If you like cats or kittens then Kittenbreak.Com – Do you need a Kitten Break Today? will provide you with 166 ( at present) photos of kittens (and old kittens!). Most of them are real although some of the earlier ones are taken from emails that have done the rounds such as the kitten on drugs, the orange cat that waves hello etc. Well worth looking through. My favourite so far is Number 43
Unfortunately i’ve subscribed to some of the posts on the Feedster blog which has the option to email you every time someone comments on a post. A feature that would be REALLY useful when you want to track what someone responds to your comment with. Unfortunately the feedster blog doesn’t have any flood or script protection as some idiot who shall remain nameless keeps sending a dumb comment to the blog and therefore sending me a notification. So far i’ve probably had 40+ emails. Grrrrrr. Email has been sent to the owner to try and get something sorted quick.
I got the pukka version of office2003 today and installed it on the laptop and the desktop so I’m now a happy bunny again and I can read my emails with a decent preview and not download any spam pictures. The interesting thing in the EULA (which I bothered to read) actually says that I can install the software on my main pc AND on another portable device as long as I am the sole user of that device. Which is great as it means I can install on the desktop and the laptop and only need one licence for it. This EULA could actually make it cheaper for some companies to upgrade to this version of office as they could potentially only need half the number of licences that previous versions needed – if of course the company is indulgent enough to give everyone a desktop and a laptop.
I downloaded the office updates and was suprised to see only one spam filter update – I guess that the second filter update that came out a while ago is actually a culmalative one.
Speaking of patches – I’ve started to install the new Microsoft patches that came out yesterday and so far have not had any problems.
Due to the company name change we needed to edit our pdf documents that have the old company name on. Now the reason the files are in pdf format is because its (nearly) impossible for a user to edit the manual…..as we have just found out. There seemed to be three pieces of software that could do the job, Adobe Acrobat (the full version) but for some reason this doesn’t work at all – although I suspect its because the user actually has Adobe Reader and not Acrobat but they won’t admit it. The other two solutions are Jaws PDF Editor but this only seems to give us the ability to copy/paste text from the pdf to another application such as Word – but then you can do this with acrobat reader anyway (unless its protected). The other application was PDF Editor from CadKas. This would do the job but its painfully slow. There is no global search and replace (which would make it easy to search for oldcompany and replace with newcompany and there seems to be a bug in firing up dialogs (which are quirky in themselves) in that if you click to load a graphic and select the folder, rather than opening the folder it will complain that the folder.jpg doesn’t exist – and then refuse to open the dialog box up again. This software could be used if you only needed to edit a few pieces of text or a few graphics – certainly not 20 or 30 manuals each 10+ pages long.
Eventually the user went back and found the original word documents (although they swore blind they couldn’t find them) and they are now editing the files in Word.
I’ve been looking for some flight prices for a friend of mine for this weekend. One of the places that I was looking at, ThomsonFly at Coventry has on their news page that they have received 2 enforcement notices from Warwick council about the airport – but they still have plans to fly everyone. But who is going to book flights with the (pretty major) chance of the flight being cancelled?
Each time I spend a bit of time on the geocaching.com website (which is a LOT of time) I am amazed at how good the programming is and how useful the features are. I’m not sure how much of it is .net programming or how much of it is some fancy java programming, but the location based logic is really good. I tried (re)-using the MAP-IT screen which gives me the list of all caches nearest my home co-ordinates and lists the ones I have not done yet but in a graphical view as opposed to a table view. Previously I’d written this facility off as useless outside the US as it doesn’t show you any street level detail that you would get in the US locations, but it does show you the relative positions of caches as in the picture.
With Microsoft’s latest round of patches available this morning (typically on a day that I’m not in the office!) it was interesting to note that there were some NT4 patches on there – you remember NT4 – the OS that microsoft was going to stop supporting on various dates sometime last year. The other weird thing is that my XP box at home downloaded more than 4 patches today – even though there were only 4 patches released.
I sent an email to one site after mentioning that a link which was coded as <a href=”http:\\www.sitename.co.uk”> didn’t work. After the initial response of “it works on my pc” I was told that 98% of browser users are Internet Explorer, which accepts the slashes in the wrong direction. Fortunately they changed the link. What they don’t understand is that the original code is plain and simply wrong, a basic bit of code that is almost the first thing you learn when coding html – but then again if you code a web page using frontpage……..
The problem I have with offline files synchronising whenever *anyone* logs off the computer is documented at kbAlertz which although doesn’t reference the site, can be found at KB article 811660). Annoyingly it looks like a call needs to be placed with Microsoft to get this hotfix – or wait until service pack 2 (I guess). Although it doesn’t bother me too much it does annoy the other people in the office when I log onto their computer 🙂
As documented on my Caching blog I managed to do 9 caches over the weekend and collect 3 travel bugs and two trig points which is a pretty good tally. My knees are aching a bit though and I was very glad of my two walking poles when coming down the hill at Shutlingsloe. I was able to use them as crutches, put my weight on them and allow me to navigate down the hill without too much pain. Today, two days later, my knees were protesting a little bit when we doing the caches, even though I’d specifically chosed caches with terrain less than 2 (although that relies on you parking in the correct spot for the cache!) but I was able to walk without much assistance. So as the Doctor said a week or two ago – I just need to get used to it. As soon as they’ve recovered a bit more I need to get back on the eliptical cross trainer to build the strength in the knees.