I’ve been wondering for a few weeks why  I can’t look up addresses from my Outlook contact list for printing envelopes since I upgraded to Office 2003.  Since I do my mailing early on Sunday mornings, I’m not as caffeinated as necessary for technical thinking, so I was shrugging it off to another of the many features meant to make customers miserable.

This morning I had just barely enough cognition to notice that when looking up addresses, it would only show email addresses. So I went to the address in Outlook I wanted to print and added an email address of microsoft@sucks.it to the person I wanted to send snail mail to. And, of course, it worked.

So, according to the Microsoft Office development team it appears that if you do not have an email address, you don’t exist.

*Yes, I know there are female MS employees, too, but referring to them would have killed the pun.

Here’s a rant I posted on LinkedIn today:

Q:  Is home automation really needed? or is it just to attract customer?

A: Needed? I don’t think so. Useful and desirable? Absolutely. Poorly marketed? Ah, there’s the question. For tech weenies like me, it is very enticing. For the average consumer, their first thought is “I will never figure this out”. The slow consumer (non-)adoption has kept the hardware and software above the mass market price level. Hard to sell an X-10 device for 100 times the price of the “dumb” version if the consumer thinks it is too hard to use.

I think if a company can find a way to lower the entry cost and provide full in-home installation it will catch on. Until then, there are still a lot of VCRs blinking 12:00…12:00…12:00…

Q: Looking for a reliable hard disk cloning software.

I want to make an *exact* copy (a clone) of my hard disk(os+apps+data) so that when it fails I can install the second disk as the main disk and continue working. The disk is already making unhappy noises! Dell 8400 desktop with Windows XP SP 3.

Have researched Norton Ghost, Shadow Protect, but would like a solid recommendation from a satisfied user. Thanks.

A: If you haven’t bought the hard drive yet, Seagate and Western Digital provide free tools for their drives that make perfect copies. Especially if you are upgrading the drive for an older machine that cannot take advantage of the full size of modern disks as you can create partitions on the new drive with your old drive cloned to the boot partition.

It is the first incurable bastard I have picked up on one of my own machines (actually a work machine) and had to take the machine to support, who solved it by wiping the machine and ruining my digital life at work. Support insisted it was spyware, where I still insist it is a virus because it renders the machine unusable.

I wish I could have found the following link (http://www.virusremovalguru.com/?p=4918) on my Blackberry when it occurred, so I could have fixed it myself and not be stuck with this crappy new image (didn’t even have the right video drivers).

I had also picked it up earlier on a Virtual Machine. What both had in common was XP (better than Vista) and McAfee (better than nothing).

In Vista 64, I just found an icon “View 32-bit Control Panel Icons” in Control Panel. And than I found “Mail” inside.

I found a batch approach at http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/25/easier-way-to-take-ownership-and-grant-access-files-or-directories-in-vista/, but it is not for the newbie. There was another offering that does not require an account at http://www.cynosurex.com/Software/TakeControl/