Unfriendly Skies

Argh! My History is gone! One of my student employees was moving the G4 that I had under my desk, and he accidentally cut the power to my workstation! Now my Internet Explorer History is gone, it's like having my mind wiped, now I have to resurf the whole net... If there's an application that I hate more than Netscape Communicator, it's WordPerfect. Today, I'm struggling with an error message that is popping up for those who were using networked copies of the program. Upon launching the program, I get the error message "The File Box.id is corrupt or missing". That file lives on the server, so I replaced with a good copy, same problem. I removed WordPerfect from a user's machine, and re-installed it locally from the CD, same problem. I posted my problem to the support newsgroup, no responses. I e-mailed support, no response yet. I called Corel's support line, they want money since we have an academic license, we don't even get the 30 days of free support.

The other reason I have negative feelings about WordPerfect, is that in general, the users I have who use WordPerfect are crankier and more resistant to change than the average Word user. If I suggest using Word until I get the problem solved, they get this look of fear in their eyes, as if it could actually physically harm them to use the "other" word processor.

Update: Problem solved! For some reason, using the shortcut on the desktop produced the error, but if you used one from the Start Menu, the local install worked. The network installs started working again once I checked the permissions at the file level, and realized that users didn't have permission to access the box.id file.

I'll admit it, I watched the last episode of Survivor last night. Rich won, and he lost thirty pounds while on the island. I'd like to point out that I've lost 32 pounds on my diet, and I haven't had to eat any rat.

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to leave home. "John" is back early from Brazil, thanks to the efficient folks at United Airlines. It's like he never left!