Holes.

Just finished reading Holes by Louis Sachar. Its a good book and quick to read. I found it hard going to start with as all the sentences are so short that the story seems to stutter, but after a few pages/chapters you get the hang of it. Its a very addictive read and only takes a couple of hours. I’d never heard of the story even though it’s just been released as a film and was one of the books featured in the Big Read. We’ll probably go and see the film in the next couple of weeks.

Autoreboot solution hints

I think I’m getting a bit closer in my hunt to work out why the computer seems to spontaneously combustreboot when I am doing certain things. A lot of the time it seems random but there are certain things I do that make it reboot. Viewing a certain gif file in a certain package, or going to www.merzo.net in Phoenix. The quick answer of course is to stop doing those things. However I logged on as a new user on the w2k box, went to the merzo site and it didn’t reboot. Therefore I think its a corrupt w2k profile that is causing problems. I tried creating a new Phoenix profile in the normal w2k profile but this didn’t solve the problem. Incidentally the Merzo website has some pretty cool artwork on it and when you move the mouse over the pictures something happens.

PDC?

I’ve been hearing loads about the PDC conference that various MS bods have been too yet nowhere, until now, have I seen what PDC stands for. It has nothing to do with Primary Domain Controllers or blogging. It actually stood for “Professional Developers Conference”

Outlook2k with Outlook2k3?

Brought the Outlook2k3 laptop into the office to synch all the changes I’d made whilst out of the office this week. Interesting to see that Outlook 2k3 doesn’t show the email marked as spam (as I deleted it whilst offline). However the outlook2k desktop, which looks at the same exchange mailbox still sees the spam in the inbox. o2k3 shows 2 unread emails in the inbox, o2k shows 4. Now either this is because you can’t have two versions accessing the same mailbox (don’t see why not) or due to the fact that when I synch I get a “Microsoft Exchange Server reported error (0x80040600) : ‘Unknown Error 0x80040600’. There are loads of articles in google about 0x80040600 most of which talked about corrupted pst files. I cleared out my deleted items, resynched and everything worked and my inbox unread messages match.

Not a good advert

It never really fills you with confidence when a website that is meant to extol the values of how wonderful their ScriptLogic – system administration program – is returns an error message. Especially one that says “Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ‘80020009’ [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied. /go/caffeine-free.asp, line 2”
A system admin company which talks to a server that doesn’t exist?