David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Fix DST appointment times in Microsoft Exchange

    As you may have heard on the news and/or radio, the DST (Daylight Savings Time) change will occur 2 weeks ahead of time in 2007. Unfortunately this change is apparently also causing a chaotic panic similar only to the Y2K frenzy in IT departments everywhere. So if your IT guys like many out there haven’t…

  • My computers svchost.exe is 0x745f2780ed

    So the other day, I’m playing around with my new Bluetooth headset and skype when my computer decides suddenly decides that I’ve had enough fun for the day. It gives me the following error and slows to the pretty much UNUSABLE speed setting. (X) svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0x745f2780” reference memory at…

  • Google DOCS: Online document collaboration done right

    Google Documents (or docs) formerly known as Writely.com are essentially free applications that are hosted on the Internet and work in your browser. Cloud computing is the term often used to describe these applications because they sit somewhere on the Internet and can be used from any computer with a browser. Google docs functions similarly…

  • A weekend with Windows VISTA and Office 2007

    I had some free time this weekend, so I decided to install latest Windows VISTA release candidate along with a trial version of . So far I’ve been relying on XP and Office 2003 because that’s what the majority of my clients use, but lots of people have been talking about upgrading so I figured…

  • Remote desktop connection 6 authentication fix

    My last trip to Windowsupdate resulted in Remote Desktop Connection version 6. For those of you not familiar with this tool, it basically lets you remote control other desktops or servers from your computer using Microsoft RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol. To my dismay, I discovered that the updated RDC added an initial authentication prompt…

  • Transfer mp3’s from a friend’s iPod to your iTunes Library

    I recently got my sisters iPod Mini and wanted to get its songs onto my iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t let you just copy music from a strange iPod to your library…or does it?

  • Stop Windows XP from automatically rebooting

    So here’s the problem. You’re busy working away on something really important and you get interrupted. Maybe the phone rings and you talk. Then maybe you talk some more and when you come back – BOOM! Your system automatically rebooted and your work is gone! Turns out that your computer found some updates from Microsoft…

  • 10 things I hate about you…Word

    In this article I’ll show you how to fix the 10 things I hate most about Microsoft Word. I’ve spent hours over the years getting Word to behave, so this article serves both as a reminder to myself and a guide for you.

  • Selecting text block wise

    Another great way of quickly grabbing vertical sections of tables, lists or log files is the select block wise feature in Microsoft Word and some other editors. Basically selecting text block wise allows you to highlight columns of text vertically. It’s great for modifying log files and reformatting sections of code where more or less…

  • Transposing cells in Microsoft Excel

    I work with lots of Log files and lists. I’ve had many situations in which I’ve had to change a list in order to quickly compare, add, or remove entries. The transpose feature in Microsoft Excel was made just for this purpose.