I bought these flowers last weekend so they are well past their prime but I liked how several of the flowers were floating on the top of the water in the vase. While shooting, a full flower fell and that is the 2nd shot which I also posted as my photo for the day on pBase

I wanted to spread some awareness on a new email going around. This morning I got the lovely email from a ‘malware provider’ claiming to be MS. Basically saying, “Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” First message I got had the ‘fix’ attached the other two have links… If you get one, don’t open it. Despite the fact that they do look real they are not – MS will never send you a link or the actual fix in an email, they will push it via Microsoft Updates. You can read more about it on SophosLabs Blog  but main point is to be aware of it and don’t open it or any others that look like it.

Off of the email topic and on to snail mail topic… really snail mail… you see back in January of 2007 I ordered a drying rack to dry hand washable etc. I watch the tracking progress and was puzzled when it said ‘delivered’ and I never got it! So I called the company and they did a search on it and couldn’t find it either so they sent me a 2nd one. Well today our mail lady showed up and mentioned she had a big package for me. I was really shocked because I haven’t ordered anything big. She opened up the back of the truck and when I saw it I started wondering if it was the long lost drying rack. Sure enough, I opened up the packing slip and it was shipped January 30, 2007. It arrived today, 2.5 years later… apparently it was sitting in a back storage room at the post office and the postmaster had someone clean it out this week.

Tiny bit of positive news… one of the recent updates to IE8 (Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP (KB969897)) fixed the invoice printing in MS Money. I can now again print my invoices to Adobe Acrobat pdf! YEAH!

I’ve also decided to hold off a bit on Quicken as there was a note posted by a Quicken representative on the MS Money Forum stating that they are working with Microsoft to develop a file conversion process that will help Money users better convert their existing data files to Quicken. Right now there is a conversion tool however it is said to be buggy: It has issues importing more than 10,000 transactions (I’ve used Money completely since 1997, pretty sure I’m well over that) and can only support 15 character names for categories and accounts…

According to the post, they hope the new converter will be available for the 2010 version of Quicken to be released fall of this year.

Microsoft has officially announced they are discontinuing MS Money…

Microsoft’s Announcement on the MS Money Home page
CNET’s Announcement

This past Tuesday Windows Updated pushed IE8 to my Windows XP desktop computer… Since I have my Windows Updates set to Notify I did have the option to opt out of this updated but since I’ve been running it on my Vista Laptop with no issues I figured why not… what could go wrong… LOL…

First problem I noticed was that I could no long print out invoices using MS Money… This apparently is a known issue and anyone interested in reading more about it the MS Money Forum has several threads on it. Apparently MS Money invoice printing and the IE8 final used for Vista and XP don’t play well together. Specifically, if you try to print an invoice to Adobe PDF (my standard method), any printer, or Microsoft’s XPS Document Writer you end up with blank page(s). There are reports of success with Windows 7 RC however, I’m not quite ready to build a new computer… later this year perhaps…

Most ‘fixes’ tell you to uninstall IE8… of course doing so creates a completely different set of problems in that the uninstall/roll back of IE has never gone well. It is better to re-install a backup from before the upgrade and just upgrade any other programs since then – that is if you make regular full back-ups/images of your operating system drive. (Highly recommended!)

I did managed to find two other ‘work arounds’ to use until MS actually decides to fix the problem. The easiest is to print to SnagIt. Snagit is a great screen capture program created by TechSmith. It is very easy to set MS Money’s Invoice printing to print to SnagIt and then once SnagIt has it, SnagIt allows you to package the printing to a pdf which you can either email or print.

Another note on SnagIt – if you have ForceField running, when you go to capture you can only see a white screen as ForceField by design inhibits screen capture due to keyloggers. It is suggested to have ForceField set to only https… I’ve kept mine running and if I run into a site I want to capture from I temporarily turn off ForceField and reopen the site to make the capture…

The other option requires MS OneNote, print to OneNote does work – however getting that into a format that is easy to print properly or send to a client is more work than it is worth if you already have SnagIt…

After getting the one problem sorted out, yesterday I found another… I have a video capture card on my system and use BeyondTV by SnapStream… well IE8 breaks the WebAdmin Program Guide… the guide sort of works (if you don’t mind jumbled times) in compatibility mode (Tools > Compatibility View on the IE toolbar). Apparently version 4.9.2 which is in RC right now fixes this issue so for the time being, I’m sticking with IE8 and the couple quarks I’ve found in hopes that things will be sorted out soon…

So much for thinking this would be a stress free upgrade…