Not sure whether it will do any good, but you can sign up to opt out of credit card offers, loan offers, mortgage stuff and all the other rubbish that gets sent to you as soon as you buy a house by registering with the optout website run by experian and other credit agencies. You can opt out for 5 years online, if you want to permanently optout you have to print a form out and sent it in the post. I guess this is so that most people can’t be bothered to do that and forget after 5 years.
I did try using the phoneline to do this a while back but it uses (allegedly) voice recognition and wouldn’t recognise my name or address. Kristen was getting quite frustrated listening to me trying o say my name and address with an american accent so pulled the phone from me and tried to do it herself, but it wouldn’t accept her pronounciation either.
Month: February 2006
Setting the default printer in a script might be handy – I have a user whose printer keeps getting set to the wrong one when they log into terminal services from one particular location. Hopefully this script will solve that problem.
The link on WSUS that tells you what is new (that most people never look at) is being updated according to WSUS Product Team Blog . What looks good is the ability to easily see if the patches need a reboot etc. What I’d like to see is the field to tell you whether it is safe to start the install whilst users are on the system and then leave the server to reboot automatically at night. Sometimes you can’t install a patch without it kicking off the users (exchange patches tend to be the worst for this in my experience).
We had the misfortune to have to claim for our kitchen table that we moved to the states. The table top had cracked in the move. We filled out the paperwork for the claim and 3 days later got the response back :”We regret to advise that we have to decline payment of your claim for the following reason:The table is not noted on your completed proposal form or on any of the attached sheets, therefore you have not paid to cover the item and cannot claim for it under your marine insurance policy.”
My response back was something along the lines of “what part of H1 – Table do you not understand?” although I was a bit more polite.
Today we got an email saying the cheque had been approved.Makes me wonder how many people give up on their claims as they receive a standard form letter.
I had a very peculiar issue at a customer site this afternoon. They are attempting to use webdav to a remote server on the internet but was unable to connect. Each time they put their username and password in they ended up with the message “Internet Explorer could not open http://WebSiteName as a Web Folder. Would you like to see its default view instead?” as documented at Kb220930. The solution in this article didn’t help but did point me towards the error log %temp%\Wecerr.txt. This contained the text “The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted” which didn’t help in a google search either.
The weird thing was that logging on as an administrator worked, but giving the user local admin rights didn’t work. However, at least this ruled out the firewall as the domain admin user could use it.
After about an hour I stumbled across the solution in kb269681 which isn’t clear enough to provide the exact solution – but it is straightforward.
Due to a bug in folder redirection it is possible to redirect %appdata% and somehow not have the %appdata%\microsoft\Msdaipp folder exist.
I created the folder and webdav started working.
Hopefully this post will help someone else with this rare and obscure problem.
I got a new phone at work the other day – a Samsung SGH D357. I’m not that impressed with it so far. I do love the fact that when the headset is connected you hear an incoming call ring before it answers. On the previous motorola phone I had it would just autoanswer with no ringing – not a good idea when singing along to the radio in the car.
We’ve now lived in the States for almost 10 months and we still hadn’t been out to an indian restaurant let alone a takeaway – after last night, that situation is rectified and we’ve found a great restaurant. I was actually looking on the internet for somewhere to get Fish and Chips from as a celebratory meal and one of the ads on googles map pages was for an indian restaurant – the amul India – with reviews on Columbus City Search. All of the reviews were extremely positive with comments like “the best indian food” so we decided to head to this place instead.
We were not disappointed – on a Friday night we were seated straight away, which seems to be almost impossible in american restaurants nowadays, and we were given plenty of time to read the menu. A lot of the other patrons were indian, which was a good sign, and the place had an atmosphere – a little bit of indian music in the background, but not too loud – and the chatter made us both feel comfortable and at home.
Ordering from a new indian restaurant is often a gamble as you have no idea how spicy their food is going to be and the spelling of every dish always seems to be different from any previous menu’s seen. I decided to have the Amul India special which consisted of “Aloo tikki and pakora, chicken tandoori, lamb curry, dai, mater paneer, nan, rice and dessert served on a silver platter” for the princely sum of $12.99, Kristen ordered the chicken curry, some papardam’s and mango chutney.
My starters arrived very quickly with Kristen’s papardams – which I’ve just read were described as crispy spicy lentil wafer’s – we’ve never had spicy, or lentil one’s before and they were pretty spicy- unfortunately too spicy for Kristen. The funny thing was that she thought it was one of the relishes so was eating more papardum to try and cool down but she had the opposite effect. The relishes were pretty spicy too – should have been a warning of things to come really 🙂
The main course arrived – Kristen’s curry had been ordered as Regular, and she loved it – she must have said how good it was about 20 times or more. My food was also excellent but a bit too spicy for me – I had ordered the medium, but it didn’t take long for my head to start sweating – I dread to think what the Medium hot, Hot or Extra Hot would taste like!
My dish was a reasonable sized sampling of 4 dishes and was delicious. A couple of the them were extra spicy, but mixing in the rice and nan cooled it off enough to eat.
The dessert was (I think) a Gulab Jamun – a fried cheese vall soaked in syrup which was really nice – it was a suprise when I bit into it as it was cold – I just thought it was part of the main course so I was expecting something hot!
Everything was reasonably priced (apart from the mango chutney which seems very expensive at $1.75 for about 2 tablespoons worth), food was great and the service was good too – Highly recommended and it deserves the 9 points it gets on citysearch.
Although I had to delay my test until this afternoon as my planned test date of yesterday was full, I passed my Small Business Exam, 70-282 this afternoon with a score of 925 – although not 1000 like my past test, still a respectable score that I’m pleased with.
The very first question had nothing to do with SBS (as did most of the questions) and was something I’d never heard of or probably need to do – it was how about how to migrate a dhcp server settings from a real environment to a test environment (hopefully that is vague enough to not get in trouble for breaking the NDA).
Some of the questions were very easy and very obvious but some of the questions were very ambiguous so I had no idea what the right answer was. They were things like “in this scenario, what are the two biggest risks?” when the choices are critical/security patches not installed, no antivirus defs, ISA client not installed and ISA server not uptodate. Apart from the first choice it’s very difficult to distinguish which is the next biggest risk – especially in a real world scenario.
Anyway, now that I have passed this exam I have another exam under my MCSE belt taken care of – 5 more to go 🙁 Once the results are submitted to Microsoft I also become a Small Business Specialist and gain entry into the exclusive Small Business Specialist Community. My company also benefits as they gain this competency/specialist too.
KB article 830836 gives the details on editing the registry when too many objects of type objtMessage are opened on the exchange server. I’ve had this a couple of times in the past and I thought I had blogged this post for reference – but I hadn’t