Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

Interesting ... I've been using Eudora as my e-mail client ever since I got online (and that was ... I think around 1994 or 1995 - wow, that's a long time, isn't it? :p) and while I've tried out almost every other client that came out, I've never really liked any of the alternatives. I did notice somewhere around Eudora 3.0 or 4.0 that Qualcomm was replacing the standard MAPI32.DLL with one of their own but never gave it any thought since all of my apps worked fine without a problem - that was until I decided to try ActiveSync 3.5 with Office XP installed for my iPaq. Since MicroSoft decided to do away with support for SchedulePlus in ActiveSync 3.5, I decided that I would use Outlook to maintain my contacts, tasks, notes etc. but that I would continue to use Eudora ... wrong!!! :p Every time that I tried to sync my iPaq with my desktop, all the other stuff would synchronize fine but none of the Outlook stuff would work. I searched the web and the MS knowledge base to no avail - it was as if nobody except for me had ever had this problem ...

I did discover along the way that if I used the repair option in Outlook (which is actually a pretty handy tool since it makes sure that all necessary components and settings are valid for Outlook and if anything is missing, re-installs it from the install CD), that the synchronization would work fine but that after a while it would stop working again. I was still at a loss as to what was going wrong when I finally stumbled upon an MS knowledge base entry which said something about replacing MAPI32.DLL and I suddenly realized where the problem was! It was Eudora!! Every time I ran Eudora after repairing Outlook, it was replacing the darn DLL file again!

I now had to make a choice as to what was most important to me - to keep Eudora as my default mail client or to have trouble-free synchronization with my iPaq. I decided in favour of keeping my iPaq synchronization healthy since I depend on the information in my iPaq a lot. The added bonus (or not - depending on how you look at it ...) would be that I would only have to have one e-mail client on my machine and could uninstall Eudora. So regretfully, after using Eudora from version 1.0 under Windows 3.1 to it's current incarnation for about seven years, I decided to uninstall it and go with Outlook. Oh the horror of it all!! :p

Of course my troubles still weren't over since I discovered that Outlook could not import my Eudora address book and mail though it imported my Eudora profiles (I have about ten <g>) without a hitch. It could have been because I had my Eudora mail folder in a non-standard location but it still should have worked fine, right? I was again beginning to smolder when I decided to try the import option in Outlook Express and what do you know? Outlook Express imported my address book and messages just fine!! Then it was just a matter of getting Outlook to import the stuff from Outlook Express - which again worked just dandy.

Woke up from a series of dreams (or one long, continuous one - not sure which) which started with me being in a strange house with an aunt of mine and then the house filling up bit by bit with all sorts of people - some known to me, some supposedly known to me (I was supposed to know them in the dream but once I woke up, I had no idea who they were) and some actually known to me. It was all wild, chaotic and kinda messed up since it brought back a lot of things that I'd left behind a long time ago. I really didn't feel like getting up and didn't feel at all like going to work but dragged myself out of bed, got ready and left.

I had written my last entry a couple of days ago but in the midst of that entry I ran into a weird problem with Blog - any changes to the entry would result in an Access Violation error and though I checked all the data files for corruption, there was no problem with the data files. I meant to do some debugging to find out what was wrong but then got caught up in my 3D stuff since I'm still heavily into getting back into 3D animation stuff since I'm working on the game I mentioned a while back ... To cut a long story short, I didn't look into the problem till today and while I still have no idea what caused it, I was able to fix it by copying my data file into another instance of Blog and doing a minor change and saving it and then copying the data files back to my normal Blog directory. So I guess I'm back to posting .... but not coding - at least not till I get this game done so that will be kind of out of my system :p
posted at 11:19:09 AM  link  comment

I've been not quite at the top of my game since I got back from Sri Lanka - the main reason was the fact that my body hadn't quite adjusted to the time changes but I was also a bit despondent (and disheartened) about a few other things ... but I finally seem to be back today :-) I actually slept through and woke up only when my alarm clock went off instead of automatically waking up at the crack of dawn and I was able to think through some of the stuff that I was trying to come to terms with on the way to work and make sense out of all of it - or at least come to terms with it :p

The problem was that I was becoming increasingly more negative in the way I viewed the world during the last month or so. I have always thought that each one of us can make a difference in this world and that we can all touch those closest to us in some way and that if that interaction was positive, that there would eventually be enough of a ripple effect to change at least a small corner of the world. When I went to Sri Lanka this time, I realized that my brother, my uncle and my Dad all thought that I was hopelessly idealistic and that none of us could really change the world. This, couple with all the stuff that's been going on recently - or rather the constant media barrage pointing out all the negativity -, has made me sort of retreat into myself and lose the joy that I had normally felt in interacting with people and doing stuff to help others.