Found this useful article that explains Outlook's Auto-Complete feature:

http://www.outlookpower.com/issues/issue200506/00001584001.html

"If the users are losing addresses of people they recently replied to, it's because Outlook crashes or does not close properly and the changes aren't written to the NK2 file. The existing *.NK2 shouldn't be replaced by a clean *.NK2 if this happens, but new addresses you've sent mail to, or replied to won't be saved to the file. Less used addresses are replaced by new addresses when the NK2 contains 1000 addresses, but if something is corrupt, Outlook replaces the current NK2 with a new, clean one. We don't know what causes it to become corrupt, but we suspect a large number of addresses in the cache is part of the problem."

I had this program a while back that would read text from my computer. I thought it was really cool but up until about 10 minutes ago... I forgot what that program was called!

"Sayz Me is a free text-to-speech reader for Windows. Text is typed in or copied from the clipboard and then read aloud. Words are highlighted as they are spoken. Select voice, adjust reading speed, voice pitch, font, font size and color. Hides in the system tray. Very simple and easy to use. Freeware. BSD style license."

Requirements

Sayz Me has been tested on Windows 98, 2000 and XP.

Please ensure that the Microsoft Speech API 4.0 and the Microsoft synthetic voices are installed.

NOTE: the installation order is important!

Be sure to install "spchapi.exe" first, followed by "msttsl.exe". These files should only need to be installed for Windows 98 and XP. They are already included in the default setup for Windows 2000.

More information about the myriad of Speech setups can be found at the Microsoft Speech website.

Source: http://www.datafurnace.net.au/sayzme/html/documentation.html

So I have some old movies I don't watch anymore, some old CDs I've grown tired of, and a pile of books that I've read and I'm pretty sure I won't read again. What am I going to do with all of this "junk"? How about taking it down to Bookmans and getting some trade-in credit? That way I can get a copy of Scorpius by John Gardner (which I still don't have by the way). Or I can browse the DVD section and get that copy of Unbreakable to replace the one that the cats scratched up. Doesn't really matter if you're not looking for something in particular. I know that when I go to Bookmans, I usually end up finding something special.

Not many people know that if you're out here in AZ and you're either a student or a teacher, you can get some serious discounts at Bookmans. This is straight from their Educators Program page:

"As an educator, we know you're spending your own money on class materials. So spend some on yourself, and take 20% off all your purchases. Not just classroom material, everything. And by the way, thanks."

If you're a kid that's 14 and under, you can join their Kids Club and get 10% of anything in the store. Also, if you're into writing book reports, you can join their Reading Program "Read 10 Books, Get A Free Book!" Details are on their website.

http://www.bookmans.com

This year's Fine Arts Festival @Orme was awesome! We had several artists running classroom workshops for the students. You can checkout the school's event flyer on the event here. I was involved with assisting Kevn Lambson who teaches the Computer Art class at Orme during Fine Arts Festival Week. Kids used several programs including NewTek Lightwave 3D, Pixologic Zbrush, Corel Painter, and Adobe Photoshop.

You can check out Kevn Lambson's website at http://www.idearstudios.com

Here are a few useful links to find the demo versions of the programs listed above:

Lightwave 3D
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/lwtrial.php

Zbrush
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/trial/

Corel Painter
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1152796555406

Adobe Photoshop (and other Adobe products)
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

Also, Kevn reccomended some open-source (free) programs out there you can take advantage of if you're working in Linux or don't like the price tags on the above programs:

Unreal Development Kit
UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.
http://www.udk.com/

Blender 3D
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
http://www.Blender3D.org

The Gimp
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
http://www.Gimp.org

InkScape
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
http://www.inkscape.org

We were having a problem with printing to our color Xerox machine in the Faculty Room. A 7MB PDF file would expand to over 300MB in the queue and literally take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to print. Not sure what was the problem at first but there were alot of factors to take into consideration. I found an article on http://www.petri.co.il/forums that explained a similar situation someone else had.

