I think this is the first day that my blog has had more than 1,000 page hits in a single day.  I'm hoping that at least part of the reason is interesting content and not just a craze for penguin bashing.

So, intraVnews lost my state.  Losing state was the same reason that I dropped SharpReader several months ago.  To be honest, I've got other gripes against intraVnews.  It often can't seem to read feeds.  After a few tries on a feed, it permanently ignores it (you have to explicitly re-enable the feed by reseting feed history or something similar).  It doesn't tell you when it's ignoring feeds.  It doesn't have an easy to find and explicit means to update a feed right this second!

So, I've switched.  I've been a faithful reader (other than when intraVnews was ignoring the feed) of Dare's for about a year now.  I've read all about the great RSS Bandit and have decided to give it a second chance.  (I tried it a while back and was less than happy about it for some reason.)  Here's to hoping it maintains my state!

Over the past few days, I've seen the outlook.exe process eating up 300 MB + RAM.  A few times, I'd get dialogs complaining of OOM exceptions.  I've got 1 GB RAM on this box, why the heck does Outlook need more?!

I've got Microsoft Outlook 2003 SP 1, intraVnews 1.0.1468.32636, and Lookout 1.2.0.1924 installed.  I know intraVnews is written in a .NET language.  Perhaps Lookout is too.  As it turns out, I installed Whidbey beta 1 this week.  My Outlook addins now bind to it rather than 1.1, which they were compiled against.  I'm guessing a combination of Whidbey being a beta product and differences between 1.1 and 2.0 caused my problem.  After uninstalling Whidbey, all was well again.  OK, mostly well, intraVnews lost all the state info for my feeds, but that's another story.

I found a great page on IANA's site last night for TCP and UDP port reservations.  I'm writing this, so I don't have to Google for it the next time I need to lookup ports.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

Back in the day, I used home+home+down to get to the bottom of a document.  That was in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.  I should probably go to the trouble of finding out if Word supports a “go to the last line of the last page” feature.  For the time being, I use the time honored control+g.  For those that don't know, this brings up a dialog asking you which line you'd like to go to (this works in notepad, notepad2, Word, and probably many other applications).  Word (at least in version 2003) also allows you to navigate a certain number of pages from the current page using the control+g (aka Find, Replace, Goto) dialog box.  So, +1000 was all I needed to quickly get to the end of my 4574 page document.  Cool, huh?

Apparently, there's a TV out there that likes to make distress calls.  I'm glad my new CD player didn't decide to do that.

I've got a pet peeve.  OK, two of them.  One is improper usage of the word myself the other is improper usage of the word went.

Improper myself usages:

Give the report to John, Bob, or myself, and we'll take care of it.

Myself, John, or Bob will do the report processing.

Proper usages (not using myself):

“Give the report to John, Bob, or me, and we'll take care of it.”

“John, Bob, or I will do the report processing.”

Proper usage (using myself):

I will do the report processing myself.

Improper went usages:

We could have went to the park, but we decided to take a walk instead.

I should have went at lunch, but I'll go after work instead.

Proper usages (not using went):

We could have gone to the park, but we decided to take a walk instead.

I should have gone at lunch, but I'll go after work instead.

Proper usage (using went):

I went to the store.

According to an article on MSNBC.com, John Kerry is leaps and bound ahead of George Bush on the world stage. 

I'm sure this has been available for quite a while, but it's new to me.  MSNBC supports RSS.  This page explains what RSS is, what feed readers are, and also a list of MSNBC.com's feeds.  Cool stuff.

Yipee!  From Eric, from Soma.  Yet another item to make Whidbey worth the wait.

Virtual Server 2005 Standard and Enterprise is now on MSDN Subscriber Downloads (think it's for Universal subs only).

To speed up your VPC sessions running Windows XP SP2 (among other things), get VPC 2004 SP1 here.

Last week I bought a new CD player.  The player it replaced had served me well for 10 years, literally.  I was a senior in high school when I bought it.  I even had to fight with UPS to get it a day early (very long story that I don't fully remember).  Anyway, my new player is a Panasonic SC-PM29.  My requirements were few - MP3 playback, WMA playback, CD swapping while a disk is playing.  My old player wouldn't do any of these.

I have 1448 WMAs (ripped from about 100 CDs) and 1621 MP3s (audio books, all but a few purchased at ldsaudio.com).  When I commenced burning CDs for play in my new player, Windows said, “hey, how 'bout HighMAT?”  Since my player does HighMAT (I discovered this after purchase...a nifty bonus), I burned Gospel Doctrine in HighMAT.

All is well, right?  WRONG!  I couldn't HighMAT'ify several of my other MP3s, because apparently it requires 44 kHz or greater sampling rate and my files were 22 kHz (does voice really require that much more?).  I tried converting to a higher sample rate but with a low bit rate.  Nope.  It seems I need a way-too-high-for-my-audio-needs sample rate and bit rate to be HighMAT compatible.  (For instance, my 14 MB files are now over 100 MB.) All I want is the playlist support.  Is this HighMAT being obnoxious or is there a good reason for this?

I'd like to write and let everyone know how insanely popular my blog is, but, um, it isn't.  This isn't to say that it is particularly unpopular, but, well, I'm not Scoble.  Anyway, last month I posted an article, only a link really, about a particular animal's Olympics.  That article accounted for about 80% of my traffic last month (minus hits on my RSS feeds) and is continuing with that pace this month.  Insane?  I think so.

Yesterday, I received an IM from someone not on my contact list.  I might have considered responding with a “who are you”, but since the sender wasn't on my contact list, I couldn't send or receive messages for that person.  Oh, but wait, I just received one?!  If you're confused, you and I are in the same boat.

My context is this:

• Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 2
• MSN Messenger Version: 6.2.0137
• Only people on my Allow list can see my status and send me messages
• The sender was not on My Block List but is also not on My Allow List.

Ideas?

Note to self: Virtual PC 2004 running Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2 and IntelliPoint 5.2 don't mix.  Very sad, my IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0 was so desirous to spread its legs (wag its tail?).