Category: software

Office 2003

I was just browsing through Jerry Pournelle’s web site, and discovered that he, too, installed Office 2003 this weekend. His main problem thus far seems to be getting to newsgroups through Outlook. I’ve managed to avoid Outlook thus far, sticking with Eudora for the last eight years or so. I’m thinking about switching, but I really don’t have a good reason to do so, except that I just paid for Outlook 2003, so I figure I should do something with it. If I start using Outlook for e-mail, though, I’m going to end up wanting to use it as a PIM too, which means I’ll want to figure out how to sync it with my Palm, which will require spending money on a third-party program. Or I could ditch the Palm and just use my Toshiba Pocket PC. It’s all getting too complicated. Maybe I’ll just stick with my three-year-old version of Eudora and my trusty two-year-old Palm i705.

Office 2003

I upgraded my home computer to Office 2003 today. I haven’t seen anything exciting yet, but at least nothing’s gone wrong — no mysterious crashes, hard disk corruption, blue screens of death, or anything like that. I suppose it was worth the $200 (educational discount), given that the last version of Office I paid for was Office 95.

Magic Notes

Lots of computer trouble today, all of which boiled down to one bad application and its apparently corrupt data file. I had been using Magic Notes to keep some sticky notes on my desktop. It’s been working fine, but apparently the data file that holds the notes got messed up bad enough for the program to crash, taking the entire system with it. Since this was happening while the sytem was booting, I had to do a “process of elimination” thing to narrow it down to Magic Notes. I don’t think I’ll be relying on this program anymore, since I really don’t like the idea of a simple utility program that can take out the whole system so readily, nor do I like the idea that the data file is not in an easily-recoverable format.

Oh well. I went through the process of finding a decent sticky note program about a year ago, and now I need to do it again. Maybe this time I’ll find something a little more reliable.

weird things

There are still some weird things going on with my desktop computer, but it’s mostly good now. I may let it do a full backup tomorrow, while I sit in front of the TV and play Final Fantasy VII. (I really need to finish that game.)

For years I’ve been using a desktop sticky note program called Stickies, by Steven De Toni. It’s freeware, and it’s always worked fine, doing exactly what I want it to do. Unfortunately, after the last reformat/reinstall on my desktop machine, it started acting weird. When I was typing a note, the cursor would always jump back to the beginning of the line every time I pressed the space bar. Sometimes, it would jump back to the end, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Urk. I investigated quite a few possibilities, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. It’s exactly the same executable I use on my work machine, so the problem has to stem from some outdated DLL somewhere that it’s referencing. If only I had an easy way of figuring out which DLL it was.

I eventually gave up and decided to find a new sticky note program. Maybe I’m just really picky, but I must have tried out 20 programs without finding even one I liked enough to keep. I think I’ve settled on Magic Notes. It’s shareware, so it’ll cost me $15, but that’s pretty reasonable. In some ways, it’s still not as good as Stickies, (for instance, you can’t bring one note to the foreground without bringing them all to the foreground) but it’s OK. So, on with my life!