Here's the link to the post:
http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=23752

And here's what Moderator Sorinso had to say...
"There is a big difference between PCL and PS drivers... Especially PCL6, that has some advanced capabilities that might be problem-makers when printing PostScript files. I don't recall the whole theory, and my printers' guru is out of reach at the moment, so cannot give you the whole picture.
Anyway, a PDF file is a PostScript file, that you are printing with a non-PostScript driver.
I would suggest two things:
1) in the printer's Properties, on the Advanced page, uncheck the Enable Advanced Printing Features box (see the attached screenshot).
2) install the PS driver for the same printer on the server and map it to the users.

Test these two and see which of them is better.
Good luck and let us know the outcome.

Added: also, see these articles from Adobe's site:
- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...ernalId=333091
- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...ernalId=323299"

It turned out we had that printer installed using the PCL6 driver rather than the PS driver. The option to change the driver was grayed out so I had to add the printer locally via it's IP address. Followed the instructions in the forum post and sure enough it printed great!

With the PCL6 driver, it took about an hour to get that job to go through. Now with the PS driver installed it took only about 5 minutes! And the file only expanded to about 120MB instead of 300MB.

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed the mass hysteria caused by an innocent email from a concerned person. Not like the world was coming to an end or anything. It was a forwarded message and it went something like this...

"The telemarketers are out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it. Your cell phone number is going to be released to the public unless you call this number and get your number put on the do-not-call list. It'll only be valid for 5 years once you register your number(s). Send this to all your friends NOW!"

Be advised that this Hoax Email has been debunked by Snopes.com Please read this article:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp

You can also visit https://donotcall.gov for more details on the real Do Not Call Registry set up by the Federal Trade Commission. Here are some more details from their site:

MORE INFORMATION

• The National Do Not Call Registry is managed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation's consumer protection agency. Click here to view more information from the FTC on the National Do Not Call Registry and how to avoid telemarketing fraud.
  
  
• Information for Consumers. Click here if you would like more information on how to register, what registration means for you, what calls are covered and more.
  
  
• Information for Businesses. Click here for answers to some common questions from telemarketers and sellers.
  
  
• Information for the Media. Click here for media materials related to the National Do Not Call Registry.

I found an awesome online file conversion website called Zamzar. You can upload files or send youtube links to their site and have them converted to other formats. Enter your email and they’ll send you a link to download your converted file.

This is a great service for teachers who receive papers from students that save their documents in programs like Microsoft Works (.wps) or Office 2007 (.docx) format. Also great for those who like to show youtube videos in the classroom but would rather download the videos for future use instead of reloading a page and waiting for their video to load.

http://www.zamzar.com

This goes out to all of you who got a new computer back in December. You know that, shiny new laptop that has a copy of Office 2007 installed on it. If you didn't end up getting a license for that, it means your 60-day trial is either coming to an end or it has already expired. Good news for you, you can buy a license over at your local computer store or online at a site like Newegg.com - I highly recommend that you do not purchase a license unless it's from a well established retailer. You could get into trouble if you think you're getting a good deal by purchasing Office online through an auction site.

For those of you that either don't have the money for that yet or need a nice office suite to replace your expired Office suite, look no further!

OpenOffice is a nice office suite that'll get you where you need to go. Got a paper to write that's due but you can't use Office because your trial expired? Go to http://www.openoffice.org and download their FREE office suite that runs using Java. It's cross platform so for all you Linux users out there (I know you're out there) can take advantage of this too. 150MB download so be advised if you're on a slow connection, it might take a while to download.


And hey, are you borrowing a friend's computer and they don't want you installing anything on it? There's always OpenOffice Portable. You can get a copy and install it to a USB drive. Works like a charm! http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable
Note: Like the site says "99MB Download - 248MB installed" I'd advise installing to a least a 512MB USB drive so you can also have some space for your documents/presentations/spreadsheets if need be.

If you're anything like me, you don't like having programs you don't use start up when you open other programs. If I wanted to open it, I would open it myself or have it start up when my computer boots up. I had a tech request recently that dealt with Messenger starting up when Outlook 2002 starts. Here's how to disable that:

Open Outlook and select Tools from the menu bar
Under Tools, select Options
Select the tab named Other
Towards the bottom you'll see a section named Messenger
Uncheck the box next to "Enable Instant Messaging in Microsoft Outlook"
Click Apply
Restart Outlook

Now that little messenger icon next to your clock shouldn't pop up again when you open Outlook 2002