Elgin Computer Guy

That’s right! I’m creating this blog entry in Microsoft Word 2007. Did you know it could do that? I didn’t until just a few minutes ago.

Just select File | New and choose Blog Post:

Cool, huh?

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So the big project is gaining momentum… Last night I was finally ready to install the first server. (There will be 5 new servers in total - an SC860, 2-PowerEdge 2950’s and 2-PowerEdge 2970’s [64-bit].)

I fired up the first 2950, told it to boot from CD and began the Server 2003 install. It got to the part of asking where to install it and gave up the ghost because it couldn’t find a hard drive. Hmmmm…. I rebooted and used the Dell CD where it prepped the drive and gathered information, then it asked for the Server 2003 CD. I gave it the CD and it spit it out. I gave it a DVD and it didn’t like that either.

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My biggest job as a freelancer started today. The customer ordered the equipment and it’s starting to trickle in. The best thing about being a computer consultant is being paid to play with expensive high tech toys that I can’t afford to buy myself. (OK, so it’s actually work and they’re tools - not toys, but I love my job!)

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After struggling with the mail merge capabilities (previous post) of ACT! and Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, I went looking for an online solution. Of course Salesforce.com seemed to be the logical place to start. I went there and found out that the personal edition is FREE. I’m all for free stuff, so I signed up. It’s too early to tell if it’s going to solve my problems or not, but thought I’d pass it along:

FREE Personal Edition of Salesforce.com

I’ve had MS Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager for a while now but never really got the hang of using it. I understand ACT! is the top seller in this category, so I tried using it many months ago and didn’t like it much either. Just the other day I downloaded the new version and tried it again.

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Make your own sign

I was listening to a recorded teleconference with my marketing coach the other day.  I don’t remember what was asked of her, but obviously it was something she found unpleasant.  Her answer? 

“I’d rather shave my head with a cheese grater!”

A friend sent me this link about hacking the printer display for HP printers. While I thought changing the display to “Insert Coin” was cute, the thing that really got me laughing was the story of a hospital intern changing a printer to say “Out of Cheese”. I used to work at a hospital help desk and imagined someone calling and trying to explain that her printer claims to be out of cheese. Too funny!

Note (November 11, 2007):  I just noticed this link is broken… I’m going to leave it up in the hopes it’s a temporary problem.  Basically it’s about “hacking” the display of a networked HP printer to display whatever you want.

http://kovaya.com/miscellany/2007/10/insert-coin.html

The Chicago SBS User group held an 8-hour meeting yesterday to talk about disaster recovery. How timely! A customer just ordered a new LTO4 autochanger and Backup Exec. The old backup system is nonfunctional and part of my job is to come up with a disaster recovery plan.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find what I was looking for at the meeting. No offense to any members who happen to read this, but it wasn’t nearly technical enough and it got off into tangents about business continuity and non-profits. I only stayed 3 hours, so maybe I missed the good stuff?

A few hours later I ran across this site about using VMWare for disaster recovery - EXCELLENT!

How to use VMWare for disaster recovery

It doesn’t really apply to my client’s needs, but it sure applies to my own setup. What a great idea!!

BOM=Byte Order Mark
UTF= Uniform Transformation Format
WTF?! = well, you know…

Whatever happened to just plain old ASCII text?
OK, so UTF is ASCII text, but why in the world would you want HIDDEN characters in your files? Especially if there’s no way to toggle displaying them or not. Thank goodness for good old DOS EDIT.

In my last post I mentioned the problems I had with installing Wordpress on my domain. The culprit was the BOM at the beginning of the wp-config.php file. I edited the file in Microsoft’s Expression Web and it added those weird characters. I fixed it by using “edit” from a DOS prompt. I was able to eliminate those hidden characters and save the file. That allowed the script to work and obviously Wordpress is working now.

I spent about an hour yesterday looking for a way to force Expression Web to NOT use BOM, but no luck. I found a few tutorials that showed how to eliminate it by changing the UTF, but that could come back to bite you as well, as that’s where the language encoding is stored. I guess the short answer is don’t edit PHP files in Expression Web.

Here’s a Wiki article on BOM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark

Here’s one on UTF-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

And finally, here’s the Wiki article on WTF?!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF