The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Just got back from a week and a half vacation a couple of days ago and have been getting back into the groove of things which is why there was a long absence of posts on the blog (no internet!).

Taking a break from the internet and the news was interesting since while I was gone a ton of celebrities died and it took time for the news to trickle down to people on the cruise ship.  Things are going well and i’m staying pretty busy lately but will be on vacation/furlough again starting tomorrow afternoon so I probably won’t have any more updates until late next week.

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The new iPhone was unveiled earlier this week and i’m pretty excited for it - if I could get it on Verizon.  I’m starting to get more and more sick of AT&T’s crappy network, slow speeds, and generally bad customer service.  The company really needs to work on all aspects of their cellular service including the ever-increasing cost of their cell phone plans.  Plus, AT&T isn’t even going to support MMS and Tethering off the bat for the new iPhone 3G S.  I saw this article today that I think really covers the salient issues with AT&T quite well: http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMoney/idUS337036694420090612

I’m hoping that by shaming AT&T Apple can whip them into shape or make a really good case for ditching AT&T and going over to Verizon.  I know i’d switch back to Verizon in a heart beat if given the chance and i’m sure there are millions more of us who are irked at AT&T.

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Summer is in full swing now, and I finally noticed this yesterday.  After work I needed groceries so I headed to the nearby Wally World.  I was working a little bit late so this was around 6 PM but in the Wal-Mart parking lot it was was scorching hot!  My car’s temperature gauge said the outside temperature in the parking lot was close to 90 degrees and it was really humid as well.  On the drive home in a section of road that is under some large trees (it is well shaded) the temperature dropped to around 81 or so.  Asphalt in the summer heat can definitely be uncomfortable!

The pools are finally opening back up here at the University where I work so i’m thinking of going to them during lunch time to swim instead of just going to the gym every day like i’ve been doing.  It will make for a nice change of pace and swimming is a great low-impact aerobic exercise.  Plus, you can’t beat swimming to cool off in the summer heat.

The other tell-tale sign of the summer around here is the thunderstorms and we have had several brew up suddenly in the last few days.  The strange thing about some of the storms around here though is that you will hear some loud thunder and see some nasty lightning, but then in a few minutes the storm is gone without even dropping any rain at all!  It is basically like a dog that is all bark with no bite.  I think the main reason the weather patterns tend to do that around here is because of the mountains and the valley where we are at.  The mountains really can chop a storm’s power back by disrupting the winds and the weather pattern.  At least, that’s my “hey look I think i’m a weather guy” working theory :-).

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This was a problem that a user at work had for several months and I thought at one point that it had stopped doing it but it turned out he actually had his blackberry turned off during that time period!  As soon as he turned it back on it started deleting appointments that were set 2 months or more in the future.  After finally figuring out an appointment that could reproducibly be deleted by the Blackberry (in Outlook it would show as BES_ADMIN deleting it) I finally tracked down the issue.

If this is happening on your Blackberry see if you have Google Sync installed.  If you do, uninstall it and the problem should be fixed!  Google sync apparently gets confused with future appointments and wipes them out and then sends cancellation notices to all other meeting attendees, even if you aren’t the meeting organizer!  You can imagine that this could be extremely embarrassing for whoever’s Blackberry starts doing this!  Unfortunately this means you can’t use Google sync to keep your Google calendar synced with your Blackberry but I think the alternative (random appointment deletions) is worse.

This applies to Blackberries that have Google Sync on them and are also synched to Outlook (in our case through a BES server).

Let me know if this helps anyone out in the comments!  It was hard to find answers to this issue unless you search specifically for Blackberry google sync issues.

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