This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Light blogging and some tech questions

I'll be paying attention to other things (family) for the next couple of weeks, and have programmed a couple future blog entries to make it seem like something is happening here.  Why not start the break with a bunch of questions that have bugged me and I can't quite figure out where and how to ask. 

I have tried some of these on Yahoo! Answers with some success.  But you never know if your question will pass by the right set of eyeballs.  There is also the danger that one could spend too much time answering questions.

Microsoft Outlook 2003

  • Can you make the Contacts folder have a standard view that always returns when I come back to that view?

  • Why can't I just 'archive' the deleted items folder only? I'd really love to set up archiving to only delete old stuff from my Deleted Items and Sent Items folders, while leaving everything else alone. That doesn't seem possible with the Auto Archive settings today, so I just manually clear these folders every few months.

  • Why do I get a phantom Outlook window sometimes? It's usually a phantom appointment.

  • I also have the odd situation where opening an item in Outlook causes another item to pop to the front of the Z-order. For example, I have an in-progress email sitting in the background, I create and close a new Task and the email has come to the foreground.

  • Why does a contact not close with Alt-F4 when I am in the website field? This isn't consistent, but I will frequently have trouble closing a contact after I've clicked into the website field. Usually if I switch to another application and back to the contact, I can close it with Alt-F4.

  • Why does Outlook stay near the top of the Z-order when I minimize it. Most other applications go to the bottom of the Z-order. I see this when using Alt-Tab to flip through windows: even when I've just minimized Outlook, it is the second item in the Z-order, not the last.

Others

  • In Firefox, it would be nice if I could have a "detach this tab as a new window" option. The way around this at the moment is to create a new window (Ctrl-N) and then drag the tab to the new window. But that seems rather clumsy.

  • Why the heck does Windows XP drop the focus onto items that are minimized? I usually close applications / windows with Alt-F4, and sometimes it gets things that have been minimized (or are hidden behind other windows).

  • Why does my Palm Tungsten T lose the correlation on the digitizer so frequently? It seems like every other day, the digitizer is completely out of whack. I picked up the firmware updates when I first got it, and there hasn't been anything new posted to the Palm website.

  • Why does Norton Antivirus take so long to tell me about Firewall violations for new programs? Whenever I install new software that accesses the internet, Norton's firewall blocks the software until I tell it what to do. However, it takes a minute or two for Norton to pop up its window asking what it should do. This seems silly. Just open the window and ask, instead of making me think the new software is broken.

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