You’ll get bored enough to recognize your own insignificance as soon as you’re sufficiently disappointed by your movement’s failure to generate anything more than a shared sense of whining. Simple-minded resentment of other’s wealth, rightly or wrongly attained, does not a movement make.

There are a lot of things wrong in this world. Occupy Wall Street etc. isn’t going to fix any of them.

The first step in solving this problem was to select Contacts, then right-click on the Contacts icon under My Contacts. I selected Properties, then the Outlook Address Book tab. On this screen, I selected the checkbox for “Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book”. After clicking OK, and then repeating the process of a new email message, and clicking the “to” button, I still got the error message. However, when I clicked the droplist for the “Show names from the:” field, there were now TWO entries for Contacts. The first was empty, but the second appropriately showed the contacts. Functional, but clunky.

To solve this problem, I had to go to the main Outlook screen, and select Tools/Email Accounts… Then I selected View or change existing directories or address books. With the lone address book highlighted, I clicked the “Change…” button. On the screen that appeared, there were two Contact list entries. With the top one highlighted, I clicked “Remove Address Book”. After closing and re-opening Outlook, problem solved! One address book/contact list, accessible as expected.

Some updates could not be installed

The following updates were not installed:

<list of updates appears here>

(This problem does not appear to be dependent on any particular update.)

There is a Microsoft support article that describes steps that resolves this problem, although note that the description contained in the support article does not appear to directly describe the SP3 condition which apparently causes this particular problem. The specific cause has to do with a orphaned DLL that exists on the machine, but does not have a correctly correlated registry entry.

The Microsoft support article is here.

FYI, I used Method #1 of the two described in the article. Worked great for me!

It turns out that when the system is booted, AVG 8.0 automatically performs a system scan. On slower computers like the one I’m describing, this process can really swamp the processor; in my case, for the first five or six minutes after bootup. After the scan is complete, the processor overhead for avgrsx.exe drops to zero except when opening an application, etc.

I’ve seem some reports that indicate that disabling the Link Scanner feature resolves this problem. I have not found this to be the case; perhaps people trying this “fix” happened to try it right around the time that the machine completes its initial scan, and thus saw the processor utilization fall about the same time.

The tool is called YourDir. Like many freeware tools, the interface is a bit non-standard, but it outputs printouts, images, or .csv files, and you can choose to include files, or instead just output the directory tree. Overall it’s a breeze to use and neatly solves an annoying problem, so despite the slightly odd interface it provides a pretty ideal example of a useful utility. It’s really small (68 kB extracted) and as a standalone executable, requires no install.

Current version is 1.7; you can find it via Download.com here.

Note this is the filenames (as in MyArtist-MySong.mp3) that you see as you are copying files to the microSD card, NOT the ID3 tags that are read by most music players. There also seemed to be a potential problem with some odd characters. So bottom line: make sure the files you put on the microSD card have filenames with 30 characters or less, and only contains basic characters such as alphanumerics, underscore, hyphen, etc.

(Quick list of specifics of my case: Windows XP client, Windows built-in PPT VPN client, connecting to Net Integrations Technologies servers; all servers with identical VPN termination configurations)

I found that all of a sudden, while I could still successfully establish a VPN connection to all of the networks I had always worked with, for some of them, none of the resources could be accessed. So, even though I had the tunnel established, I could not even ping, by name or IP address, any device within that network. For other networks, things worked perfectly, as they always had done.

By trial and error, I eventually discovered that a recent update to iTunes, somewhere around version 7.6 (which apparently includes Bonjour) was the problem. Bonjour is a “zero configuration” network discovery technology that supports the ability to easily recognize other network devices and applications on a local network. It turns out that Bonjour makes changes to your local route table that certain VPN clients do not like. Apple somewhat cryptically notes: Some VPN Clients interfere with Bonjour although it doesn’t point out the more irritating inverse behavior.

Because Bonjour is a separate service, it may be possible to stop the Bonjour service when VPN connectivity is desired; it may also be possible to simply uninstall Bonjour, and leave iTunes functioning without Bonjour. I have not yet tested these possibilities, so YMMV.

Why should this be so hard? No one can possibly excel at everything, or even most things. Further, only by recognizing shortcomings can anything be done about them. Even taking the shortsighted, selfish point of view that an individual would be prefer to not be viewed negatively in any way, the best way to avoid this perception is to figure it out yourself and change it (if possible) before others notice. And yet, time after time, people frantically attempt to excuse or deny their weaknesses, which only makes the problem more obvious to others.

I believe this tendency can be traced to the ubiquitous and mindless mandate to “believe in yourself”. I’m not trying to say that “believing in yourself” is a bad thing. The problem is in equating “believing in yourself” with “everything I do is great and I’m great at everything”. Can’t we teach ourselves and our kids to recognize that all of us suck at different things? That successful people not only build on their strengths, but also seek to identify, and then address their weaknesses? That the shame is not in having weaknesses, but instead in denying them?

But really, does any of this matter? At the end of the day, people tend to vote by identity politics and by intangibles, while policy positions or even managerial style be damned.

There’s no doubt a large percentage of people support candidates they identify with. Thus, the depressing reality is that a significant portion of women who support Clinton do so primarily because she is female, and significant portion of blacks who support Obama do so primarily because they share his race. (As an aside, this clearly applies in all directions; a lot of old white men will vote for an old white guy primarily because he’s NOT black or female, especially in a general election against Clinton or Obama.)

For those whose support is not already locked in by identity, another significant chunk of voters make their decisions based on meaningless soft intangibles; appearance, tone of voice, mannerisms. I suspect Ms. Clinton is at a serious disadvantage within this group, and this group alone may prove her undoing.

However, over-emphasizing these “identity and intangibles” drivers is also a risk. The unfortunate result of the above is that the media absorbs and assumes these factors as not just a tendency, but a total reality. The soft underbelly of this blanket assumption has been exposed in the media handling of black women voters, who are ALL portrayed as being helplessly torn between supporting one or the other of their political identities for its own sake (“are you black first or a woman first?”). These stories often are presented with nary a whiff of expectation that ANY African-American women might actually be concerned with whatever policy or governance style differences may be found to exist between the Democratic candidates.

It’s a disgrace that there are indeed way too many voters who think no further than their own race, gender, and irrelevant superficialities; but perhaps a bigger disgrace is that all voters (especially black women voters) are being painted by the media with the same brush.

Finally, after poking around, I found it under:

Settings/Security

Edit the password field as if to change the password, and one of the available options will be “Wipe Handheld”. Select this, and you will be prompted to enter “blackberry’ to confirm. Wait a minute or two, and everything will be cleared and reset.