No Mother’s Day in 2008?
I was seeing Mother’s Day ads in various places, and this started me wondering when exactly Mother’s Day was going to be. “No problem,” I told myself. “Outlook will know.” Except… Outlook didn’t know. It’s probably because I’ve been bringing along my existing .pst file each time I move to a new version of Outlook. So, for all Outlook knew, Mother’s Day and all other holidays cease to exist on January 1, 2008.
In any case, I decided to add the new holidays. But, I knew from experience that when you do that, you usually end up with two of each. Sure, two Christmases are nice. But, two Groundhog days are a bit too much. So, step 1 when adding new holidays is to deep six the old ones. I put my Outlook calendar into Event view so that just the holidays would show up.
Then, I deleted all of the existing holidays. Finally, I chose Tool > Options > Calendar Options > Add Holidays. Since I live in the U.S., that’s the set I chose, and clicked OK.
Now I know that Mother’s Day is happening on May 11th. Whew! Still time!
Outlook 2007, Vista, Firefox, and General Failure
Should we salute General Failure?
For some reason, over the past few days, many Firefox users have encountered the General Failure error message when clicking links in Outlook. I haven’t yet tracked down the why in each case (one why occurs when you install the beta of Firefox 3, then remove it and revert to a still-installed Firefox 2.x), but several solutions seem to be floating around:
- Remove and reinstall Firefox;
- Change the default browser to Internet Explorer, then change it back to Firefox;
- Delete the (Default) REG_SZ registry value found at:HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec
i.e., replace what’s stored for (Default) with nothing; double-click (Default), select and delete what’s stored for Value data.
Caveat: editing the registry incorrectly can result in your computer not working anymore. It also is a major cause of global warming. Edit the registry at your own risk.
