Is a Toyota Corolla Worth It?

Last year my trusted, will never die, will run for ever, will cross 300,000 miles, will do cart wheels Honda Accord finally showed its age. After many days of research I finally decided I wanted to get a new Toyota Corolla. For the first year, I had zero complaints, however in the last two months, an onboard computer chip had to get replaced and now my center case latch needs to get replaced. None of the replacement parts cost me anything since the car is still covered under a warranty but what’s more concerning is the fact that great brand name products fail. It’s even more annonying when now you can’t walk around recommending your purchase knowing that the same things may fail for others. In this case, word of mouth marketing is definitely not in Toyota’s favor.

Plastic Packages

If you’ve ever bought anything that a store thinks might be worthy enough to be stolen you’ve probably dealt with the ‘very easy to open plastic packaging’ theft deterrant. The packaging is so popular that Consumer Reports has their own Oyster Awards for America’s hardest-to-open packages. It looks like a company called Ranchmark Inc, decided they wanted to ruin the awards ceremony by introducing a product called OpenX – a new hand held tool specifically designed to safely and easily open plastic packages. I’m waiting to read some more online reviews but am also curious if it comes in its own plastic packaging?

Downloading Your Pictures From Flickr

I’ve blogged about service lock-in before but wasn’t expecting to encounter this with Flickr! Either way, I couldn’t find an easy way to export or download my images from Flickr, without going through each image and then saving them one by one back to my desktop. Why do they make it so simple to upload pictures, tag pictures, group pictures, organize pictures and do everything you could possibly imagine with pictures but make it so hard to download your own pictures locally? Perhaps I wasn’t searching hard enough for the burried Flickr export option, but thanks to Greggman, this frustration was quickly doused by way of his FlickrDown utility – a program that offers a quick and easy way to download your pictures from Flickr.

No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk

The best error message I received in August was “No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk.”

Not a very nice error when your client has some critical work on a floppy disk. In fact, a very bad error when most online search results indicate that there were no easy ways of recovering the data. As always, these are the worst times to bring up discussions such as the use of the floppy disk or saving critical work in only one location.

Anyways, the only way I was able to recover the data was by using BadCopyPro – an excellent utility recommended by Mike Y. and created by Jufsoft.

Exchange 2003 Outlook Web Access Message Headers

Earlier this week I was trying to figure out a way to view headers of various messages in my Outlook Web Access inbox and realized that out of the box Exchange 2003 Outlook Web Access does not have a way to view message headers. What! You mean I have to open an Outlook client just to view headers?

According to some sites I read, the only work around to viewing these headers is to replace a file on the Exchange server to provide for this functionality. Argh!

Anyways, if you think this feature is essential and have access to your Exchange 2003 server try the updated file available at Exchange 2003 Outlook Web Access Extension Allows You to View Message Source or at the Information and Utilities for Exchange/IIS Administrators page.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if Exchange 2007 has this feature integrated with Outlook Web Access?

All About Service

As part of trying to organize my never ending list of favorites I’ve been trying out various online bookmark services such as del.icio.us, Live Favorites and FavoriteSync. The first product allows you to bookmark and store all your links online. The latter two provide a way to synchronize favorites from a locally stored favorites file. While experimenting with Live Favorites and FavoriteSync I accidentally erased favorites both on the online site and my desktop computer. An obvious case of user error. I didn’t have access to previously archived copies of my local favorites and so I spent some time e-mailing the support teams for both products. Below are the responses I got from the support teams of Live Favorites and FavoriteSync. Can you guess which product ended up providing me with the best service?

Product 1

Thank you for contacting Product 1 support. My name is Barb, and I will be happy to help you today.  It is my understanding that when you synchronized the favorites with a computer that did not have favorites this action wiped out more than 200 favorites that you had stored.  I deeply regret you have lost your 200 favorites.  I have further investigated this issue for you and as we do not have any of your favorites in our files we cannot assist you.

Product 2

Here is the latest backup. Please put it in the Product 2 folder and use the Options | Backup to import it. There should also be automatically stored backups saved there.

Needless to say, I was able to recover my favorites using Product 2. Two different products offering very similar services yet in the end the product that provides the best service wins.

Return Receipts in Entourage

I’ve slowly started the move toward using a Power Mac G5 as my primary work computer. While installing and configuring Entourage earlier today I came across a tip for setting up Return Receipts in Entourage. The tip indicated that in order to enable return receipt requests for outgoing messages, you would have to customize your mail account so that every single outgoing message would automatically include an additional mail header titled ‘Disposition-Notification-To’ whose value was set to your e-mail address.

I have never been happier for not liking, or for not using return receipts with messages that I send.

Waiting …