Don't Back Down

January 2005

  • Parents Outside, Kids Inside?

    I recently read a story that makes absolutely no sense to me. Apparently the parents are staying outside while their (misbehaving) kids get the house. I think they have this backwards. I completetly understand the frustration, and even support their decision to not do the work themselves if…

  • Revisiting Comment Spam

    I was reading through MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site again (an interesting read), which prompted me to consider many of the points within. For those who don't know, this post, along with the activity that generated it, was a big part of the reason behind the…

  • Two Immovable Objects

    What happens if an emergency vehicle (fire, police, ambulance) were to come screeching through (sirens, lights) at the exact time that saw a schoolbus stopped on the side of the road, red lights flashing? I'd be likely to say that the emergency vehicle was supposed to stop -…

  • We Need More Star Trek

    Star Trek taught us that "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one)". The Charlotte Observer reminds us just how unrealistic that statement is in real life. I cannot count how many times I have heard stories like this one, stories that…

  • Bloglines Toolkit in Spanish

    With the gracious help of Ricardo Gonzalez, the Bloglines Toolkit now offers a Spanish translation! I also cleaned up a couple of little things in the package, like giving credit to the translation authors for their work and some mislocated data. If you're using the auto-update feature, you…

  • Outlook Web Access Stinks

    Actually, I rather like Outlook Web Access (OWA). But sometimes I just don't get the folks at Microsoft. OWA is setup in such a way that you can store distribution lists (lists of email addresses) in a contacts folder. That part is okay. But if you happen to…

  • Open Access List Permission

    I think the final piece of the puzzle was the Open Access List permission. It's quite possible that this was in place before I mucked about with the address lists and caused my problems. Nonetheless, after overcoming the mailbox permission fiasco, average users were still unable to use…

  • Excel Number to Text Macro

    I had a pretty hefty spreadsheet of contacts that I wanted to post into Outlook. The problem is that the phone numbers were stored in Excel as numbers and Outlook doesn't like importing numbers into that field. Not sure what the folks at Microsoft expected, perhaps they are…

  • Mismatched Mailbox Madness

    So now that I resolved the issue about the bookmark not being valid, I made may way carefully (and rather suddenly) to the next error: "The name could not be matched to a name in the address list". I swear there are days that I wish I had…

  • Permissions Really Bite

    I understand the need for object permissions. I really do. But man can they be a pain. Apparently at some point in the recent past, I managed to assign Everyone (a special Microsoft group, meaning, well, everyone) deny permission to an access list in Exchange. To make it…