audible.com’s Audible Manager isn’t happy running as a non-Administrator.  Searching to find out why …

In this day and age where much of the spam I get is about making things larger, wouldn’t it be nice if something related to e-mail could be made smaller?  ClearContext for Outlook is a smart add-in that prioritizes your e-mail based upon a whole number of factors.  I’ve been playing with it for a few days now and have my Inbox down to 19 items all of which are read!  Go check it out.

By the way, I’d have my Inbox emptied out completely if I could figure out a good filing scheme.  I’m waiting to listen to David Allen’s Getting Things Done in audio book format in hopes of a solution to this one.  My quandary is should I buy the book now on audible.com or wait until next month when I have another audio book credit?   Well, I just checked and it’s $12.60 at Audible.  Given that’s less than my monthly subscription fee, I’ll buy it now and use my credit for something a bit more pricey next month!

 Wow!  Bob did a fantastic job with this OneNote skin which I’ve adopted now that Casa dé Hambone is back up and running.

With the recent release of Microsoft’s AntiSpyware tool and having spent a number of hours cleaning up friends’ computers, I was very happy to stumble across Aaron Margosis’ blog about running as a non-admin.  I took the plunge last week and have found it to be pretty easy to do with the utilities and tips he’s posted.

Some of the issues I’ve had so far, and their resolution, include:

4                  XPlay from MediaFour wants you to be an Administrator to manage your iPod; fixed with makemeadmin.cmd and a rooted Explorer window

4                  Our updated VPN client checks to be sure that the Internet Connection Firewall is turned on, a task which fails if you’re not an Administrator; fixed with makemeadmin and rasphone.exe

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to do the same and remove yourself from both the Administrators and Power Users groups and start running as a regular User today!

As we come to the end of this week, the necessary framing has been completed, the dry wall is up and routed out in the proper places, it is taped and now actively being mudded.  If all goes well, by Tuesday of next week it’ll be sanded and primed … ready for me to tack on base boards, hang doors to the gas meter, laundry shoot and chimney access and then we’re all done. 

Hopefully you’re aggregator picks this up before it happens, but Casa de Hambone will be going offline today as new drywall goes up.  I want to get the “server” moved before this all happens, but time isn’t going to permit that to occur.  Maybe this afternoon … 

I’ve had a .NET branded USB hard drive on my keychain for over a year.  It’s never worked.  Every time I plugged it in and tried to copy files to it, I’d get a write error stating that the media was write protected.  I chalked it up to a cheapo device that just didn’t work … but I kept it on my keychain because it “looked cool” (yeah, cool if you’re a geek.)

Well, today Steven Dougherty – who doesn’t have a blog and therefore I can’t link to him – today pointed out that there’s a little write protect tab on the device that just needs to be flipped.  Of course, Steven majored in music and I appeared to have majored in just being an idiot, hence the humor of this situation.

Suffice to say, my USB hard is now usable.  Thanks, Steven!

Yes, I’m thinking of re-doing my CD collection – but this time in Windows Media Audio Lossless.  The point being, WMA Lossless is archival quality – and that’s the reason for doing this project in the first place.  I can then use Plus! Audio Converter from the Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition to convert from WMA to MP3 “as needed.”  In fact, I could probably keep the entire collection in WMA Lossless and an entire collection high-quality MP3 to easily move to the iPod.  Again, the advantage of WMA Lossless being that its archival quality, so there’s nothing lost (the lossless in lossless) in the audio quality.

There’s a couple of other reasons for doing this, too.  I feel the data provided by AMG is far superior to that provided by freedb used by Exact Audio Copy.  To me, metadata is almost as important as the song itself and I’ve just not been happy with the data provided by freedb.  A second reason is the conversion is pretty straight forward with Windows Media Player – it just feels better.  The one thing I noticed with the converter, however, is that album art was lost.  I’m wondering if that means there’s some metadata that goes missing in the conversion?

Where to store all of this?  On a wonderful 300GB Maxtor One-Touch drive, of course!

It has been years since I paid any attention to Audible.  However, my driving has increased as of late and I thought now would be a good opportunity to look back into the whole “books on tape” thing.  I must say that I’m pretty impressed.  For $14.95/month, I’m getting one audio book each month and a monthly subscription to an audio version of the Wall Street Journal.  Having never been a WSJ reader, I must say that I’m impressed with their content – especially the editorial.  Furthermore, the iPod knows full well about Audible’s format and conveniently files all of the content under Audio Books and a genre of Spoken Word.

However, I have to question why Audible makes available content in MP3 yet still has some goofy wrapper they put around it.  The file still comes down as a .aa file, not a .mp3 file, and requires some extra stuff in the likes of Windows Media Player in order for the content to play back.  Simply renaming the .aa to .mp3 is not sufficient.  If anyone has insight into this, I’d love hearing from you.

Just for the record, ANUSOL and Anbesol are two different medications that sound very similar and you do not want to use Anbesol where you’d use ANUSOL.