Outlook is now running like a champ. I'd go so far as to even call it "speedy" -- not a word generally associated with the software.

I'm now having a hard time concentrating on doing anything except futzing with the damn software. I want to run the attachment saver. I want to compress more. I want to re-index the search tool I installed (LookOut) for looking through past e-mails (Outlook's own search sucks). I'm now obsessed with making it perfect, and that's far worse than just trying to fix something you thought was broken.

Continued use of the E-Mail Dupes Eliminator and the built in compression tool have knocked that same PST down to 1,161,177KB. I've reclaimed almost half a gigabyte. Not bad. And I still haven't run the attachment stripper...

Exciting times we live in, eh?

One thing they don't tell you when you download the E-mail Duplicates Eliminator is that after you delete all the messages, your PST doesn't change in size. Mine was stuck at 1,838,937KB (that's almost 2GB) even after deleting around 15,000 dups. I had to run the "Compact Now" feature built into Outlook to get the file down to a virtually indistinguishable 1,740,153KB. Sigh. But I guess I'll take it. (and I still have yet to run the Attachment Saver utility.)

(An Access Moment:)

To Compact the PST file you use in Outlook 2002, do the following:

• Go to the Tools Menu and select Options.
• Click on the Mail Setup Tab.
• Click the Data Files button.
• In the Outlook Data Files box, select the file you want to compact and click Settings on the right.
• In the Personal Folders box, click Compact Now. Let it run (don't click Cancel). It'll disappear when it's done compacting. It could take as long as 1/2 an hour if you have a big PST file that you've done a lot of maintenence on... like mine.
• Once done, click OK or close on all the dialog boxes to exit.

Now, imagine your email is complete FUBAR. You can't even delete messages, you seem to be missing a recent week worth of mail, and, oh, you happen to just live within the confines of Microsoft Outlook 2002 for all that you do in your professional (and personal) life. And then you call me, Mr. Big Shot Computer Tech Editor Guy, to come save your hash.

If I charged you by the hour, say $50 per, you can assume you'd owe me about $500 by now. Because I've wasted about 10 hours of my life on fixing what turned out to be a stupid ass mistake that didn't obliterate a thing.

First off, I accidentally dragged my work email folders into another folder, nested like three deep. That's where all my last week worth of mail was. But when i tried to restore the messages from backups -- backups over a week old, mind you, so they didn't have the needed messages anyway -- I ended up ballooning the Outlook PST file that stores all mail way up in size, to the 2GB limit. At the 2GB limit, you can't even delete mail in Outlook, apparently.

After creating a new PST to store some messages, and staying up until 1:30am to compress the PST with my personal messages, I was up again at 6am today downloading $40 worth of shareware to kill off duplicate messages. It just murdered 15,000 dups across all my folders.

Next, I will run the tool to strip off all the file attachements -- I have about 500 emails with 1+MB PowerPoint files sent to me in the 2.5 years.

Outlook is now deleteing all the duplicate messages... it's taken about 20 minutes so far.

Hopefully this will add about 2 more years of life to my email without my having to get drastic (for me that means deleting old messages... I can't part with old email any more than I could old letters or photographs. Not bright, but that's me.). If it doesn't I might just have to find myself an Outlook alternative.

Who am I kidding?

(FYI, I have started to call my wife by the nickname Squanto. There is no good reason to do this, but I do it anyway.)

Yesterday was supposed to be a day of rest. Not because it was Sunday, but because I did a bunch of crap around the house Saturday (painted, cut and mounted lattice on a deck, etc.) and I decided Sunday would be lazy day, perhaps in the hammock, perhaps on the couch.

Instead the wife decided we should go for a walk. Up a gorge.

We hit Buttermilk Falls State Park and climbed up one side (with stairs) and went down the other (no stairs. Turns out stairs are good). Half way up we were both feeling the pain. Meanwhile, we were being passed by cheery senior citizens. Pathetic.

Dogs are allowed there on leash, and because dogs are allowed, there's poop. Right on the trail, sometimes. The wife decided that since other people are inconsiderate scum willing to get dogs banned from the park by not cleaning up after them, she would, at the very least remove the feces from the trail herself. For the dogs, not the people, who are filth. She would select a stick and use it to fling the droppings off into the woods.

I told her that she should get a job in the park, as Poop Ranger.

"Yeah," she laughed. "Squanto, the Poop Ranger."

It was there I came up with the lyrics to her new theme song.

(sung to the tune of "When Captain America Throws His Mighty Shield" from the 1960's Captain America cartoon; listen to MP3)

When Squanto the Poop Ranger finds turds on the trail
She knows she must remove the poops or fail!
With the pick of a stick
and the flick of her wrist,
The shits are removed
and will never be missed.
When Squanto the Poop Ranger finds turds on the trail!

