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Happy New Year!

Wow, it’s been almost a month since I last posted an article. Who would have thought that I would have been so busy…

There were a lot of good potential articles, unfortunately many of them have fallen through the fingers of my mind. There is however, one that has stood out…

For those who might not be aware, Microsoft released a major patch or service pack for Microsoft Office 2003. I was tipped off by several of my RSS feeds from several of the major computer magazine companies that there was a problem.

According to Infoworld.ca:

“Also blocked are file formats found in some older versions of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, and Corel’s Quattro spreadsheet and Draw programs.”

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So, as I mentioned yesterday. I’ve been kind of busy of late. Christmas does that to pretty well everyone I know this time of year.

That being said, I’ve still been able to fit in a computer emergency or two. The latest one was for my eldest daughters laptop. She got it from Dell just over a year or so ago. I highly recommend Dell laptops, both my daughters have them. They are affordable and can be configured in many different combinations and fit pretty well everyones budget. However as a friend of mine mentioned recently, you do have to wait a week to get one.

Dell is very good in supporting their hardware, especially during the warranty period. My youngest daughter’s DVD burner died after an unfortunate incident at a border crossing. We called Dell and they shipped out a new one right away. The laptops are very easy to maintain (hardware wise). It just took a single screw to unlock a slide mechanism and out went the bad drive, in went the new.

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You may have noticed that I haven’t written much the last couple weeks. Trust me this isn’t because of lack of things to write/chat/rant about but rather just being too darned busy!

Yes Christmas is coming which I think takes care of a good chunk of many peoples spare time this time of year. So that is certainly a part of it. But with Christmas in this part of the world comes snow, storms and just plain weather. A case in point was the last two days.

We (my wife and I) were asked to look after our two grandsons (both under 5) for a couple of hours while my son in law drove to work. Both of them (son in law and daughter) work at the airport and once in a while have overlapping shifts, which means that sometimes we are lucky enough to babysit the boys for a couple of hours.

This particular time they were dropped off due to the weather, he didn’t want them in the car with him on the road. It was dangerous, and while he may have had no choice to be there, he could at least make sure the kids weren’t and so we got them for a short while…. we thought…

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We were doing some online shopping on Amazon recently and stumbled upon an add for a new gadget that they are selling. Both my wife and I looked at it, and at almost the same time said “Star Trek”. Yep they’ve done it again…

It’s kind of amazing when you look back upon that original show. Yes, it’s showing it’s age now, the special effects are kind of lame and the acting somewhat campy. But man did Ray Bradbury know what he was doing!

He liaised with some of the best minds of our time and spent many, many hours in discourse with NASA and numerous other scientists. He tried to make “Star Trek” as realistic and futuristic as he could. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams!

He are just a few of the items that were completely fictional when the show came out, that have now become reality…

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Man.

I have had a web search challenge that I have been working on for over three years! I kid you not. I just broke it this morning and I had to share it with someone.

For the last few years, usually starting around December 1^st some of the radio stations in Canada have carried a wonderful one minute story pertaining to Christmas. The same story usually played on or near the same time every hour – with a different story every day.

They are heart warming tales, told by a gentleman with a kind and gentle voice. Unfortunately, for the last year or two, we haven’t been able to find him being broadcast on any of our local stations, including the cable companies 24 hour Christmas music channel.

Of all the people in my family, I think my youngest daughter enjoyed him the most. She’s our Christmas kid. Come December 1st (and sometimes earlier) she lights up our house with joy and laughter and the spirit of Christmas and she enjoyed those special broadcasts even more so than we did.

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