Outlook 2007: Some Great Features, Some Great Frustrations

Generally speaking, I really enjoy using Outlook 2007. It’s a nice evolution from Outlook 2003, and in particular with the way they’ve combined tasks, categories, and flags, it’s now a much more powerful organizational tool. I’ve grown to like the kinda’ sorta’ Word 2007 module that loads when I’m writing email – the in-line spell-check and grammar-check is handy. Outlook 2007 is especially effective on wide-screen monitors because you’ll probably have the space to leave up the “To Do” bar, which consists of a single-month calendar view, your appointments for the day, and all your tasks. Given the type of business I run, and the type of person I am, you’d think that I’d be an enthusiastic user of tasks under Outlook. That hasn’t been the case until I started using Outlook 2007 – with Outlook 2003, tasks weren’t really tied to anything they were just stand-alone items that needed to be completed. With Outlook 2007, with a couple of clicks I can take an incoming email, flag it as a task, mark it with a category, and have it added to a nicely organized list that I can use to base my day around. Granted, I still don’t have enough personal discipline to do that very often, but at least I can’t blame the software any more. 🙂

Outlook 2007 isn’t problem-free though: start-up to using time is brutal, though I strongly suspect it’s due to the six IMAP accounts I have Outlook configured to check in addition to my hosted Exchange account. It checks for mail in all accounts all at once when it starts up, which is a messy and slow way of doing things – why don’t they do some sort of smart queueing? Another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes URLs in email messages, when clicked, will generate the following Outlook error:

outlook2007-url-click-failure.PNG

It seems to happen randomly with different URLs, and the URLs in question are definitely valid. The error is a strange one, because it refers to the URL as if it were a local resource (file) that couldn’t be located. I haven’t seen it often enough to nail down a pattern, but I think it may be related to the system load: if I open up Outlook 2007, while it’s churning hard I can click a link in an email and usually get this email. I think if it can’t load the URL in “x” seconds it will trigger this error. I’ve also seen this error in Vista outside of Outlook, so I’m thinking it has to do with Firefox not giving a response back to the URL request in “x” milliseconds – because the error won’t usually happen if Firefox is already open.

Curses! New Shuttle XPC is Dead on Arrival

I’ve been waiting to build a “super computer” for months, and now that I finally had enough parts to get started, when I put it all together into the ultra-sweet chassis of the Shuttle SD39P2 XPC…the damn thing wouldn’t boot! I had a kick-ass Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 running at 2.96 Ghz (courtesy of Intel Canada), 4 GB of 800mhz RAM (courtesy of Kingston), 1150 GB of storage (courtesy of Western Digital) – what I didn’t have was an optical drive since Plextor said they’d send me a Blu-Ray burner but never did, and I never did end up sending that email to ATI asking for a card…

At any rate, I cannibalized a few parts from another PC and put it all in the SD39P2. I felt a rush of excitement booting up such a powerful machine, pressed the power button, and nothing happened. @&*$%&^@#!! I spent the next couple of hours trouble shooting it, swapping out the RAM and video card, all with no positive results. @&*$%&^@#!! Then I got in my car and spent 90 minutes driving to and from Memory Express, having bought a ghetto 2.8 Ghz Celeron CPU ($60!) just for testing purposes (I didn’t have a spare Socket 775 CPU sitting around). It was a grim scenario: either the $1300 CPU from Intel was bad, or the Shuttle motherboard was bad…both scenarios sucked for me. Turns out the new CPU didn’t change anything, so it looks like the Shuttle XPC is bad. Damn. Damn. Damn. They’re sending me a new one and I’ll send this one back. That’s going to take at least a week though, meaning this project is on hold.

I guess on the bright side though by the time the new Shuttle arrives I’ll have the new video card I ordered and the new optical drive as well. I just hope that XFX video card fits in the XPC (gulp).

Every time I build a computer and it doesn’t go quite right, I think to myself “Jason, just go buy a Dell…” – but once I fight my way through the problems and I end up with a sweet-ass rig, I know it was worth the effort. I really hope this is one of those scenarios…

Scientists Identify Dinosaur Proteins

“In a retrieval once thought unattainable, scientists have recovered and identified proteins in a bone of a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex that lived, died and was fossilized 68 million years ago. The scientists say the success, attained with advanced research techniques, opens the door for the first time to exploration of the molecular-level relationships of ancient, extinct animals, instead of just relying on their skeletal remains. Dinosaur fossil hunters are planning nine expeditions this summer to search wide and deep for more specimens as promising candidates for similar tests. A few large dinosaur bones already in laboratories might be examined for surviving traces of organic matter.”
– International Herald Tribune

Jurassic Park here we come! You guys go first though, ok? I’ll take the second helicopter over. No, really.

