I couldn’t help but get a chuckle out of this: I posted the entry about the It’s Rule and then today I was typing and look what the Word Grammar checker (manifested inside Outlook 2007) told me to to:
It’s wrong in suggesting that I not use “it’s” since I am saying “…the next email I get it is fixed again.” In retrospect I probably should have had a comma after “get”, but I doubt that would have changed the flag.
Well, it’s about a year too late, but Microsoft has finally admitted that Firefox is a serious browser player in the market and if they want to claim that a majority of the Web can access Windows Media content, they have to have a real Windows Media Player plug-in for it. Now here it is. I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume it will be just as seamless as the way WMP works with IE today. [Source]
I’m completely baffled. I thought that the screwy keyboard character issue was restricted just to Firefox, but this morning I saw the same problem with Outlook 2007 when I tried to type a question mark I’d get an “ѐ” character. The same problem cropped up in Firefox, but in a Windows Live Messenger chat window I had no problem getting a question mark? I’m officially getting ticked off at this problem…what kind of a problem would effect keyboard input on a per-application basis rather than system wide? Restarting Outlook fixed the problem, but that doesn’t help me narrow down what’s causing it.
I found this amusing because it’s a mistake that, up until perhaps two years ago, I was making constantly. You’d think as a writer I’d know how to use the word, but my brain had a hard time grasping that this rule wasn’t related to the possessive. Isn’t English fun?
Saw this on Vinny’s blog, it made me laugh out loud.
It’s always ticked me off the way Microsoft Office requires the install CD to do any number of seemingly minor things. Today though I was surprised to see an all new “feature”: I was working on a laptop that had Outlook 2003 installed, and I had signed up the owner for a hosted Exchange account and wanted to install Outlook 2007. Sure, I could install over top, but why not do an uninstall and keep things clean? I tried to uninstall Outlook 2003, but it wouldn’t uninstall without the Office 2003 install CD. What kind of lunacy is this? You should *never* need an install CD to remove a program – that’s idiotic on every level possible.
I’m just about read to rip out my hair here, and I can’t seem to figure out what the problem is: seemingly at random, Firefox will start to incorrectly interpret keyboard characters. The ‘ becomes a #. The / becomes an ѐ. When it first started happening, I thought it was Vista-wide problem, but I realized it wasn’t happening in Outlook, Windows Mail, Word, or anywhere else, including the Vista shell. Then I thought it might have been some sort of problem with the Logitech keyboard software, but it’s a Firefox-only problem from what I can see because if I shut down Firefox and re-start it, the problem goes away. In fact, now that I think about it, it seems that it only tends to happen if Firefox has been open all day or multiple days – which makes me wonder if it’s some sort of memory leak issue. Any other Firefox users seen a problem like this?
This is one of those things I’m posting solely for the purpose of perhaps saving someone else the same headache I’m now going through because I wasn’t able to find this information when I was searching. In a nutshell: I wanted to get the fastest, but completely silent, video card that I could find for the Shuttle SD39P2 system I was putting together. I looked at every option on the market, and it boiled down to one: the XFX GeForce 7950GT, a passively-cooled card that out-performed the 8000 series cards that were passively cooled. I knew it had a “big” heatsink and cooling fans, but I wasn’t sure how big. I also knew the SD39P2, like all Shuttle XPCs, was “small” – but that’s a relative term and I couldn’t find out how much space there was on all sides of the PCI Express slot. So I took a leap of faith and ordered this card for $325 and when it arrived I tried to install it. It would not fit. The picture pretty much says it all:
The heat pipes connect to the radiator and it sticks out the back a good 2cm or so, making it impossible to put the case back on. So scratch that plan, it looks like I’ll be putting this 7950GT in my big tower and I’ll either put the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro in the Shuttle, or perhaps sell it on eBay and get a new 8000 series passively cooled card. And I’m still waiting for a new SD39P2 to come my way – this project is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare…
I discovered something new about Vista today (I’m constantly discovering new things actually), and it was in the Games section of Vista. When you click on a game title, it will show you the required and recommended Windows Experience Index ratings for the game – we all knew that. What I had never seen before is that if you right-click on a game icon, you see a whole bunch of different options:
This is a great example of contest-sensitive user interface. You want to know where your saved games are for a certain game? Right click and it will open the right folder for you. Nicely done Microsoft!
Several months ago, let’s say November, Ashley and I were driving home from church on a Sunday afternoon and I saw a woman pushing a cart full of garbage bags. She looked homeless, carrying her only possessions in the cart. I was very surprised to see her on the side road we were driving down at the edge of the city – most homeless people tend to stay downtown, close to the shelters. When I saw her my first instinct was to stop and help her somehow, to give her some money – but I immediately felt worried it would be awkward for me to stop my car, put it in reverse and get out and approach her. Not exactly a low key approach, now is it? As I kept driving down the road I wrestled with my conscience over this – and eventually ended up home a few minutes later. I confessed to Ashley that I wanted to help that lady, and that I was ashamed I hadn’t. She told me that the woman was more or less a “regular” down that road, that she saw her now and then going to and from work. I vowed that the next time I saw her I’d stop and do something to help. Months passed, and I never saw her again – and, in truth, I eventually forgot about her (to my shame).
On Monday night of this week, Ashley and I loaded up our car with five bags of cans and bottles for recycling – we always find it a bit of a hassle to drive down to the bottle recyling place, wait 10-20 minutes in line, and only get $30 for it. We recycle for environmental, not monetary reasons (like almost everyone I imagine), so we usually leave it until we’re tripping over garbage bags full of cans and bottles and have no choice. We always hope the local boy scouts will stop by on a Saturday so we can give them all of it, but they haven’t come around since last year. At any rate, we decided to drive to a bottle recycling station that was a bit further away, but more convenient to get to – and because it was new, we hoped there wouldn’t be any lines.
We arrived only five minutes before closing, and when I came in carrying three garbage bags I sighed in relief at seeing only one woman dropping off her cans because it meant we wouldn’t have to wait in line (Ashley and I have a problem being patient waiting in line you see). I opened up the bags and started to dump out the cans and bottles – as I was doing so I looked over at the women who had just dropped off her cans and was at the window waiting for her money. She was clearly homeless, and immediately I knew what to do – I walked over and asked her if she’d like to have all of our cans and bottles. She smiled and said “Yes, thank you so much” and I said “You’re welcome”. I finished emptying out the next bag and she came over to wait while they sorted through it. She thanked me again, and Ashley and I left.
As we were walking out to the car, Ashley said “Do you know who that lady was? She’s the one you passed on the road last year and wanted to help – and now you have.” I stopped dead and gave Ashley an incredulous look – what were the odds that we’d see her at that place, at that time five minutes before closing, on that day, at a bottle depot we’d never been to before? Stack those odds together and you end up with a very long shot. In that moment I knew it was a God thing, a designed moment in time. I have no illusions that us giving her a few bottles changed her life, but if a small act of kindness from a stranger made her day a little brighter, then it’s a step in the right direction.