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Sunday, 11 February 2001
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Well, nobody wants to buy my house yet. That is, there's some "interest," but nobody has actually written an offer yet. And I'm getting tired of living in a large, echoing empty box. And one that I have to keep unnaturally clean seven days a week. Hey, I'm a guy. It don't come natural. It's starting to get to me. Lemme out.
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Monday, 12 February 2001
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I'm getting very fond of the HP Jornada pocket PC. I've gotten it adjusted pretty much the way I want it, within its limitations. Set the buttons to do what I want them to do, tinkered with the onscreen menu that HP offers as an alternative to the little "Today" screen. A couple of things I don't like though — the little plastic flap that covers the card slot is definitely not going to last. Shove it in and out of pockets a few hundred times... sooner or later, snap. Guaranteed. And the cute little Record button that lets you (not me, I'm betting) record voice memos that are stored as audio "notes" files — it keeps getting pushed while it's in my pocket, which turns the unit on. I haul it out and it's already lit up. So far, my workaround for that has been to try and find a task that does basically nothing, and assign it to that button. I think I've gotten the better of it. For now.
But I read a whole book on it, and didn't particularly suffer. Good screen. The pocket PC version of MS Reader that comes with Windows for Pocket Computers (WinCE 3.0?) has a couple of little things missing that I wish they hadn't removed — you can't adjust the ClearType, the way you can on a real computer; and when you start reading a book, you can't go to a table of contents and jump to any chapter, because there's no table of contents. So you're stuck either jumping right to your last place, which is normally OK, or simply scrolling through the file until you get where you want to go. But that said, I still enjoy it. There's not real substitute for paper yet, but this'll do in a pinch.
And the basically seamless integration with Outlook is very nice. I haven't messed much with Word and Excel yet, but I'll get there eventually. And speaking of Word brings me to data entry and character recognition. There's a neat program called Transcriber that comes on the CD, which does a surprisingly good job of recognizing printing, cursive, or a mix of both. Sweet. Bottom line, I'm liking this thing a lot.
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Tuesday, 13 February 2001
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Yesterday I wasted a whole lot of time (well, "wasted" except in the sense that I'm still going to get paid for it), trying and failing to figure out why a customer can't browse the web, though they can ping, and even resolve DNS names to IP addresses. Their main issue is that they can't get pcAnywhere to connect. (Yes, it's that customer...) Back again this afternoon to try more stuff. Of course, this isn't something that I can work anywhere but onsite, or any time except during business hours. Ack. Maximum ack. Fortunately, the people are very nice about it. I've made sure (a la BOFH) never to raise their expectations to the point where they expect PCs to work properly for more than a few hours at a time, and never to give them any way to try and attack problems on their own. The last thing we need is to have the end lusers mucking about in the works, eh? ;^)
And somebody is supposed to present an offer on the house tonight. Probably not an exciting offer, except in the generic sense that it's nice to get an offer. I wish I had the money to fix the old place up myself, and just stay there. But I don't, and that's that. Ah, well... life goes on. I wonder where mine will go on to in the near future. Actually, I spend very little time at home. It's sort of just a place to stash my small quantity of stuf, and sleep. A house without a family in it isn't a home; merely a shell, suitable for keeping the rain off. Oops, we're in some danger of waxing philosophical here. Better go earn some more money.
Jornada update: It turns out (unsurprisingly) that some of my quibbles with the Jornada pocket PC were mere newbie ignorance. The MS Reader program does have a table of contents, tough I still seem to have been right about not being able to adjust the ClearType. And it also turns out that there is a setting to disable the Record button when the unit is off. Good-o! What else don't I like? Well, so far it seems to me that the Today default startup screen isn't very customizable. You can add items to it from a pre-defined list of object types (contact, appointment, document, etc.) But you can't remove the default Owner, Appointments, or Inbox objects. But that's a minor quibble. Oh, and the case isn't actually metal — it's plastic, but the thing is so much more dense and solid-feeling that a Palm unit (of which I've had four or five) that it feels like metal. It just has a bit of heft to it. So now I guess I need to see what it does to Word and Excel documents created on a PC.
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Wednesday, 14 February 2001
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Busy day. I just want to record a fix I used this morning, so I can find it later when I need it again. It's something that I've used very seldom, but it's mighty handy in those situations. What situations? Well, this was a Win98 notebook that couldn't see the network. I'd done the normal things — downloaded the newest NIC driver from 3Com, made sure the card was installed with no conflicts in Device Manager, made sure all the setting in Network Properties were correct, checked the NIC for a link light... Everything looked perfect, but when the PC booted, it went right to the Windows desktop, without pausing to log into the network. Huh?
Then a vague memory stirred, of my first encounter with this syndrome some years back. A clueful Compaq tech told me then about something to try; it worked then, and it worked again this time. See, there's a registry setting that might or might not be present; and if present, might or might not be enabled. If you go to the key called HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Network\Real Mode Net, there might be a binary value called autologon. If it's not there, you can create it. It should be set to 00 01 to enable it, or rather to force it on, rather than letting an unspecified default setting control the behavior. So I created the key and set it to 1. While I was poking around in there I noticed that the values for netcard and transport were blank, so I put in "3CFE575CX" and "TCP/IP" respectively, and rebooted. Bingo! It's all good. I'm a hero.
I notice, parenthetically, that on my working Win98 desktop machine, those values are also blank, and there's no autologon value specified, and this PC logs in fine. But hey, this trick is something to try if everything looks OK, but still no login joy. If it already works OK, leave it alone. Unless you're a Manly Man, in which case the rule goes more like "If It Ain't Broke, Fix It Till It Is."
Which is sort of what I just did at my client with the Road Runner/pcAnywhere problem. I tried and tried, and eventually what ended up happening was the cable modem wouldn't power back up when I tried to power-cycle it. No lights, no camera, no action. In the circumstances, I'm thinking this is a Good Thing. Because before, it didn't work and I couldn't find anything wrong. Whereas now, it doesn't work and there's something visibly wrong. Which kicks it back to the Road Runner crew. Tag, you're it. I ain't heard the last of this one...
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Thursday, 15 February 2001
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Wow, what a busy day! I've hardly had a chance to sit down. I've been running around to all our PCs updating the antivirus software, and disabling JavaScript in IE and Outlook. And taking the opportunity to update the PC inventory table, which of course is always a moving target. Tomorrow morning I go back out to my "problem" client, and take another whack at Road Runner. Oy gevalt, as my (Gentile) mom used to say.
The couple that was going to make an offer on the house is having problems of their own, and decided not to proceed. Oh, well... On to the next possibility.
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Friday, 16 February 2001
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Well, I spent the whole day out at the Problem Child. Win98 was BSOD-ing on every startup. Reinstalling Windows didn't fix it. Of course, it only would have if the problem was with a file in the normal Windows installation. But as usual, it wasn't, because that would be easy, and Life's Not Like That. So after a brief consultation with a Gateway tech, and use of a low-level Gateway utility to check the hard disk, it was FORMAT C: time. What? I asked. No ghost image on the recovery CD? Nope, sez he. This PC comes from the old-fashioned days (two years ago), when Real Men rolled their own. So OK, time once again to act like a Real Man. That took a while, but eventually it flew. Got the two NICs talking to the appropriate places and began reinstalling apps and restoring data. Ran out of daylight with a couple hours worth left to go. Ever notice how things take longer when you do them on a slower PC? [Sigh]
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Saturday, 17 February 2001
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No entry.