October 2005 – Absoblogginlutely!

Todays the day for money screwups!

By Andy on Monday, October 31, 2005

After not receiving the money for our house today, I also found out that none of our wages this month got paid as there was a problem with Huntington’s Automatic Clearing House procedures and the money did not go into the account (or anyone else’s at work) This is 5 days after the bank came to the office to give a presentation on how wonderful they are and how we should move our banking across to them – I have yet to be convinced that I should move.
In the end we got paid via paper checks (which could take a couple of days to clear – fortunately we don’t have a mortgage to pay today or tomorrow)

We were also due to see a mortgage advisor this evening but he had to cancel as he had forgotten it was Halloween and his kids would not be impressed if he didn’t go trick or treating with them. I understand his intentions, but tonight was the second attempt to try and meet up with him and tonight was the only evening we have free this week.

Moving to the states

At last – the house is sold.

By Andy on Monday, October 31, 2005

Finally – our house sold today ~~and the money was transferred into our account~~ or it would have done if the annoying solicitors hadn’t employed a sneaky trick to hang onto the money for an extra day. We had previously told them (several times) our account details at the bank but today they sent an email to us giving a summary of the house balance (less the estate agents and their fees) and asking us if we really wanted the money paid into our account that we had previously told them. So we’ve sent them a snotty letter asking for the money to be paid into our account immediately.
The whole house selling saga has been a right pain with lots of hassles with estate agents who lie and do not work for our best interests by telling people to put in an extremely low offer on the house as it is overpriced whilst at the same time telling us that there would be no problem selling the house at the price we were listing at and then having the cheek to tell us that they were trying to protect our higher price as long as they could – for less than 24 hours after they became our agent.
I would suggest anyone who wants to sell a house in the congleton area to stay away from HamRidingSimpson.

Music

Sony DRM goes bad.

By Andy on Monday, October 31, 2005

Mark’s blog at sysinternals talks about Sony’s latest DRM software that acts like a rootkit – resisting efforts to appear in active processes on the system and other really nasty software. Although Sony’s aim is to stop you copying their music, when they start doing tricks like this (which is possibly illegal as it modifies your computer without you agreeing to let it do so but ianal) it is more likely to encourage piracy as people rely on getting mp3’s off the internet as they are less likely to get copy protected additions at the same time.
The direct link to the article is this link which appears to be broken

Exchange / Outlook

11 Outlook Web Access tips (plus 1 bonus from me)

By Andy on Saturday, October 29, 2005

11 outlook web access tips for 2003 which are also useful in outlook itself. I did wonder what the difference between premium and basic version was and now I know. My bonus tip is that unless you have owner access to a users mailbox you only get read access to someone elses calendar in outlook web access, even if you have edit or author access within outlook. I spent ages trying to work this out for a remote customer (who I couldn’t talk through things over the phone as they only had 1 phone line which she used for dialup! I finally managed to get hold of someone in the office, make sure that a pc in the office wasn’t in use and then take control of the pc to test the outlook vs outlook web access functionality.

Office

Excel won’t open files.

By Andy on Friday, October 28, 2005

…when you double click on them but will from the File/Open menu was a weird one that I hadn’t come across before. However, following the instructions in a Google Groups posting where the tools | options | general | ignore other applications was unchecked and it worked. Very strange. Not sure why this has started to happen but it works – *shrug*

Utilities

Free EssentialPim Pro

By Andy on Thursday, October 27, 2005

Essential Pim are going to be giving away the pro version of their software for everyone who visits their site on Halloween. Looks like Opera started a great trend 🙂
The cool thing is that the portable version will be available too which means you can use it on your usb key. The data is encrypted and it doesn’t need installing on the pc.
Although I’ve not tried this software it sounds really good. Now that we don’t have outlook in the office (or even on the computer) and the Notes Pim functions just suck big time (at least on a naff 1024*768 screen) this will hopefully be really useful.

Gmail

Gmail forwarding.

By Andy on Thursday, October 27, 2005

I’ve taken the step of forwarding all incoming mail for my userid at my main domain to my google account for 3 reasons. 1 is to reduce the amount of spam that I get in my inbox and the second is to give me a decent web interface for my mail as the web interface with 1and1 is awful to use and really slow and thirdly to have a searchable archive of mail available from any computer.
The main computer at home will download the email via pop3 as usual but I’ll also have email on the move. I’ve not forwarded all email via google as it blocks certain attachments (.exe files for example) which I occasionally need but I might do this at a later date with an exception email that goes direct to pop3 instead of via gmail.

Funny Pages Other Blogs

Dilbert blog!

By Andy on Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Scott Adams has a blog and starts off with “If you’re reading this on company time, congratulations on beating the system. If you’re reading it on your own time, you really need to find a job where they pay you to do this sort of thing.”
I’m sure i’ve read the follow up story in one of the dilbert books (or management principle books) but its still pretty funny and shows how pointless committees are.
Thanks to Adam