Today was spent at the Zoo. No, no, not hte office - the Zoo. Literally. I mean it. Would I lie to you? Don't answer that.

9:30 AM Piffle. My family is in town. The apartment is crowded, my work schedule is compressed, and I have the sniffles. What a LOVELY day.

Lots of planning and projects coming up. Some exciting, some otherwise, all different, so things are looking up. More information on those as time allows.

Two new items; last week we picked up a Canon BJC-2000 inkjet. Normally, I hate inkjets; the cost per page is too flinkin' high. This time, it was a semi-decent quality printer, refurbished, for $50. Too good to pass up. As it turns out it was an EXCELLENT deal; this is a wonderful little printer. Quiet, not-bad quality - not photo, but more than Good Enough. The cartridges, ordered online, aren't too bad - $20 or so - and from what I'm hearing, they last a pretty long time. Better yet, the printer head is a separate component - it can be easily removed and swapped out. Not as good as making the head part of the cartridge, but it's a start.

Ultimately, we'll end up with something better; I like the HP LaserJet 1100P or 1100A, myself. We have a few of the Ps around the office for those users that need either confidentiality (the legal and financial staff) or print more than any other 10 people (the admin assistant.) 8 ppm, quiet, excellent quality - well, it's a laser - and the output can be either to the front of the printer, or out the top - which means basically that if necessary, you can make it have a VERY small footprint. The toner cartridges are about $70 each, but they last roughly 10,000 pages, which is excellent for a light-duty office printer. The 1000A also has built-in scanner and fax capability, which can be useful for a home office.

The other item I've been playing with is X10 controllers. Hardly new, but it's fun anyway. For those that don't know, X10 is a protocol for controlling lights and appliances - even security and video - through the electrical wiring of your home. I'm not going to link to any sites on it, since I know of few that aren't commercial, but they aren't hard to find. In any event, we now have most of the lights and some of the other things in the apartment controlled by X10, and today I got a box with the newer computer controller and some other fun little gadgets. Toys make the geek world go 'round, you know. And I got even more; RC1 of Exchange server, and some very nice Database software (ERwin; hefty price tag, nice tool.) And some legitimate work to do, as well. Better get to it.

Later.

1:00 PM DON'T USE OFFICE SR-1. That warning is from Tom, who is offline until he solves the problem. Apparently, after installing the patch his Office installation - including Outlook and Front Page - refuse to run. More details here and on Tom's site later today.

8:30 AM Interesting - and long - day ahead. Let's get started.

Task one is a double-rebuild. I have a laptop - a "loaner" for the general staff - that's been running Windows 2000 RC3 for a couple of months. Time to upgrade that to Final Release version. That has to be done today, and running and ready for three weeks away from the office on a long business trip, so I can't use it for the second half; SR-1 testing. For those who didn't catch the warning yesterday, go here. The story is currently the "Recent" link, under Tuesday, the paragraph that starts "Warning". The short version is, the Office SR-1 patch broke Tom's Office installation. Needless to say, he's upset. Don't blame him. I have an office FULL of users who are shortly going to be asking about this update, so I need some answers NOW. If I get them from Microsoft (through Tom) then all's well and good. But judging from Microsoft's performance yesterday, I can't bet on that.

Task two is some Windows 2000 work; I've got a multi-server development environment running Windows 2000 Server. In and of itself, everything is fine; one of those server, though, is intended as a Database server, specifically SQL Server 7.0, and it is not cooperating. It can't be Windows, nor can it be SQL Server, because I have another server that's running fine. This one, though, refuses to cooperate. We'll see what happens there.

Those two are enough to keep me busy. There's a couple more, but I can't talk about those until tomorrow. Isn't the suspense just killing you? <SEG> Until then, take a look at this amazing link; an interesting SlashDot link. Yep, that's right. This is a review of the TiVo "digital VCR," by one of SlashDot's editors. The link is comment-free, so there's no chaff to wade through. Interesting review, and an interesting product. I don't watch much TV, but this still looks pretty interesting. Worth a look, at least.

Oh, and John Vogt was the first of several to point out that the BJC-2000 has a scanner option; one of those "plug-in-a-scanner-head" jobs. Product number IS-22 for anyone who's interested. I'm not particularly; a cheap inkjet printer is just the thing for notes and "galley proof" images, but for scanning my wife has much higher standards. But it's nice to have the option. TTFN.

No update today. iTOOL.COM is dead; long live Zanova Inc.! At least long enough for my stock options to come through!

8:00 AM Thank GOD it's Friday. Not that it's the end of my workweek or anything.

Yesterday was the official name change of iTOOL.COM. Turns out the the United States Trademarks and Patents Office wouldn't let us register "iTOOL.COM" as a trademark. "i" or "e" in front of a common word is no longer trademarkeable. (They'll issue a patent on Affiliate Programs, but not on iTOOL...) So the solemn <snicker> decision was made to change the name to something else, and the exec team chose Zanova. Why? Beats me. It means "a new beginning" in Russian, and they claim that this is a new beginning for iTOOL, yada yada. Whatever. The most important part of yesterday for me was arriving for work at 4:30 AM and leaving for the last time around 10:00 PM. I was a bit tired.

I had intended to post yesterday, and set aside a time around 8:30 to do so. Around 11:00 I realized what time it was, and never got caught up from there. Oh well.

In the category of "People More Insane Than I," we have the Model Warship Combat Club. Looks like a lot of fun. I could see where driving an RC boat around a pond, shooting at other boats, could be very good for my stress levels...

Lastly, I have one more comment on SR-1, and then I'll leave it from now on. Tom posted his final thoughts, and I figured I had best do the same.

Am I happy? No. Even with the new information on the update available - which I could swear wasn't there the other day, but I could be wrong - Microsoft is still screwing me and my development team. Why? Because the update doesn't work on anything but the full retail version. This is important because my team is mostly running on the MSDN version.

There's nothing illegal about it. We have software licenses for every copy of Office we're running. But rather than keep track of a thousand different keys (well, slight exaggeration) I choose instead to use the MSDN kit version. No registration key needed for the install. So our fully legal, complete, supposedly identical-to-retail installations of Office - intended for developers - can't use the latest patches and updates. This is a mistake, and if Microsoft insists on abusing their MSDN customers, it will come back to haunt them.

And that's all I'm going to say on that. Work to do. Ciao.