Dave McComb's Blog

This site has long been forgotten about. Yet another good idea that never quite materialized. I have just discovered that I do enjoy blogging though. Please be sure and check out my new site. Hopefully it will not go the way that this one did. But, who knows, maybe this one will be resurrected too… Time will tell.

Xenu is a great “free” program to check your web site for broken links. Check it out at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Ok, so I just found out that the latest version of Adobe Reader has a PDF previewer for Outlook 2007 built in. The Foxit solution I mentioned below loads much faster, but only works on Vista.

So, I’ve now discovered that blogs quickly get out of date. I’ve posted some tech articles, but I just realized I haven’t updated my main page in over a year! Maybe I just don’t have anything that interesting to say… nah, that can’t be it.

Well, one site that I did discover recently is Finetune. It’s a great site that allows you to build custom playlists, stream music, listen to other’s playlists, etc. Take a listen to the playlist I put together of some of my favorite artists and tracks:

Ok, so that’s all I’ve really got for now. Check back later (hopefully, not a year later).

Like many others, I have not been very happy with my Microsoft Vista upgrade. Vista is just not ready for prime time yet. I have frequent crashes, programs that do not work, devices that do not work, etc. In fact I just ordered a new home PC from Dell (with Vista) and my first plan is to rebuild it with Windows XP. I don’t think I can take having Vista at home as well as at work.

MS Office 2007 has been a completely different experience altogether. I love it! While it takes some getting used to, the new features and layout are great. Outlook has a number of new features which make life easier, including: auto-detecting Exchange server settings, better multiple email account management, the ability to have sent items for IMAP accounts stored in a separate folder, and auto-preview so that you can view attachments in Outlook without opening another program. So, this works great for images and MS Office programs, but it doesn’t have a PDF previewer installed. Luckily, Tim Heuer and Foxit software have developed one that you can download from his blog.

Oh yeah, make sure you download the Save as PDF add-in for Microsoft Office too. It lets you save files as PDF without needing to have Adobe Acrobat installed.

Having that annoying problem with IE automatically opening zip files instead of saving them?  Follow these steps to correct this behavior:

Open Windows Explorer.
Go to Tools | Folder Options | File Types.
Scroll down to ZIP and select it.
Click Restore to restore the default settings.
This sets the file type zip back to “Confirm open after download” which you can find in the advanced settings.