Archives: 2007 October

I plan to add some longer pieces to The Schlog as pages rather than posts, so they can be slowly savored and digested rather than getting chugged down along with the ordinary blog posts.
Here is the first.

The Schlog’s first post appeared one year ago today. According to Feedburner, I’ve got somewhere between 90 and 115 subscribers. Thanks for being one of them.

More and more people are asking me about Vista these days. You know, it’s really not all that different from Windows XP. However, you will notice a few different things about the user interface. For example, the Ctrl-Alt-Delete screen is a lot prettier:

And they even show you your picture when you put in your [...]

Kevin McLaughlin of CRN has an article about the challenges small business IT consultants face with Microsoft licensing. Because I had commented on the blog posting that was the inspiration for the article, Mr. McLaughlin requested an interview with me as he was preparing it. From the voicemail he left me, I got the impression [...]

Me too. Here’s an article from MCP Magazine with some suggestions for improving performance and troubleshooting Outlook’s inability to close properly.

Got a call from a client last week. He was concerned that he had some sort of strange virus or other serious software problem. He’d be typing some document, when all of a sudden what he’d typed would start disappearing, letter by letter. It would stop after a while, and then he could go on [...]

I knew that the latest version of Windows Live Writer had a bunch of new features, including the ability to create new WordPress pages as well as posts. But when I tried to create a new page, I found the File menu item grayed out. To fix this, I went to Edit Weblog Settings … [...]

This is not a very interesting issue for the “masses.” I’m posting this in the hope that someone else will find it later and be spared some time troubleshooting.
Here was the scenario:

Server: SBS 2003 Standard SP1, Exchange 2003 SP2
Don and Jorge have WM5 phones
Don had absolutely no problem synchronizing his phone with Exchange.
Jorge cannot sync [...]

See Mary Jo Foley’s write-up of Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Why Microsoft insists on calling multiple different products with the same name, I’ll never understand. I’ve signed up for the MOLW beta waiting list. I’ll let you know what I think if and when I’m allowed in.

If you’re thinking about getting into my line of work, read this first. It may not be a complete list of reasons why NOT to become an IT consultant, but what’s there is pretty accurate.