IT Werkz Sometimes

I noticed that some contacts had disappeared from Outlook, not the end of the world as I have them backed up to a CSV file, via exporting them from Outlook and for a secondary backup imported them into both Hotmail and Gmail.

With hindsight that sentence was easy to write but at one point I had forgotten that I’d backed them up so well and was trying to figure out any other way of getting back the lost contacts. I have a feeling a Facebook application has got something to do with the missing contacts as I had a Facebook Male and Female Contact folders in Outlook and some of the missing, but not all of the missing, contacts were in there. One way I thought about was to import them from the outlook.pst file which was used by Outlook on my old XP PC. I ran Outlook on XP and there were all of the missing contacts. Now the problem was how to get them from there to the Vista PC. Easy, use the shared drives via networking which I knew worked. Wrong. Something recently has changed on one of the two PC’s, though dunno what.

Why is PC networking such a pain in the neck. I’ve been networking PC’s for about 15 years and it still manages to throw me into a loop every now and again. Neither PC could see the other PC. I noticed that the old domain name on the XP PC was set to MSHOME and the network name on the Vista PC was Network so I changed them both to NETWORK and rebooted them both, to no avail. Switched off the forewall on both PC’s, but no luck. The networking road goes on forever.

Installed some Facebook thing the other day and I can’t even remember whether it’s a plug-in for FB, an iPhone app or an app for Windows/Outlook, but the net effect is that all of my addresses on the iPhone are duplicated. Terrific.

I also noticed that Outlook actually had no addresses in Contacts, but that there were contact folders for Facebook male friends, Facebook female friends and, I think, Facebook all friends. In those folders were Facebook contacts that were of the relevant sex. I assume the app has a look at the profile of the FB user and checks the sex field where the sex has been entered. Anyway I did something with Outlook Contacts and they reappeared like magic (But what did you do? Ed). Now I have this tedious duplicates addresses issue on the iPhone. I better uninstall something but heaven knows what.

I’m going to see if I can download a demo version of Novell’s Zenworks to see if I can get my ahead around how that works. Also need to get a new version of Auction Sentry and a demo version of QueueExplorer.

Later: I downloaded Auction Sentry with no problem and also QueueExplorer, which I fired up but of course there were no queues lurking about so that got a bit upset. I had a look at Zenworks, and my oh my, that is a big download. Also doesn’t look very easy to setup so I stalled on that.

I’ve been updating my resume, because it’s been a bit of a disaster area for a couple of years, and now it’s starting to look ok. Not so much a resume as full-on advert.

What’s all this fuss about deleting yourself from Facebook and getting upset coz your tracks are still left on there. Of course your tracks are on there. If you’ve had a conversation with someone or they’ve copied some of your photos what do these people expect, for all this activity to be removed if the owning person removes themselves from FB. Those actions have been done and are part of history.

If someone has a bank account and decides to close it do they expect all of his records and money transactions to be removed. Ferggeddabowdit. Those money movements have been made and audited and can’t just be made to disappear. I’ve got a feeling some people have behaved inappropriately on Facebook and are embarrassed by their digital detritus and want to lose it.

A couple of months ago I raised a bug on some empty fields with IBM’s Datamirror software. The bug didn’t go far, just hung around for a few months while all and sundry hoped it would slope off of it’s own accord, or at least do the honorable thing and put a bullet between its eyes. Eventually someone kicked up some mess and sent it to IBM to see what they had to say about it.

Today someone told me there was a fix due from IBM. I asked whether it was a known bug and it wasn’t. Nobody that had ever used Datamirror had ever encountered it or if they had weren’t confident at aiming said bug at big blue. So my bug was fixed by some fresh IBM code and may even be lobbed out the door to all other Datamirror users Worldwide. That might do my reputation at work some good (Why does it need it? Ed).

Quote of the day ‘The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair’ Douglas Adams