A millisecond power outtage on Sunday -- which occured for absolutely no discernable reason -- didn't do any damage to anything here... except my e-mail. One of the PST files that holds some of my e-mail data in MS Outlook came up today showing, well, no data. Luckily, I make backups. I'm in the process of restoring the missing missives now. I'll probably end up with mulitple copies of each message or something. But this is my work e-mail, stuff I need to be able to look back on, so it's got to be done. And it's got to suck away a couple of hours where I don't dare do much else on the PC.

This is a perfect example of why computers suck and why tech helpers will always have work.

My little Atomz Search box here on the site reveals much.

I suggested recently that people search on my site for the terms "farts" and "boobs" -- with links to the searches. The number of searches performed on the site went from 4 to 34 in a week, all because most visitors here clicked on those links. I guess if I want to deliver for this audience, its more fart and boob jokes to keep you happy.

Other search terms that creep me out: "aunt," "aunt photo," and "aunt photo sex." And one for the word "dentist."

Continuing the theme of hating Mondays...

Last night, I worked late, but not until 9pm. I decided to take the wife out to dinner and she said we should go to Lucatelli's, an Italian place in Ithaca that neither of us had been too since 1992. We soon found out why. The hostess took us into the dining area, which was almost completely empty, but she asked us if we wanted to sit in the lounge. I have no idea why. But we said, sure, whatever.

The lounge decor is vintage 1960's lounge, complete with Sinatra music playing on the stereo. We were seated at a corner booth, which meant scooting across 7 feet of vinyl to get in front of our place settings. A TV at the bar was running some movie channel playing a war movie with Owen Wilson, it was playing louder than Frank. I had a very nice breaded chicken dish, but Bon had some pasta that was either old or moldy or both, I'm not sure. We got it taken off the bill.

Since we wanted to skedaddle from there fast, we decided we'd go treat ourselves to some desert up in Collegetown. We walked by the dessert place, which appeared to have a bunch of store bought cakes and pies, nothing home made. Instead, we decided to go to a fancy place we'd never been to before, Stella's, mostly because the menu outside said it had a dessert called "Chocolate Orgasm." Two great tastes that taste great together.

So we went in, orders a couple of martini's, and asked for a Chocolate O -- and the waitress said they were out. We settled for the tiramisu. Turned out it was their last one, and it tasted like it. It tasted like they'd made it in 1998 and had kept it in a freezer ever since. We also got that taken off the bill.

Monday nights out in the big city. All you get is leftovers from the weekend.

When I was a kid and Garfield was first starting to take off as pop culture touchstone, I decided I was going to become the biggest collector of all Garfield memorabilia in the world.

I got about seven books, a calendar, a Garfield shaped pencil eraser, a plastic Garfield statue (I think it was a statue... it didn't do anything), and uh... Maybe a few years later someone got me the far-over-done suction-cup Garfield for my first car.

Oh, and I did have the record with music from the first (and funny) Garfield prime-time cartoon, with tunes by Lou Rawls. Sad but true, and I liked it. I can still remember the music.

That was it. So much for collecting. (At other points in my life I planned to buy any and all products related to the following: GI Joe, Yoda, Batman (The Animated Series), Deep Space Nine, Dilbert, and most recently the first Spider-Man movie. I am a sheep to the whims of marketers. Lucky for me, I'm also cheap and lazy.

Suffice to say, as the Garfield film rolls out, I'm glad my collecting didn't go too far. I certainly couldn't have waited two decades to get newspaper articles written about my theoretical collection. Picture the Reuters headline that could have been: "Man Houses Giant Garfield Collection in Special Temperature Controlled Vault; Unsurprisingly, Still a Virgin."

I might sell the books on eBay if I can find them. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan on it. And I haven't read the strip, except by accident, in about 15 years. So why this disdain for all things orange and feline?

It is the anti-Calvin & Hobbes in all ways, by the design of his creator, so he was successful -- he wanted to make a trillion with a character that was an icon. He set out to make Snoopy 2.0. and it worked. That doesn't mean I have to like it (the strip that is... can't begrudge the success). The big problem is, Garfield has three jokes.

He's fat (ha!).

He likes lasagna (cats eating Italian food! Ha ha!).

And he hates Mondays. How does a cat even know what day it is? "This is the day I cough up a fur ball, must be Monday?"

(ASIDE: Shrek 2 features one of the funniest furball coughing-up scenes I've ever watched. Well, maybe the only funny furball coughing up scene I've ever watched now that I think about it. Still, damned funny).

