Time Marches On ......

Problem: I have a friend who just turned 60. I'll call him Jonald so as not to reveal his name.. :o)
Jonald used to live right next door, so I saw him almost every day for 15 years, or so. Now I hardy ever see him; he's always on the go. But, I get these odd phone calls every now and then saying things like, "Hey Ron, I need to park in your driveway for a couple of hours". The car will magically appear and be there for awhile. Then I'll get another call, "Hey Ron, I picked up the car, just to let you know it was me who took it, so you won't report it stolen", (heh, heh, as if I was really watching it). Anyhow, he's like a phantom; I never see Jonald. It's tough and unsettling. I don't know if I miss him or if I'm just going through some weird withdrawal. But all this is beside the point. The PROBLEM is, this 60 thing. It's got to be driving him nuts! Everybody hates aging, but for someone like Jonald who is so incredibly busy, time must be flying. He's running as fast as he can but he never seems to catch up. He's gotta wonder where the time is going. I can't help him with the aging process. All I can hope to do is try and cheer him up.....

Solution: 10 things to help cheer up poor OLD Jonald:

1. Just because you're 60 now doesn't mean the chicks will lose interest. You see, they were never really interested in your looks. It was always the money.
2. You're one of the few people I know that can actually still blow your own horn and get applause.
3. Same goes for the singing. Most of us sound like wounded mammoths when we try to sing. Not you. You still sound almost good.
4. Your new neighbors get to enjoy the singing and playing at all hours of the day (and night), that we no longer get to hear. This one actually benefits them, but it must be very gratifying for you, too.
5. You have the most wonderful kids that I have ever known. What a blessing, but I've always wondered how they got so smart. Oh well, they say it takes 2 to tango.
6. I understand that the Chrysler Executive Lease Program has been extended to allow you 23 new cars per year, up from the 16 that you've been accustomed to.
7. Smyrna has been taken off the list of Delaware land designated as Flood Plain. So, if the creeks don't rise, it really might not be a bad place to retire.
8. You're a full 10 years older than you need to be to get Senior Rates at all the Comfort Inns - Worldwide!! Think of the travel opportunities! Be careful though, the same is not true for Motel 6. You'll have to wait 5 more years for that.
9. At your advanced age you have only slightly less hair than me! I hate to mention this, but I'm 6 months older. Sorry.
10. You still have us, your ex-neighbors right up the road, in case you need anything. As soon as you let us know exactly where you live we'll know where to send the Meals on Wheels people.

Now that's sure to cheer him up...........

Autoruns Made Easy

Problem: Recently I had the need to use an Autorun to launch an HTML file from a CD. As you probably know, this is rather messy; the autorun, of course, expects you to launch an executable, not an HTML file. There are some sites on the internet that have some code to help resolve this, but it's easy enough to make an executable to launch the HTML file, yourself.

Solution: I created an AutoIt script with the following one liner:

RunWait(@ComSpec & " /c " & 'myHTLM.htm', "", @SW_HIDE)

I named the script file autorun.au3. Compiling the script into an executable is a simple right-click-and-choose-Compile Script. This created an executable named autorun.exe

Then I named my HTML file myHTML.htm and put the following 2 lines in an autorun.inf file:
[AutoRun]
open=autorun.exe

Burn the whole mess on a CD and that's it. Easy as cake, eh? .........

Grey Screen of Death

Problem: What the HELL is going on????? I've had to rebuild my machine 4 times in the past 4 months. This time it was a solid grey screen right after Dell's spash screen, early in the boot sequence. And you thought only Macs got the dreaded Grey Screen of Death; Hah! I assume it had to do with some driver load problem; I was able to see some of the drivers load by trying a Safe Mode boot a few times.............. I know, I probably cause some of the problems myself with all the registry hacking, but this is getting to be a bad habit.

Solution: Anyhow, I couldn't get by it; had to do another rebuild. Rebuilds are becoming a routine thing for me. I have no idea what normal users do when they have these problems (some of them call me, oddly enough). I shudder to think what would happen if I didn't have another machine in the house to back up my data. There, I said it again. Getting the picture yet?

Slow Boot and Logon

Problem: The user reported that her machine was taking a very long time to initialize. She was running XP on a late model Dell system. It was taking up to 30 minutes to get the logon prompt and then another 15-30 minutes to paint the desktop after logon. Even booting into Safe Mode took a long time; the driver load sequence hung for about 10 minutes (would have been a hint for a less dense technician). Once up, I ran a virus scan and found nothing. I ran Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D which cleaned up a few things, but didn't solve the problem. THEN I noticed that a Cruzer 128MB flash drive was in a cradle, attached to a USB port.

Solution: I removed the cradle from the USB port and rebooted. The system came up immediately. Further investigation showed that the cradle was purchased with a different flash drive, from another manufacturer. The machine would boot fine with the other flash drive in the cradle; it only had a problem when booted with the Cruzer drive plugged in.

Someone with more time, or better sense, than me will have to figure out why this caused a problem. I assume it was some driver incompatiblity or loading problem during the boot sequence. The Cruzer drive worked fine when plugged in after the system was up.......

Incredimail Backup?

Problem: Back on December 19, 2004 I endorsed Incredimail for its ability to create a backup file for transporting to other machines or for disaster recovery. As you probably know, Outlook Express doesn't do this. Well, I had a chance to use my Incredimail backup to restore after a disaster the other day, and guess what. It didn't work! I got some bogus message that told me the restore failed and to check my disk space. I had plenty of space so that wasn't the problem. So, all my messages and contacts were gone; such is life. Then I remembered that I had saved my contacts in a separate file. The separate file was a simple csv file created by Incredimail. I imported the file and guess what. IT DIDN'T WORK EITHER! However, not all was lost..........

Solution: I browsed the csv file and saw that some of the contacts were stored differently. That is, some of the data was apparently in the wrong columns. I manually corrected this and tried the import again.................... You guessed it; no good. It was time to switch to my old friend Outlook Express. I imported the contacts from the csv file into OE with no problem. Once I verified that all the contacts were there, I imported them from OE into Incredimail.