bignoseduglyguy

You’d think I’d know better, wouldn’t you? Last night, fuelled by boredom and a little too much Adnams, I decide to see if Pumatech’s Intellisync for Yahoo was any less flaky than when I last tried it. Given that it is heavily promoted in the new lean, mean Yahoo mail service, I thought they may have ironed out the well-known bugs but it seems that, for some folks (like those on XP?) at least, the old HotSync incompatibilities are still there. If, like me, you are tempted to give it a try again and then want to uninstall, you may find that the Intellisync conduits refuse to relinguish their grip, crippling the normal HotSync process. Should this be the case, you should be able to restore normality by following the process below. As always, if you are not familiar with back up procedures or monkeying around with your PC’s Registry files, DO NOT proceed – go read about backing up Palm files on your Palm & your PC and how to backup, ddit, and restore the Registry in Windows.

1. Back up your Datebook/Calendar, AddressBook/Contacts, MemoPad/Memos, ToDoList/Tasks in your preferred fashion.
2. Exit Hotsync Manager by right-clicking on the Hotsync icon in the Sys Tray and clicking ‘Exit’.
3. Uninstall Intellisync by going to Start | Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs, locating the Intellisync program and then clicking the Chnage/Remove button.
4. Clean up the mess left in your Registry files.

a) Go to the Windows Registry by clicking Start | Run then typing ‘regedit’ and ckicking ‘OK’.
b) Expand hkey_current_user | software | us robotics | pilot desktop.
c) Look for ApplicationIntellisyncAddressBook and press ‘delete’. Repeat for all the Intellisync entries.
d) Click on Hotsync Manager – it should be several entries below. Look in the right hand pane and find a Notifier entry – towards the bottom – that contains ‘yahoo/intell…’ and delete the entry.
e) Exit Windows Registry. Reboot the computer. Proceed as below.

5) Restart Hotsync Manager. Go to Start | Programs | Palm Desktop (or Palm) | Hotsync Manager.5) You should now be able to Hotsync your Palm. Double check that all the conduits are working with a few test entries.

After all that, I would recommend that you write yourself a stiff warning to never bother trying Intellisync again – at least until the next time.

Inspiration via jeffyen-ga @ Google Answers

Michael Sippey has cooked up a couple of small but lovingly crafted bookmarklets for Gmail users.

Once dragged or saved to your browser’s toolbar, these will give you the capability to i) fire up a blank gmail without the need to click onto the Gmail site and ii) do the same, but linking to the webpage your currently browsing. Sippey say they work fine in IE6; however, for the IEphobics who tend towards Mozilla browsers I can confirm that I have had no problems with them in Firefox.

via evhead

Today’s moral dilemma: does having terminal cancer excuse Cass coming up with a pun like this?:

TO ALL COLON CANCER GROUPS
I think we need an anthem. It could be sung to the Sting tune and goes
Don’t stand so..
Don’t stand so..
Don’t stand so.. colostomy

If you have never read Cass’ CancerGiggles weblog, you’ll not know that it’s just fine to laugh in the face of death.

P.S. Cass, now I’ve covered mine in tea reading your blog, please leave me your keyboard.

‘Face’ by Sprog 4 (Foodstuffs on acrylic; 2004)

Is it lunch or is it art?

My recently retired pundit’s story of self harm through smoking without inhaling reminds me of the time I was almost responsible for the death of a friend, his girlfriend and myself.

We were en route to a superb Ian Dury and The Blockheads concert at the Hammersmith Apollo. At the time, my friend was a roving Mr Fix-It for a posh kitchen company, so whilst he and the object of his affections rode in the front of his van, I travelled to the gig lying on top of a pile of kitchen worktops in the back of the van. Despite this and the fact that the other two were non-smokers, I decided that I couldn’t last the journey without a smoke. So, whilst tearing along the M25 (London’s infamous orbital motorway), I lay back and puffed away. Amidst stage coughs and muttered complaints, my friend opened the driver’s window to allow the fug to escape. Once I smoked the cigarette down to the butt, I rolled over and, with a deft much practised one-handed movement, flicked the butt out of the window. However, rather than being sucked into the racing vortex of air passing by the van and disappearing into the distance, the glowing stub simply ‘bounced’ of the slipstream outside the window and neatly dropped between my friend’s legs. With burning embers threatening his crown jewels, he instinctively tried to remove them from their vicinity by raising himself off the seat. In order to do this, he unthinkingly moved his weight onto his shoulder blades against the seat back and his feet against the pedals. The van shot forward, lurching and revving wildly whilst friend and squeeze both tried to sweep the butt to the floor. They eventually managed to do this and he brought the van to a screeching halt on the hard shoulder. For some reason, I was held to blame for this incident despite the quite obvious contribution of the prevailing environmental conditions at the time. Pulse rates back to normal, we resumed the journey and enjoyed an absolutely brilliant gig – one of the best I have been to – during which my friend even spoke to me once or twice. The evening was also notable for another reason in that I had a stand-up row at the bar with the (piss) artist Peter Blake, the inspiration for Dury’s Peter The Painter on the 1984 4,000 Weeks Holiday album, who was holding court at the bar in the interval. He and his entourage were more than a little sniffy about having to rub shoulders with us proles so I saw it as my duty to tell him where to get off, as you do.

You’ll not be surprised to learn that I went home on the Tube, which one could smoke on in those days.

The London Metblog is open for business and a cross-section of London bloggers, including yours truly, are posting. It’s early days for the London site but the metblog concept is becoming hot – the LA metblog has been making big news since late last year and the Chicago metblog just made Feed Of the Day at Feedster.

So says Michael Owen. I’m sure Andy will blog the last hour’s events better than I. Sad.

SWMBO and the sprogs like to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire, whilst I’d rather crawl over broken glass. Having recently grabbed the Who Wants to be a Millionaire Junior board game second hand off the net, they sat down to play it this evening. I made myself scarce and jumped on the PC to read mail, blogs and newsgroups, whilst answering a few calls on my mobile phone. I grabbed the fourth call in an hour – and heard sprog number three say “Hi, it’s Chris Tarrant here from Who Wants to be a Millionaire….”. Yes, that’s right. SWMBO was using me as her ‘Phone-A-Friend’…from the house phone…in the living room 15 feet away. Is it any wonder all you folks out there are my best friends?

If anyone one of my regular correspondents is interested in a certain popular beta doing the rounds, let me know.