All this is a long winded way -- the only way I've got, apparently -- of saying that I can at least sympathize with the hating of Mondays. Today is a typical example of why I just don't have time to blog and I'm crazier than Sun Myung Moon. I'm behind on writing two stories for work. I spend half the day in meetings with vendors and more than the other half on the phone with my brother, talking him through getting his cable modem up and running on his new computer. Between reading e-mail and blogs and news, and deleting spam (one just came in with subject line that said "Mondays aren't so bad!") I've sucked away hours. Knowing I've got two products sitting here in the house I need to review just fills me with guilt when it should fill me with gumption. I'm not getting anything done that needs doing. Just like most Mondays. I try to blame it on recovering from the weekend. Not that I do anything on the weekends. Apparently it takes a lot to recover from somnolence.

So I'll sit here until 9pm tonight if I must and work and work and get as much done as I can because, dammit, it's Monday. And that's why we all hate it. Not just sellout cats.

Our country is being run by a lunatic Christian cult...The United States of America has been hijacked by religious nutballs who are trying to bring about the end of the world!

If only it weren't true.

One of the joys of my job working from home is that my retired father -- who isn't really sure what the hell it is I do for a living -- feels free to call me whenever the mood strikes. He might call to point out some story he read in a magazine ("septic tank maintenance!"), or to ask my help in finding something on the Internet that he's sure he saw just the other day (uh... Google much?), or so we can perform the clandestine gift buying plans that are so much a part of my family. We're big on big gifts.

Today he called me with something unique, however. He found a gun in the wall.

Some background: Each summer my parents have a household project. Sometimes its not even limited to summer. Since they built the two car garage in 1981, I don't think a year has gone by that they haven't done some major household redecorating or reconfiguration or renovation.

They can't be bothered to empty the attic and basement of 35 years of detritus -- because you never know when a Popular Mechanics from 1958 might yield a worthwhile article! -- yet they have no problem ripping down plaster and lathe to re-sheetrock a room. They've redone the living room, the dining room, two bedrooms, the bathroom, the front porch, moved the washer and dryer up stairs, even built their deck out and out and out so it now covers, no lie, 1.2 square miles. The neighbors are pissed. When dad retired, the family got together and built an addition on to the garage as a woodworking shop. A few years ago, they redid the kitchen. And now, its time to redo the kitchen again.

This weekend I'm going out to help them replace the roof on the back part of the kitchen, which is an add-on space that was there when they bought the house in 1969. The roof has started to leak, and needs to be fixed/replaced before major interior work begins. Dad won't get started ripping the existing roof off until Saturday (in case of weather), but that didn't stop him from going to town inside. They've moved out the cupboards and counter, so its time to pull down the wood paneling that's been there since they bought the place (a week before I was brought home from the hospital, in fact, all pink and chubby and hungry. Very similar to my current state, in fact.).

And there it was in the wall behind the paneling, buried in the blow-in insulation... the gun.

Well, not just any gun. A BB gun.

A copper-plated Commemorative Daisy Air Rifle model 50, the Golden Eagle, in fact. It was stamped with the name and dates on the barrel, and there's a decal on the stock that says "1886-1936" -- the first fifty years of the company's existence. From what I can find on the Web, this gun was released in 1936. It would hold 1000 BBs. A couple are up for sale on eBay right now, with low bids expected at $160 or higher (no bids in yet, though.)

It's not the first thing my parents have found in their walls. They once found a handful of corset stays, probably dating back to the 1920s. Not hard to picture someone tossing those... corsets hurt! (I assume. Ahem.)

The question is, why get rid of a highly collectible Air Rifle? That gun could have been stuck in the wall any time between 1936 and 1969. Thirty-three years.

The story behind this gun would be fascinating to know....

Did a child use it to kill neighborhood sparrows in the maple trees in the backyard and, overcome with horror at what he'd done, put it in the wall as his dad was replacing the paneling?

Perhaps a sadistic father, angry with his sons test scores, held the weapon out to his progeny and in a major "psych" took it back and said "It says in the wall until you pull them grades up, boy!" -- the boy was so dim he continued to fail and forgot about his golden gun...

Maybe some kindly uncle buy it for his nephew only to have it disappear when a disapproving mother snuck off with it and inserted it in the wall during some remodeling before her child accidentally shot one of the neighbor kids?

We'll never know.

Meanwhile, hey... free gun!

In the wake of recommitting (see below), it occurs to me I should make it known to people who've never been here before -- because I expect a giant influx of new readers for absolutely NO REASON AT ALL -- who the hell I am.

Oh, where to begin... let's see...

I'm Eric. I was born, grew up, and went to public school in the city of Hornell, NY. By the time I turned 18 and was a senior, I'd become thin, slightly-popular (as much as a D&D playing, Tolkien and comic book reading, Doctor Who & Star Trek watching, non-athlete who was in school musicals ever can be), had a girl-friend and an actual sex life. The world was my oyster, but all I could think about was getting the hell out of there. So I was also a little asshole.

