I've had two interesting things happen to friends computers over the past few months.

First I got an email from my friends at Tin Roof (by the way, if you want to support a great charity... this is it) telling me that she needed to file an extension on her taxes before she leaves for Nicaragua on Tuesday. However when she started Turbo Tax she was getting an error.

Further investigation by me (via a VNC connection I set up with her a while ago) realized that this was a .NET error.

Turbo Tax spit out the following error: 20888 39915.  A Quick search of their site gave this article.  Basically blaming .NET and their solution has a link to a program that totally wipes out .NET from your system so you can start over.  I downloaded the program, ran it and then reinstalled .NET and her problem was fixed (well after I ran a reboot.bat file that was in the Turbo Tax installation folder, but that's another issue all together).

Then I have another buddy who had been using a program I wrote for my church to transfer files between members of the multimedia team.  Several months ago a basic Windows component of it stopped working right.  I was at a total loss for a solution (as a simple uninstall and reinstall of .NET didn't help).  I let it drop... but I emailed him today with this fix and my hunch is, that this will get him up and running again.

What frustrates me the most about this, is that Microsoft's .NET uninstall doesn't fully uninstall itself.  Many years ago I did some work for Lexmark's All in One printers and one of the BIG things they did was make sure that their uninstall completely wipes out any record of the machine being on your system.  And really there is no excuse for any other behavior.

If you are a .NET developer you've faced the issues I've faced when using a major search engine... results that don't really fit your problem.

But Google has an interesting feature that allows you to create a custom search engine.  You define the sites it searches. 

Dan Appleman has put together a site www.searchdotnet.com that searches his list of .NET sites and overall the results I get from this site are pretty good.

I recently ran across this post and loved it!  I do some image creation stuff and the hardest part of my task is picking a font.  Now I can print out my installed fonts and quickly pick one out.

Now here is the guys code, but slightly edited.  As his had a few syntax errors in it. 

try

{

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (FontFamily family in FontFamily.Families)

    {

    sb.Append("<h2 style='color:blue;font-family:Arial;'>" + family.Name + "</h2>");

    sb.Append("<font face='" + family.Name + "' size='6'>");

    sb.Append("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890");

    sb.Append("</font><hr/>");

    sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

    }

    lblFontList.Text = sb.ToString();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

    lblErrorMessage.Text = ex.ToString();

}

I'm on vacation and the wireless internet access I have is restricted by MAC address.  I initially signed up on my personal PC (not knowing it was MAC address restricted) but needed access on my work PC.

So I went looking for information on masking my MAC address on my work PC to match my personal PC.  Led me to look into the advanced properties of the wireless card, and I found the answer.

As an FYI I have a Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Card installed.

Step 1:  Go to the device manager (if you don't know how to do this, you don't need to be doing any of this).

Step 2: Expand Network Adapters, Right click your wireless card and click properties.

Step 3: At the next window go to the Advanced Tab and select the "Locally Administered MAC Address"

Step 4: Enter in the value field your custom MAC address, and there is how you do it.

Was pretty happy to find it this easy.

Well I think I am finally dropping FoxMarks.

FoxMarks is a Firefox Extension that synchronizes your bookmarks between machines.  It was a beautiful extension until version 2 was released.  Version two has been a train wreck, and for the longest time I just kept running version 1.  However I quickly grew tired of the notification that my FoxMarks extension was out of date, so I finally decided to give version 2 one last try.

Needless to say it failed bad.  Its a shame to see such a good product become such a bad product.

So I did a search for a replacement option and find out about Google Browser Sync.  Syncs not only my bookmarks, but also my cookies, history, saved passwords, and open tabs and windows.  BEAUTIFUL!

Now when I switch from my work PC to my home PC I keep many of my settings.

I've helped a local company do their web site over the years.  They have come to me several times with 'great ideas' for their web site.  From 'nice' blinking text to hiding text at the bottom of the page to 'fool Google'. 

When they come to me with these idea's I fill them in on why that is either a bad practice or a downright bad idea. 

And this isn't just this client that I've had these kinds of conversations with.  Most highly respect my technical skills and accept my answer.  Sometimes they listen to my reasons and decide differently.  In the end they are the boss. I've only had one client that seems to constantly override my thoughts, frustrating for sure. 

But this local company came to me with another 'great idea' and I again told them why it was bad.  So they decided to go with somebody else.  Honestly, kind of relieved.  But I wait for the day that they face some of the consequences of not having somebody willing to tell them no.  When Google's spider realizes the hidden text and drops them from their index.

So I guess the bottom line is, feel free to tell a client no.  But realize they are the boss!  And if it is in your power, and them telling you no just frustrates you to no end... drop them as a client.  Having them make you design a bad site or application isn't worth your reputation.

I'm a TV buff, watch a ton of stuff thanks to my DVR, but occasionally it messes up and occasionally to many of our good shows are on at the same time, so thanks to the my high speed connection and network TV learning to use technology I can watch those missed shows online.

All the major networks have some version of this in place, so if you miss a show... be sure to check out the network web site to catch up!

What a frustrating bit of time I've had.  On Saturday there was a video scavenger hunt at my church.   I wanted to pull two clips off my camera to share with others.  However this was the first time I'd be capturing video from my camera since my system refresh.

The AVI file was stuttering and skipping, now knowing I just installed a base XP Pro system I knew the issue was codec related... however finding the right solution is very hard at times. 

I started downloading codec pack after codec pack, and was having no luck.  So I went searching for things to find corrupted codec's or if there was some other problem causing it.

Found a few things that seemed to help.

Step 1: Uninstalled every codec pack I had installed previously.  Worked to make sure my system was as clean as possible.

Step 2: Ran the vbs file on this page.  Now after doing this, I tried the video again and it was skipping... so while this may help you, it didn't help me.

Step 3: Ran Sherlock 2.0 and it pointed out a few codec corruptions, so I worked to clean those out the best I could (deleting registry keys and such).

Step 4: Installed the K-Lite Codec Pack using the option that said something like "A bunch of stuff".  Now this actually found some corrupted codec's and deleted them.

THEN IT WORKED!!!! 

Now a side note, I've become a huge fan of Window's Media Player Classic which is installed with K-Lite.

We've all heard it... the annoying Windows BEEP.  Read a post on Lifehacker about disabling the beep, tried to do what they said... couldn't get it to work.  A few searches later and here is the fix.

Open a Command Prompt.
Type: sc config "beep" start= disabled

Notice the quotations around beep, and the space before disabled.