Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

This morning, I was greeted by yet another Microsoft error. It came from Outlook 2003 and read like this:

“There was a problem reading one or more of your reminders. Some reminders may not appear. Cannot locate recurrence information for this appointment.”

I found a fix online that instructed me to go through every active and recurring appointment, opening and re-saving each one until I, by chance, found the one giving the system grief.

Here’s what I did:

1. Select the Calendar Folder.
2. On the View menu, point to “Arrange By” then “Current View” and then “Recurring Appointments”.
3. Open each appointment. Open the recurrence. Then save it.

When you try to open the damaged item, it will give you an error message. When you get this error message, delete the damaged appointment. Then close and reopen Outlook and see if the error is gone. I had to do this twice because I had two damaged recurring appointments.

If you have exceptions to appointments (days skipped, etc.) when you re-save them, you’ll get a message that says, “Any exceptions associated with this recurring appointment will be lost. If any of the exceptions are meetings, the attendees will not be notified. Is this OK?” I guess it has to be, huh?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the method by which websites syndicate their news. You’ll frequently see the letters RSS or a small RSS icon on a web site. It might be XML, something, for all intents and purposes the same.

CNN has their RSS at the bottom of the page. If you click it it will take you to www.cnn.com/services/rss/. That LINK is what you want to paste into your Google personalized homepage if you want to RSS CNN news into your site.

To do this, go to your Google personalized page. You will find a link on the right that says, “Add stuff.” When you click it, it has tons of stuff you can add. But you want to look near the search field for “Add by URL.” Click that and then you can insert the RSS feed info from CNN or GantDaily or whatever. To put ShieldsGroup’s RSS into your Google page, you’d paste www.shieldsgroup.com/blog/?feed=rss2 into that field.

Part of the beauty of RSS is that you can choose the kind of news you want. For example, if you want Steelers news from KDKA, you can go to http://kdka.com/steelers and look for RSS (on the right, just less than halfway down as of this writing). Click on “Click here to subscribe to our Steelers RSS feed” and copy the URL (kdka.com/steelers/resources_blogrss.xml) to your clipboard, then drop it off on the “Add by URL” on your Google page described above.

It’s a little laborious at first, but it’s worth the work to get the kind of news you want.

Last night when we came home from church we smelled something burning. Following our noses, we found the smell was coming from the computer room. But we could find nothing hot. We turned it all off and kept a close eye on everything.

This morning I took the PC apart and found a small rubber-band used to hold the cables together away from the processor fan had dried out, lost its elasticity and fallen into the processor heat sink. Mmm…. Smelled good!

The question arises: “Who left that rubber-band in there?”

Me.

It’s good that God takes care of dummies.