Phoenix Rising

Outlook

So, you’ve been sent a lovely spreadsheet from your boss. It has everything, well almost.. so you start adding stuff, taking away stuff re-jigging the formulas and layouts etc.. etc.. etc.. But you need to go for a coffee or something else much more important than staring at a bunch of numbers, so you quickly click on ‘Save’. After all, you don’t want to lose all that work, or the lovely colour scheme you have given that report do you?

So you’re all caffeined up, and it’s time to go back to your spreadsheet, you open the e-mail again, and click on the spreadsheet, and there it is! errr.. NOT, this is the original, and not your excellent wizzy one… where’s all your hard work?!?

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Setup.exe

So I had to install this here application. Specifically, something called BroadVision Command Center, a front end to manage web content basically… though much more if used properly. Anyhow, every time I ran the Setup.exe file… nothing happened… Well after much searching and probing about into windows files I really had no right being in, I found the answer, and here it is…   Read more…

8 Cell Battery

Well, still getting on OK with the Dell Mini 9. Upgraded OS-X, upgraded the BIOS from A00 to A05 and re-ran DellEFI … what do you know, no more issues when trying to wake up from sleep mode. Sometimes it just wouldn’t, but others, it did so, but with no mouse pointer anymore… either way, the only way out was to press and hold down the power button until it turned off completely… but no this was a thing of the past!! Excellent news….. or was it..? Read more…

Sony PRS 505

I have for many years been a fan of eBooks (as you can probably tell from a few previous postings. As a result I have tried many different systems and stores to purchase from. Which brings me nicely to my soapbox rant about eBooks… Why so many proprietary formats?!? And why DRM protection… If I have purchased a book, I’d really like to read it on whatever system I happen to have at the time, or I may as well just buy the paper back.   Read more…

Dell Mini 9

As those of you who have been reading this site may know I have been looking into netbooks for quite a while now.

After a lengthy period of research (or procrastination…), I had narrowed things down to a couple of possibilities, neither of which I ended up with (figures – ED), and here’s why.

Turns out that there are a bunch of people with a Dell Mini 9, and it is being made to run Mac OS-X as well as Windows XP, or indeed Ubuntu Linux (or the netbook remix version). So the best of all worlds. I soon got my hands on the unit, and gave it a whirl myself.

Being a long time Mac user (since the Macintosh plus in the mid Eighties actually), I got OS-X Leopard on to it, more on this in another entry I think, this is a long posting all on it’s own! – One for another day….   Read more…

Zendesk

Having worked various service desks in my career, I have used a lot of Help Desk/Ticketing systems. From Bugzilla to Remedy, from Royal Blue’s offering to CA-Unicenter’s AHD software. I also have been to many mind numbing demos, and shown new wizzy bits’n'bobs that the sales guy’s software can do, and I can honestly say, without exception that yes, they do in fact work…. but do I really need all this?    Read more…