Where I store my tech stuff

The bad news: MS Word keeps crashing.

The good news: The Microsoft Online Crash Analysis (pic) tells me I need to download a new update.

How appropriate that Word crashed while I was writing on chapter on debugging.

This guy’s blog is called Ajax in the City, but it’s not what you think. It’s a cool title, though.

Check out the 404 error that I received from Google this morning. I must’ve hit the server during a reboot or something.

Are you using Firefox yet? It has all kinds of cool features, like this one for managing bookmarks:

Imagine you need to research some topic. You start at Google, and you go down a path until you can’t take it any more. In my experience, two things happen:

• You have to go, so you shut down your computer and tell yourself you can find all those same links again in the future if you need them.

• You’re over it, so you shut down your browser and tell yourself you can find all those same links again in the future if you need them.

First of all, remember that you can open new links in tabs in Firefox. So you can have all the sites you’ve followed on a topic open in a single browser session. Now, let’s say you have to go for some reason. You can go to Bookmarks | Bookmark All Tabs, and all the sites you have opened are saved as bookmarks in a folder you designate. How cool is that?

The other day I needed to do a quick reboot but I didn’t want to lose my place, so I used the Bookmark All Tabs feature and saved all my open tabs to a folder called Reboot. When I opened Firefox back up, I right-clicked on the Reboot folder and clicked Open in Tabs. My browser session from before my reboot was restored. I just used this again to save a bunch of research I did on Windows Mobile. Bookmark All Tabs is a huge time saver.

Many people erroneously assume that individual e-mail recipient’s addresses are hidden when they use a distribution list in the To field of an e-mail. Unless your e-mail program is setup otherwise, most e-mailers will expand the distribution list and display the names of each of the recipients. Think about it: If the e-mailer doesn’t expand the distribution list, how does the e-mailer know where to send the e-mail?

I believe it’s a generally accepted best practice to place the recipients’ e-mail addresses for a bulk e-mail in the BCC field. BCC stands for blind courtesy copy. Everyone listed in the BCC field will get a copy of the e-mail without divulging a list of all the recipients. Some programs may have bulk mail features that will hide addresses listed in the To field. Unless you know for sure, always use the BCC field.

Other best practices include performing a test run before executing your mailing. You can find more information at these resources:

• E-mail etiquette
• Bulk mailing best practices

Another tip: I always make a point of adding recipients to an e-mail last. It saves me the embarrassment of accidentally sending the e-mail before I’m ready.

I just received an interesting gift in my inbox from the Dummies Marketing Team. They sent me the first-ever author newsletter in a 6MB PDF file. AND, they included the distribution list, which I’m assuming includes most, if not all, of the dummies authors’ e-mail addresses. Mine’s in there, but I don’t see Dr. Ruth anywhere.

There are over 500 e-mail addresses representing 300 unique domains.

What’s the starting bid?

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I just finished reading a blog entry that dispells the myth that Microsoft SQL Server is just Sybase in a new package. While I don’t feel passionately about this, it is good information. I was a DBA for a Sybase SQL Anywhere 6.0 database in the late ’90s. Since then I’ve been working with Microsoft SQL Server. I’m interviewing for a job right now for a shop that uses Oracle. They have a full time DBA, which is really a blessing.

One of my former co-workers once told me that Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 was all Sybase code. Apparently, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 was mostly, if not all, new code. I thought the two products felt similar, but then again that could’ve been because they’re both DBMS. Well, I’m glad that we got that straightened out.

Billy Hollis has written two very tongue-in-cheek histories of Basic and the C family of languages. Funny stuff.