Like many, we participated in the 173rd Semiannual General Conference via television yesterday and today. My favorite talk this time was by Spencer V. Jones, as he drew an excellent analogy between sin and repentence and his childhood experience with getting sprayed by a skunk (and the resulting process of trying to get clean again). I'm not really doing it justice here, so feel free to read it or watch it yourself.

On my recent Vegas trip, we had a few of those Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies at home, and since I like them, Misti packed a couple in my suitcase for me. Well, have you ever seen one when it's been flattened after going through the whole airport process? It's quite humorous. I'll post a before and after photo here in a few days.

Here's another brief SETI@home update: "The race for 4th place". It's been some time that I slipped into 4th place on our Seti@home team. No one was even remotely close to me for awhile, so I really slowed down and worked more on other distributed computing projects instead. I would still check the team rankings every week or so to see what was going on, but I wasn't worried about loosing my spot until two days ago, when I saw that two folks had recently crept up on me. Now there's a race, so to speak for 4th place (me - to retain it, Ravyn and Glenn - to jump ahead of each other and to overtake me). In other Seti news, Brad has been bumped out of top 10 again, this time by someone with no name.

If you've been shopping at Kmart's Big K 90% off bankruptcy sale you know it's a mad house - simply crazy. We got a few good deals there, but I was really shocked by the whole scene - the lines were 20 minutes long at least, the whole store was in utter disarray, and they must've been trying to sell every last spiral CFL in the country - they were everywhere - aisles and aisles and bins of them.

Becca likes little smiley face stickers now, and she says "miley" - it's cute. I like to read her books on the couch. She comes up and hands me a book and then climbs up on the couch right next to me and leans against my shoulder as I read it to her - it's the best. One of her favorites is a little book that I used to read to her before she was even born yet, called "Slug". It's all about this cute little greedy slug with poor vision and an insatiable appetite. Who knew slugs could be cute?   =)

Becca likes soynuts, she thinks they're popcorn kernels. I was reading the label on a pack of Wrigley's "Orbit" gum. It has Xylitol (which is good), but it also has Aspartame (which is bad). Hmmm. I do like the packaging and the taste, though, but I can't figure out why if they're using Xylitol, why bother with Aspartame at all (they're both sweeteners, and although Xylitol costs more than Aspartame, Xylitol has known dental benefits, whereas Aspartame doesn't, and Aspartame has had some very negative publicity)?

Brenda touched Jon Bon Jovi on stage at a concert in Salt Lake - for free! That's gotta be pretty novel, right? We watched a few episodes so far of "Nashville Star". It's pretty clear to me that the Texas girl (Miranda Lambert) is gonna win, although it will be tough for the judges once it gets down to the three best performers. There are quite a few that I think could be cut without any hesitation, but there are a small few that are really good.

Watch out, get out of her way - Becca plays ball angry:



Here are my humble observances on what's wrong with Outlook 2002:

• If you've got 15 different group calendars in the public folders, there is apparently no one "master" calendar that automatically adds everything from the other calendars. It would be extremely nice to have one master calendar for the entire company's events each day, instead of having to look through all the separate calendars for each department.


• For some reason, it's apparently impossible to get rid of the stupid "bulletin board" folder, even if you're the administrator, you know the one that only keeps entries for a few days anyway - not much of a bulletin board, in my opinion, anyway.


• Why doesn't the Auto-Archive feature auto-increment the file names of the .PST files? How stupid is that? It would be helpful in some cases to have a user-configurable setting that allowed it to archive 6 months worth or a year's worth of email, and then automatically start a new file for the next time period - for organizational and backup purposes.


• Maybe this is more of an Exchange 5.5 issue, but why can't you have more than one owner for global distribution groups? How dumb is that? In a team setting sometimes it would be nice to have 4 or 5 people be able to maintain the list members, instead of just one person. Doesn't Microsoft think about how to actually *use* their products?


• Also, why can't a distribution group be the owner of another group? Let's say you've got the administrative group consisting of the network admin, the IT manager, and two techs, and they're all members of that group. Two actually have administrator privileges, but the other two don't. It makes sense, then, to have them all in an Exchange distribution group, and then have that group maintain all the other distribution groups - that way you've got 4 people that can all help maintain the lists instead of just one person and one administrator. Hasn't anyone complained about this before?


• Outlook has a problem keeping line feed/carriage returns (hitting the enter key to drop to the start of the next line) in plain text email messages - it just loses them. They're there when you view the email message, but not when it prints or not when you reply or forward the message. It also happens when you compose a draft, save it (without sending), and close it, and then come back to it - all the LF/CR's are gone and it's one big run-on sentence. What's that about? I suppose it has something to do with Outlook's "ability" to remove 'extra' line breaks. Well, guess what - THEY'RE NOT EXTRA!


• When you try to print some email messages using File...Print..., Outlook 2002 won't let you change the printer (from the default to a different printer) - the dropdown list is grayed out. What's that about? It only happens on some messages, though - not all of them. How do you get around it then? Simple, you just change your default printer for a few seconds while you print then change it back. Small hassle, but it works.


• Why can't an Outlook profile have multiple user addresses like Outlook Express does? I have several valid email addresses at work, but I can't send a message from each of them without logging into a different profile. Whose bright idea was THIS limitation?

I sincerely hope they fix these issues in Outlook 11 (2003).