new SD39P2 arrived last week, so last night I sat down to put it all together – I breathed a sigh of relief when it actually booted! So imagine the frustration I felt when the Vista installation went screwy – it would get to the stage when it copied files over and expanded them, but at the expansion stage it would stick at 0% and the optical drive (a Plextor 760A) would make these rapid-fire seeking sounds. I tried four times, and it never worked. I swapped in a cheap NEC DVD burned I picked up to keep as a spare burned, and it worked like a charm. So for those keeping score this ONE project of mine has had THREE defective parts. What are the odds? Am I cursed, or have quality control standards slipped badly on PC hardware?

On the plus side, the new Shuttle SD39P2 screams with the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme in it. It’s so fast it hurts. But it’s a good hurt. I’ll be writing an article on this rig for Digital Media Thoughts, so watch for it.

Another one-hit-wonder just for the search engines and people who happen to have the same problem as I did.

Somehow I’d managed to turn on “reveal codes” or “show paragraph marks” or whatever it’s called in Outlook 2007 (it’s hard to describe a feature that you turned on accidentally, but see the image above). Word calls it “Show Hide P” (“P” being the backwards “P” paragraph symbol that I can’t copy/paste from anything, nor can I find it in the symbols font), and it can be toggled off/on by using CNTRL+*….at least that’s what Word 2007 says, yet that keyboard shortcut didn’t work for me in Outlook 2007.

I couldn’t figure out how to turn this feature off – I’d searched online, the bundled help, and every single menu and options screen I could possibly think of. I should add that I toggled it off/on Word 2007 but that has no impact in Outlook 2007, so the two settings aren’t linked.

I was pulling out my hair, but Sue Mosher (who’s been an MVP for even longer than I have I think) responded to my posting in the Outlook newsgroup with this single line:

Try Ctrl+Shift+8 (which is what Ctrl+* really means).

And that did it. I really have no idea why Ctrl+* doesn’t really mean press the control key and the asterisk key (*) at the same time, but the solution works.