Somebody recently left the company, as a result I thought I would delete him from my contacts in Communicator. I right-clicked his name in Communicator and selected ‘delete this contact’. Communicator then crashed. Restarting Communicator fixed the problem and I successfully deleted him this time.

Cut to 10 minutes later when I switch to Outlook to read my mail.

Outlook is displaying my folder list down the left hand side as normal but where the inbox listing and reading preview is I see a large message:

‘Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 has not closed the file …… properly…’

So I click click the silly office icon and select exit.

Restarting outlook shows the same dumb message.

So I quit Outlook again and search for any sign of it running. No minimised windows on the start bar at the bottom. Nothing amongst the seemingly endless list of icons in the system tray. Nowt.

This is where a normal user presumably rings support. Knowing a little more about computers I brought up task manager and started searching for something Outlook related. There it is OUTLOOK.EXE sitting there happily running with no visible UI elements for the user to interact with.

Killing this and restarting Outlook obviously fixed the problem. Dumb.

Why do I care that Communicator broke outlook
Why do I need to know that there are hidden processes running in the background of this GUI operating system.
Why do I need to know how to kill those processes.

Idiocy.

While on the ferry from Portsmouth to Fishbourne I had the pleasure of watching the sun go down across the Solent.

One of our suppliers invited a few of us out for a Karting evening. Much fun. Although some aches this morning!

Catching up on a back log of photographs. A few weeks ago we went down to see some relatives in Windsor.

Took a little (584 miles) trip to Devon and back at the weekend and I have to say I love it!

Finally flew the thing, had a couple of 20+ minute flights this afternoon. It was a little windy really, but it made it back to earth safely.

Vista suggested I tried Windows Update this morning to see if there was a fix to some problem which occurs every day. Windows Update helpfully said IE 7 was not newer than IE 5 and therefore I couldnt use it to access Windows Update.

Saw one of these buildings on Oxford Street today, I like the way they can remove all of the structure apart from the facade and simply hold that in place with what looks like heavy duty scaffolding while they rebuild the rest of the building.

* Next to the link is a large play button. I click it. A Java system tray icon appears along with a large tooltip saying something about Java. Nothing else happens.

* I click play again, nothing

* I open the ‘media help’ page in a new tab

* Try to switch to the tab with the standard keyboard shortcut ctrl-2. nothing

* Switch to the tab with the mouse, windows dialog ‘application has stopped responding’ Firefox crashes.

* Re-open firefox, visit the wikipedia page, navigate straight to the media help page.

* Download the ogg codec pack

* Install the codec pack

* Tell windows ‘yes i meant to double click that installer’

* Wait

* Click the ogg link on the original page, offered to save file (not play it)

* Save the file to disk

* Find file (firefox put it some temp folder so had to use find to locate it)

* Double click it. ‘Do you want windows to look on the internet to find out how best to handle this file?’ yes

* Windows cannot identify the file.

* Manually run Windows Media player, drag file onto player window.

* Player is busy ‘loading library’ so nothing happens

* Wait, try again

* Nothing, no message.

* Shift Right click -> open with, manually choose Windows Media Player. file plays.

yay! 2008 and I feel computers have really come a long way.