Beware of Email Filters

My economics teacher likes to use online resources for her course, and this means that she often has us go onto her blogs to post our assignments or do online discussions.

Recently, she created a new blog for us to post our assignments, and told us that she had sent invitations to the blog to all of us. However, when I got home, I couldn't find her invitation email anywhere— including the spam box— so I sent an email to her, asking her to resend the invitation.

Then, after two days, I still didn't get her reply— which was strange, considering that she usually checks her email every day. So I sent another email to her, asking her to just add my username to her blog.

Ten minutes after, I somehow noticed that I have an email folder named "BG," where all emails containing the word "blog" would be redirected to. And guess what? The two emails from my teacher— as well as 7-8 other emails that I mysteriously didn't receive a few months/years ago— were all there.

So I have learned my lesson— never use email filters, for they can cause a lot of trouble. I now recall from grade 10 that there was once when my classmate couldn't get any email from me and we had to create a shared email account so that we could send each other our information on a history project. And the culprit of the inconvenience was, obviously, email filters. This, along with what my email filter has done to me, clearly proves that email filters are evil and disastrous.

Windows Media Player: Shuffling Problem

I noticed that even when you have pressed the "shuffle" button in Windows Media Player, it still always starts with the first song in your list. In other words, Windows Media Player only starts shuffling the songs after the first song is played.

This is extremely annoying, for you don't always want to start with one particular song, especially if that song isn't one of your favourites.

So to solve this problem, I simply created a one-second media file, and made it the first item in my list. This way, this file would always be played first, and then one second later I would have a completed shuffled list.

If anyone wants to try this method, and doesn't know how to create an empty file, you can download one here.

I Hate Computers...

Arr!! Why do computers have to be riddled with errors, glitches and bad designs!? After I started using the new computer, I began to pay close attention to its various details, trying to fix any problem that I spotted and change any settings that seemed inconvenient or illogical. And I found that I probably spent at least one and a half hour a day finding solutions for these problems!

Five days ago, I spent hours trying get Microsoft Word to work. On the same day, the icons for certain files stopped displaying correctly, and it took me one to two hours to fix that problem. On the next day, I spent one or two hours just to change the colour of the taskbar. Yesterday, I had to to spend one hour before bed to fix a directory problem. And today, I spent nearly three hours to get the video thumbnails to display correctly, and one hour to find a way to edit the properties of certain glitched files!

Really, why couldn't the developers make the interface a bit more user-friendly, and make more effort to ensure that the system worked without glitches? It is just unacceptable that so many problems arose in just a few days! Even worse, all these problems were difficult to fix, and they all had some obscure solution!

I am exhausted by all the Internet-searching, program-downloading, registry-editing, and rebooting needed to fix the problems. Arrrrrgggg!!

Problems with Microsoft Word

Yesterday afternoon I finally finished reading The Children of Men by P. D. James, and decided to use the night to update this blog.

Unfortunately, a terrible thing happened which stopped me from doing so— Microsoft Word 2000 stopped working! Every time I tried to open the program, it would freeze when the program license thing was being displayed. In other words, it would stop responding even before a blank document was opened.

Actually, it would be wrong to say that Microsoft Word had stopped working, for I wasn't even sure if it had ever worked... Yes, that's right— the computer was only a few days old and I have never created a word document on it before. And since I wasn't even sure if it had ever worked, it was hard for me to tackle the problem— I couldn't tell whether it was an installation problem, a compatibility problem (Word 2000 on Windows 7), a licensing problem, or some other type of problem.

Database: Fail

For quite some time I have longed for a database program that would be able to store all the vocabularies that I have studied. Each vocabulary would have attributes such as "definition", "synonyms", "date added" and "source," and this way I would be able to sort them very easily.

So today I finally decided to actually obtain one. However, the process was not nearly as easy as I have imagined.

At first, I tried to use the Java Database program. But who knew that it was going to take thirty minutes to download and three hours to install? Even worse, I couldn't find a way to open the program, even after I searched the Internet for more information! So I had to give up.

Next, I tried to code a simple database myself. But I realized the impossibility of it after one hour of coding. The programming language that I used was simply not powerful enough for a good database.

At last, I tried to find other databases on the Internet to download, but it didn't go well either. I could not find any free and non-online database that was easy to understand and use!

So at the end, I wasted a whole day accomplishing nothing.

Encryption Program

For the posts that contain things that I don't want others to see, I have encrypted them with my special encryption program so that only I will be able to decipher the code.

However, if for whatever reason I lose the code of my encryption program, I will not be able to decipher my posts. So I decided to post my code onto my Blog as well. So yeah, this post really is just for me...

Zamzar—Online File Converter

Link to Zamzar: http://www.zamzar.com/
I find all the Microsoft updates to be very annoying—they make new file extensions that cannot be opened by the older versions of its software. For example, Microsoft Word has always had the extension .doc, but they changed it into .docx about three years ago, and now people are beginning to use these .docx documents more often because that is what's provided in their new Microsoft Office Packages.

This makes sending files to and from my classmates a lot more difficult. Often when working on group projects or when editing each other's work, we need to send files via email so that we can see each other's work. However, since I have the old Microsoft Word version, I cannot open the .docx files that many of my classmates send me and I often need to ask them to cut and paste their material into the pieces of mail that they send to me.

Even though the above method is time consuming, it usually works and that's how I have been dealing with the problem during the past year. However, when the file in qjavascript:void(0)uestion is a powerpoint (.pptx) file, it's simply impossible to copy and paste all content into the email. This is why I find Zamzar essential.

I found Zamzar a few days ago when a member of my chemistry presentation group sent me a .pptx file containing the powerpoint that he had done. Since .pptx was the extension for the new version of Microsoft Powerpoint, I could not open it with my old Powerpoint version and had to find a way to convert the file. Therefore I went onto Google and searched for a file conversion program, and surprisingly I found Zamzar, which was an Online converter!

Screenshot of Zamzar

Zamzar was very easy to use. I simply uploaded the .pptx file and specified what type of file I wanted it to be converted into. There were many types of files that you could convert, such as audio, video and image files. Anyway, after selecting .ppt as my desired extension, I entered my email and in a few minutes I received an email containing a link. From the link, I just downloaded the converted file.

I find Zamzar to be very convenient because it's online and does not require any membership. However, I do notice that the converted files tend to be a lot larger than the original ones, which can be quite a disadvantage if you have limited Internet usage. But overall, I am sure that I will be using it in the future.

Encryption

Due to privacy concerns, I have encrypted some of my posts, mainly the ones that reveal personal information. This is something that I really don't want to do (because it makes the blog look ugly), but I am afraid that if I don't do so my classmates are going to recognize me if they happen to be on this blog.

I wonder why Blogger doesn't even have the basic feature of setting the privacies of certain posts. For example, if a post contains personal information, that feature will allow me to lock/protect it so that only people who know the password can read it. I know that many other blog providers, such as WordPress, have this feature, and I simply don't understand why Blogger hasn't kept up with those blog providers yet.

Well, for the time being, encrypting some of the posts may be the best option for me. So if anyone happens to be  a regular visitor of this blog (which I doubt), I will say sorry in advance for the messiness that you're going to see.