Still, I got out. I went to college in Ithaca, NY, and found myself wanting to be a writer/editor but planning for a lifetime of work in food service -- that was my main job the entire time I was in school. Luckily I graduated with a healthy disdain for the industry, and with enough background form other campus jobs to get a career started in tech publishing. Oh, and yeah, I met a girl in college that I have been with ever since.

She's keen.

My career and hers -- we occupied the same professional space for a time -- has taken us from Ithaca to NYC to western Massachusetts to closer to Boston and then, to our current place of residence: Ithaca. Again. The wife, as she has become known since our nuptials just one short decade ago, actually works at our old alma mater. So she now knows the inside evils of the place, horrors we could only speculate on as students. It's all true, though: colleges do use the tuition money to drown kittens.

So, hobbies: I'm big on reading, mostly comics and mystery novels... nothing too taxing. Well, I did read The Lovely Bones. Great book, well written, though the ending wasn't very satisfying. Realistic, but not satisfying. Because when is reality ever satisfying?

My kick lately has been books ostensibly aimed at children, going far beyond the Harry Potter books (though I'm a big fan). I've read everything from Captain Underpants to Artemis Fowl to Lemony Snicket. I'm starting His Dark Materials next.

I'm big on television, so much so that I do truly feel I missed my calling as a network executive. The cancellation of so many great shows of late has me thinking I'll only watch The Daily Show for the next seven months.

I like to futz with computers, but not enough to spend money on them. I do worship my iPod though. It contains many, many Broadway soundtracks.

I spend way too much time in front of my PC, anyway. And since I work from home, I spend way to much time in my house. I try to temper this with getting out when I can. I took a class on watercoloring lately, for example. I didn't learn much, and its all just distraction from doing what I want to do, which is write a novel. However, I find writing to be occasionally be about as much fun as watching tree bark peel, and only half as painful as if I'd just nailed my hand to the same tree.

Despite that fact, I've worked as a tech journalist for the past 12 years, at magazines and Web sites. I've covered software development tools, the Windows operating system, games, consumer electronics, online publishing, and home networking. My current lot in life is running a daily site covering wireless networking. They let me work from home so we moved out here to be closer to family, cause, let's face it, I might feel old, but the folks are the ones not really getting any younger. At least I can pretend I have the option of getting slimmer/faster/stronger/better.

The wife and I are the (occasionally) proud parents of three dogs, all Labrador Retrievers, collectively known as "The Idiots." Siren (the Poop Dog) is an 8-year-old chocolate female. Caper (the Monkey) is the yellow male, he's five; and Kylie is the yellow female, she just turned five, too. They all have their quirks which would require a blog in and of itself to list. Oh, my nickname for Kylie is "Cooter-Girl" but my wife thinks that sounds dirty. I just think she looks like the mechanic from The Dukes of Hazzard.

I'm a pretty rabid Clintonian Democrat. I wanted to believe that I wasn't really part of either party once upon a time, that maybe I was a pure Libertarian or something. But it turns out I'm not. So you can imagine how much I love the douche bags currently running things. Problem is, I don't usually try to talk about it as I get so worked up I become a sputtering, spitting mess incapable of articulating my disgust with any facts to back them up... anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side. I heard that somewhere. Luckily, many, many people (like this guy) take care of arguing for me.

That's it. Did I miss anything? If so, there's three years of posts on this site, so go do a search on something like "fart" or "boobs" and see what you turn up. [Updated 9/6/06 to use GoogleSearch instead of Atomz.]

It is time to recommit.

I've been at this blog game for a while now. In fact, last week marked the three year anniversary of the ol' Squished Frog Blog's launch, in the wake of my losing a job. At the time, the posts even had a point: dealing with unemployment. Luckily, I wasn't unemployed for long, so my blog completely lost direction, flailing about like a stuntman on fire. It ended up just being like most diary-type blogs.

Which isn't a bad thing. There's three types of blogs in the world today. There's the real-journalism-type blogs that are few and far between. There's the pseudo-news-type blogs that just link off to other things online -- though these are usually worth the time because of the snarky comments made by the blogger. And there are diaries akin to mine, the modern day equivalent of the locked book carried by teenage girls, only spread wide open for all the world to see.

Uh, that might not be a great metaphor...

Okay, anyway, I just miss blogging sometimes. There, I said it. And I feel guilty leaving it like its going to wither and die like so many do. The longer I wait to write something -- whether because I'm working, or trying to have a life -- the more it feels unimportant and doesn't get blogged (it’s a verb! Get over it!). So, no more waiting.

As of today, I'm recommitted to this blog. Daily posts. At least Monday through Friday. Occasionally they might only be links to something interesting. Mostly they'll be insights into my daily life of sitting in the basement writing about stupid wireless crap that some people actually think is a magic way of getting Internet access. I will vent my spleen, I will share far to much knowledge of Broadway musicals and dog feces, and share the hopes and dreams of a man on the slide toward 40 trying to write a novel while having a day job.

Should be a good time.