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	Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Carol Is Blogging!!!!!! Oh Boy!!!!!! Oh Boy!!!!!!!! Carol, one of my favorite college buddies of all time is now blogging!!!! Yipee!!!!!!! Her blog, Small Town Ramblings is now parked on my blog roll. Carol is from Leoti a very small Kansas town about 6 hours to the west from Winfield. One of my peak culinary experiences of all time occured one Sunday night when Carol brought fresh eggs and cream back to the dorm from her family farm. We made ice cream with those eggs and cream and I have never in my tasted ice cream that fabulous. Oooh - I'm so happy that I can now check in on Carol on a daily basis!!!!! Yea!!!!!! 7:57:31 PM    comment []

Entourage Joe, who is Mac user, upgraded to MS Office 2004. And he's quite pleased with the Entourage improvements. I am in the midst of the comtemplating The Switch - changing from Windows to Mac. My main issue is that I must have complete and seamless compatibility with our corporate e-mail and calendaring server - which is of course, Outlook running on top of an Exchange server. Now, Microsoft advertises that Entourage is totally and completely compatible with Outlook/Exchange. However, this summer, one of my non-profits upgraded to Entourage. To get the calendaring functions to work, the office also had to change from an OSX server to an Exchange server. And, at that point, e-mail became intermittently unstable. Unexplained crashes and the common calendaring function did not work. After much research, we found that we were not the only ones with this issue and in fact, Entourage cannot provide common calendaring functions on top of an Exchange server. Right now, we're evaluating whether to give up on common calendaring and drop back to the more stable OSX server or to install a third party product that might enable calendaring on the Exchange server. This would be yet another example of why I hate Microsoft. And I'm still stuck trying to figure out whether I want to make The Switch.... 7:45:27 PM    comment []

Camera Repair Woes The Slat Rat is definitely an unhappy camper. My wonderful Sony DSC F707 has been in repair hell for the past two months. In mid September, the lens end piece and focus ring came off. The damage could not be repaired locally so the camera had to be sent back to the Sony Mothership for repair. And that's when the ridiculous saga started. First, Sony misplaced the camera and it took several nudges from us for them to hunt it down. Finally, three weeks later they examined the camera and provided a repair estimate: $245. I gave the go ahead for the repair. Two weeks later, the camera is shipped back. The guys at the local camera repair shop open the box and discover the camera was not repaired. The Sony folks evidently misplaced my go ahead for repair. So, my poor camera gets shipped back to Sony. Three weeks later (last Friday), my camera arrives!!!!! And this time it's repaired. As a matter of fact I used it for my geocaching pictures. It takes the most fabulous pictures in low light. I've been using Peter's very small Sony PSC-10 5 Megapixel camera during the repair saga. It's a great little camera - but its performance just is just not the same - that big Leitz lens on my camera makes all the difference in the world. Anyhoo, I went to recharge my camera after this weekend's activities. And guess what - it wouldn't charge - the little amber charge light would not come on. At this point, I was royally pissed off. The camera charged just fine before it was shipped off to Sony repair hell. I stomped back to the camera repair shop. We took a close look at the camera - the recharging receptacle/plug should have two little wire anode type thingies. It only had one. Those idiots at Sony repair broke the camera's charge receptacle. So, my poor camera is now on its third trip to Sony La La Land. This kind of shoddy service is not what one would expect from Sony. One expects this sort of low rent service and quality control from a third rate, cheap electronics manufacturer. Not Sony. So you can bet I am going to escalate this within Sony. This is simply beyond the pale. I would be appalled to provide such poor service. 7:28:02 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Stephanie A. Kesler. Last update: 3/5/2005; 8:49:15 PM.