I'm out until August

I've tried to keep this up to date twice a week since I started.  Like most other people who run blogs, I did not want to post a few entries and then give up.  I want to let you know I will be out of touch for the next few weeks and won't be updating this blog.

In the meantime, I will have my tablet with me tracking a few projects I have.  I already use OneNote to gather all my data for these projects (yes, this sounds like an advertisement), but I also noticed how much I am using some powertoys.  For instance, I always check the length of my ramblings with the Word Count powertoy and use the printout manager to handle long Word docs being printed to OneNote.  I make sure to shrink the image a bit to leave me room for notes off to the side.  I also use the Copy to Device addin to help syncing with my mobile phone (a T-Mobile Wing, for those interested).    And maybe if I get some free time, I can play Sudoku…

One other loose end to tie up.  Last week I mentioned the final call I answered when I was in product support.  I also remember the first call I took.  We had finished our training (at the time, the basic class was 5 weeks) and had worked with each other to deal with the expected calls for a new OS.  Issues like "my sound card doesn't work," "One of the floppy disks is bad," or "I can't get my CD player to work when I boot to the boot floppy" were all covered.  Of course, the fist call I took was slightly different (and I'm paraphrasing here):

"I just installed Windows 95 into the 15th partition I have on my drive system.  I can see some of the FAT partitions - I have five, and can see three of them - but none of the HPFS partitions are visible.  The FAT32 partition for NT shows, but I cannot browse it.  Oh, and I have a BSD partition I can see, but I cannot browse it.  And none of my linux partitions even show, except when using fdisk at a command prompt.  What should I do?"

And all of this was thrown into this fellow's 386 based machine.  We worked and got all the FAT partitions working, and he said he would take it from there.  No big lesson here, but I always keep these experiences in mind when I have to call product or tech support myself. 

I should be back in August.  Enjoy the summer!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John