Missing pics?

Hmmm – if you view the previous post in internet explorer the first picture of a cartoon is not displayed, yet it works in firefox. Internet explorer seems to treat the align=”left” code as display=none for some strange reason. The individual page for the post shows both pictures correctly – any css gurus got any ideas?

Rewards!

Two weeks ago I got the honour of being the employee of the quarter from work which I am pretty chuffed about πŸ˜‰ Thankfully I didn’t have to give an acceptance speech as there would have been too many people to thank. As a prize I was firstly awarded a Batbelt – complete with (nonworking GPS). This was because of the gps but mainly because of the fact that I always have a software tool to solve a computer problem and it’s become the joke to ask if I have a tool on my batbelt for a particular problem. Needless to say, everyone thought it was funny so I proudly hooked it up to the top of my cubicle to be on display – this also means the little dart gun is close at hand in case I need to ward off a particular nasty case of job sloping.

I also received an avaya t-shirt – again a gag gift – as I have done so much work on the avaya phone system that support should really be doing, that everyone thinks I am an avaya employee now! (incidentally I got a compliment from the tech I was working with last night (on our third firmware upgrade to solve persistent phone problems) when he said it was nice to work with a customer who actually knew their way around a computer and could help in the diagnostic problems)

Caricature at North Market The third gift was two tickets for the North Market 10th annual Apron Gala which we went to on Saturday night. The event was really good fun with loads of posh food to try out. We didn’t stay right to the end but did enjoy being there at the beginning when there wasn’t too many people around. One of the most popular stalls was Bob the fish guy who had two huge containers of shrimp which were really nice – lots of people made several trips to that stall! The picture framing stall had a caricaturist doing pictures so Kristen and I got ours done as you can see on the left – click for a bigger picture. We also purchased two aprons as our donation towards the event – the pockets in the apron were great for keeping napkings, forks and a cup handy whilst walking around.

Kristen also got me a congratulations cookie biscuit (thanks Rob!) which we are now half way through – thanks luv!

Employee of the Quarter!

Information Improvisation

Due to extensive wireless internet coverage, a number of wireless internet service providers are prospering. These include at&t wireless as well as rogers wireless. With the advent of wireless internet, how distances have been reduced to nothing is not exactly a miracle. Services like cingular wireless have made sure that one can find wireless internet anywhere.

wmp11 leaked

Apparently wmp11 has leaked and apparently uses less resources and is more stable. That is good news as I was attempting to rip a cd tonight in wmp10 and it insisted on showing me the cd that I had ripped previously instead of the one that was in the player, it stopped responding once and I had to kill the process – something I have to do nearly everytime I use the thing (but it is still better at ripping than creative music organizer which is a piece of junk (apart from the Zen integration which is why I use *that* piece of software – it would be nice if the auto detect of mp3 files would occur AFTER the mp3 has been completed and not before, when the mp3 tags haven’t been written to the disk yet.

Outlook Web Access problems

I was getting an error attempting to log into an exchange web mailbox with the message “The Local Security Authority can not be contacted”. As it turned out this was actually due to the fact that the previous administrators had set this user up so that they were only allowed to logon from one particular workstation. I (thought I) had already solved this problem by adding the exchange server to the list of computers that the user was allowed to log onto but that didn’t work – it was only after I removed the restrictions (which were not necessary now anyway) that they were able to get their mail via the web.

Back at last!

We’re back! My site was closed sometime last week as the server it was hosted on was having resource issues. I was offered a move to a new server and unfortunately the flat web pages got moved across but the sql database backend didn’t. It’s now been fixed and we’re live again. Expect a couple of posts from me as I catch up on my blogging from the past couple of days.
Now I’m off to ensure I have a REALLY good sql backup of my data – for some reason my control panel backup didn’t include a valid copy of my mysql databases.

Printing now works in the kiosk mode

I forgot to blog that we fixed the problem with not being able to use Ctrl-P to print in internet explorer with a kiosk group policy on a machine. The solution which sort of makes sense was to enable the File menu again. We had restricted this but for some reason this also restricts ctrl-p, ctrl-s and other shortcuts on some sites. By enabling the File Menu in the group policy everything worked 100% of the time. Further details in the extended entry

5th May

Apparently today is Cinco de Mayo – something I’ve never heard of before. My first thought when I saw it in an email was that it was someone playing battleships with sandwich fillings but a quick google search later shows that it commemorates the astounding victory of the Mexican Army over the French at the Battle of Puebla on the 5th of May, 1862. As I don’t want to be accused of inciting racial hatred I won’t say any more but it does sound like a GREAT day today πŸ˜‰
Oh – and happy Birthday to my Sister for Sunday!

footnotes in Word

If you’ve ever tried to create a footnote in Word and got the daft error message that states “Start At must be between 1 and 16383 for this format.” when the Start At is set to 1 (or 2 or 3 or 4 or …) then the fix is to select the entire document apart from the last paragraph mark (turn the viewing of paragraph marks on by pushing the ΒΆ button on the toolbar) and then copy paste the document into a new document. Hopefully the document is not that big and that you can copy paste with no problems! Thanks to this post on google groups for the answer