House Calls

Well, yesterday was full of 'extra curricular' activity. I got a call from our regional director that their Entourage email program was not working. I agreed to come out at 2 and look at it (leaving work just a little early). Well, I had no clue what was going on. First it was telling me that the 'Test Drive' version of Office X (for the Mac) had expired, and they needed to buy the full version. It didn't make sense to me that they had been using a trial version for a full year, but that's what it seemed. Even Word and Excel gave the same messages. Finally, after ordering a new copy for them from the mission, I discovered a 2nd 'Microsoft Office X' folder. What's this?? The programs worked just fine in there... but Entourage was notoriously absent. I canceled the order, which hadn't gone through anyway. Copying the Entourage back in seemed to get us back where they had started, with an ambiguous error message. I finally typed it into Google, shortly found that I needed to repair the Entourage database, and all as well. I got supper out of the deal. The moral of this story? Google is your friend!

I went from there straight back to my 'compound' where I had promised to help another family with their laptop. It wouldn't accept pictures from the card in their digital video camera. After trying countless times to set it up as a camera (and installing Spybot to clean up a horribly infested computer), I found that it needed to be installed as hardware, not as a camera... Go figure. They got the pictures off, and I finally got home shortly after 9pm.

I must admit though, I enjoy problems like that (unless someone else's data is at stake, like when they don't back up). In neither case did I know what to do, but with google, and lots of fiddling, it finally worked out.