Anyone know how to make the Outlook 2007 "Click for more appointments" button stand out?

I've found that Outlook 2007 is a little irritating in the way that it presents the "click for more appointments" indicator in the Calendar view.

The problem occurs in the calendar view when you have more than about 3 appointments. Since it can't show them all, it shows a small down triangle indicator at the bottom right of that day. The problem is that the indicator is a pale pastel. There is very little contrast between the indicator and the background. Therefore it is VERY easy to miss.

I've tried a number of things to get the indicator to stand out but have not had any success.

I'd appreciate it if anyone could reply with a method on how to accomplish this. I am running Vista Home Premium on this particular machine.

Someone needs to let the Microsoft engineers know that appointments are usually pretty important and missing them is a pain.

Belkin mobile power supply is not working

I had a Belkin Mobile Power supply for about 8 months. All of a sudden, it stopped working.

What would happen was that the laptop screen would dim and the indicator lights showed that the unit was not providing power. I contacted Belkin and they shipped a replacement power supply.

When I plugged that in, I got the same exact results. IOW, it wasn't the power supply. If I plug in my OEM HP power supply, that works fine.

It appears that the problem is probably in the M029 tip. For some reason, it isn't making a proper connection.

So, I might end up eaating the cost of shipping the power supply back. My next move is to get back in touch with Belkin and get a replacement tip. Hopefully that will work.


UPDATE - Belkin sent a new tip which worked perfectly. I guess 10 bucks for shipping isn't that bad considering that Belkin really does stand by their warranty. When I get a chance, I'm going to order a spare tip. The reason is that I could probably pick up one of the travel power supplies almost anywhere while on the road but the tip could take a couple of days to arrive (which would be a bummer in a travel situation)

Do it yourself Server installations

I had a client I hadn't heard from in a long time give me a call.

He had previously used a workstation as a sort of 'server'. That machine died so he purchased a Dell Server running Server 2003. He realized as he was setting it up that he was in way over his head.

When I came out I found that the machine was pretty much wide open to any hackers. First of all, none of the workstations are running an antivirus app. That leaves them open as tools for potential hackers of course. The server was set to run some services that it definitely didn't need: FTP, Web Server and SMTP. Any one of those could be exploited. Finally, the server itself was not running any type of anti virus.

My guess is that we may start to see more of this in the future, especially in a tight economy. There are a lot of business people out there who can maintain peer to peer networks. However, there are few who understand the implications of running a server.

Laptop USB ports and high draw items such as fans

I had previously extolled the virtues of devices such as the Targus Chill Mat to keep your laptop running cooler.

However, I have been noticing that the Chill Mat's Fans seem to be changing speed. I could not find any info as to whether the Chill Mat has any kind of variable speed or thermostat control. It appears that it does not.

That leave a pretty scary proposition that the power going to the USB port is having issues.

So, since I use the laptop at one place at home for the most part, I decided to get the Targus Chill Hub. One major difference is that the Chill Hub is powered from a transformer whereas the old Chill Mat was powered from the laptop's USB port. This way, there will be no strain on the laptop's USB power or on the Laptop's power supply.

I think the price is worth it for the piece of mind.

Canon mx310 series all in one - dumber than a rock

Ok, maybe it was operator error.. then again, maybe the user interface stinks.

I needed to fax about 5 pages to a client. I loaded the stack of papers into the Canon MX310 all in one machine. I thought I hit the fax button but I can't be sure. Anyway, I put in the fax number - 15165551212 and hit Black and White.

I then went downstairs to do a bunch of other work which included sending about 5 more pages to the printer.

When I came back upstairs I saw that the whole input trays worth of paper had been printed with identical copies of the first page of my fax job.. It took me a minute or so to figure it out.

THE STUPID MACHINE WAS TRYING TO MAKE 15,165,551,212 COPIES OF MY PAGES.. Instead of seeing the number I entered as a fax number, it took it as the number of copies. Yep, somehow I screwed up and ended up trying to copy the pages instead of faxing them. I would think that there should be some logic in there that would put up a message like

"HEY STUPID... do you really want to make 15 billion copies of that document?? What are you doing, sending a christmas message to every person on the freaking planet?"

Nope, no such luck.. It dutifully tried to make the copies which would have amounted to about 75 billion pages total.. I wonder what kind of duty cycle the engineers at Canon expect.. One of these days I'll have to do the math and try to figure out how long that copy job would take.


Oh, and the bad news... I've tried to kill the copy job a couple of times and it hasn't died yet.. I'm a little leery of putting paper in and leaving it unattended.

Vista - No Steenking Print Preview

The other day I was trying to put together our yearly Christmas Card. I did the photo in Adobe Photoshop CS3.



The problem came when I was trying to print it. The machine is running Vista Home Premium. The printer is admittedly a cheapie.. a Canon MX310 series all in one.



Where I was getting frustrated was that neither Photoshop nor the MS Office picture manager would show a print preview. I wanted to print two pictures on one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of photo paper. I had to print about 25 sheets before I got it right (thankfully I was smart enough to print on plain paper first).

For the life of me I don't understand why there isn't a print preview. This feature has been around for over a decade and has saved countless trees and barrels of ink and toner. My guess is that this is somehow related to Vista. I did not see a print preview when printing from Photoshop to the HP laserjet or the Canon Printer, nor did I see a print preview in the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I do see a print preview in Office 2007 though.

So, please, whoever the geniuses were that decided we didn't need a print preview, add it back at the next revision.

thanks




I