The Jump Cut Comes Back With a Vengeance

I’m not a professional video guy, but I’ve done enough video work over the years to pick up some of the basics. One guideline in shooting video, and subsequently editing it, is that shooting the same scene back with cuts is a visually jarring experience for the viewer because the head (and sometimes body) of the person jumps from one place to another with each cut. Anyone remember Max Hedroom? What’s interesting to me is how the emergence of sites like YouTube have taken jump cuts to a whole new level – and in the case of comedy or a monologue written in a broken up style, it actually works quite well. Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about…

Advertising 101: Make Sure It’s Your Domain

I was watching a UFC show called “All Access” the other day – it’s a behind the scenes show that covers how UFC fighters train – and I noticed that the show had “Blue Chip” branding all over it.  I didn’t know what Blue Chip was, but later in the show they showed an URL for Blue Chip, evidently a sports collectible company.

ufc-all-access-blue-chip.JPG

Now here’s the funny part: www.bluechip.com loads a empty Web page related to something called the “Telamon Project Tracking System”. There’s no mention of Blue Chip anywhere. A first I thought I had made a typo in the URL, but that wasn’t the case. Next I thought “Ok, maybe it’s .net or something else” but a Google search for Blue Chip Sports failed to turn up any likely candidate that would have sponsored this UFC TV show. Was this some sort of typo in the domain? Or did BlueChip.com at one point have a sports collectible store, but they went out of business before the UFC show aired? Did they also have zero Google juice? That’s a bit hard to believe unless they started up this company last month.

At any rate, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to sponsor a TV show, make sure they get your domain right, and that your company will last long enough to see some benefits from it.

There Are Bad Ideas, Then There Are B*A*D Ideas

karaoke-tunes.JPG

That’s a banner in a booth I saw at CTIA 2007. So the idea here is that you use their software client to sing along with Karaoke tune, then whenever your phone rings you get to hear yourself singing. I’m a vocalist myself, so I have a bit of a narcissistic streak when it comes to hearing what my own singing voice sounds like, but this is completely ridiculous. And sharing it with others? “Hey, here’s a ring tone for you – what it is? Why, it’s yours truly singing Bootylicious…no, wait, why are you walking away?”. Some business plans deserve to fail.

It’s Just One of Those Days

Upgrading WordPress is a Pain in the Ass: I just finished updating WordPress from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3, and for this particular version they strongly suggested that people delete most of the WordPress files and re-upload them from scratch. What a slow, frustrating process that was – I can’t believe that with all the users WordPress has, they wouldn’t have come up with a smoother, more automated process by now. I’m keeping my eye on Habari to see if it evolves into a smarter solution.

Someone Hacked My Church’s Web Site: What kind of a degenerate hacks a church Web site? Evidently a degenerate that lives in Turkey. He got in through a Joomla exploit and didn’t seem to do much damage other than putting up a “You’ve been hacked” front page display. Thanks to Jorj and Janak, who did the investigating, it seems that only that one account was compromised and everything else on the server is ok. Yet I still remain a big nervous because you just never know…

Buy a Fresh, Whole Rabbit from Amazon.com

I don’t know if this is an April Fool’s joke or what, but my sick and twisted sense of humour found the “buyer” reviews to be extremely amusing. Here are some of the more amusing ones (thanks to Todd for the heads up).

“A lot of my friends like to shop online, so I added this to my baby registry. My best friend received one at her shower and she loves it! So when I got TWO at my shower, it wasn’t the disaster other duplicate gifts can be! My little girl is now three months old and we are still getting a lot of use out of the Fresh Whole Rabbits.”

“Thought it would make a cute Easter gift, no one else thought so, kids are in counselling now. Apparently I’m the only one with a sense of humor in this family. At least it’s a hit with the dog, one extra star for that. I’m way too scared to even try to take it away from him, he loves it so much. ‘Heh, OK SirFluffles,’ I say to him, ‘it’s YOUR fresh whole rabbit.'”

“How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave. Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins. What a time saver.”

Gears of War Quandry: Surely This Can’t Be Right?

I picked up Gears of War a couple of months ago, but have only recently started to start playing it more seriously. Some friends were over a few weeks ago and we played in co-op mode for a bit, and got to a certain checkpoint. Then this last Saturday I fired it up again to play with a buddy of mine who’s in Ontario. I wanted to start over a new game from scratch with him, but I also wanted to keep my previously saved game. The game wouldn’t let me do that – it said that if wanted to start a new campaign I would lose my previous campaign and checkpoints. That can’t be right – am I missing something? How do you play a solo game and also do online campaigning with your friends? Or what if you have more than one group of friends you want to play with?