- I was talking with an the Oak Island town council member the other day on the subject of the projected flood of day-beachers who will flock to our town once the new bridge is operational and those thousands of new Brunswick homes are built. I came away from the discussion feeling that not much planning is going on. I think it is difficult for them to see past the private club issue going on right now.
The town needs to address these issues, and I am suggesting a moratorium on private clubs (or, to be more precise, a moratorium on zoning changes, variances, or permits to allow them) until a comprehensive plan is put into place.
But the bottom line direction should be that Oak Island is kept as it is - residential and weekly rental. I have nothing specifically against private clubs, as they will actually provide services for some of the day-beachers without incurring town expense. But we need to have a plan before permitting.
- You may think that because I know a bit about computers my life is somehow less complex, more orderly, and not subject to the gotchas that life (and Microsoft) deal to you. Ha. I was bitten this week, and here is the story.
I am a firm believer in not being an early adopter of anything from Microsoft. That includes new Operating Systems and other tools. It does not, however, include the almost weekly updates, which I do apply religiously. So following on to my philosophy, I dragged my heels upgrading Internet Explorer from 6 to 7. But last weekend I thought it was finally the right time and performed the upgrade. By the way, it really wasn't that necessary because I don't use IE as my standard browser - I use Firefox. But sometimes you have to use IE (such as when accessing the Microsoft website) and so it is a good idea to keep it around and current.
The installation went well, and all seemed to work OK afterwards. So I went about my business. The next morning I noticed that my Outlook email had become very slow, especially when trying to reply to a note. It had basically become unusable.
Suspecting IE7, my first step was to uninstall it. There was an entry in Add / Remove programs for that, so I just followed directions. When done, IE6 seemed to have returned, but Outlook had now gone from being just slow, to a state where it wouldn't even start. It looked like a couple of important DLL files had been erased during the IE7 uninstall, but the linkages to those that had been put into Outlook had not been removed. I tried reinstalling just those files, but this failed also, although in a different way.
I then decided to try to use the System Restore feature to restore to a checkpoint I had taken before the IE7 install. I selected the restore point, rebooted, and it then proceeded to tell me that it couldn't perform the restore. No indication as to why. So, what to do then?
I thought I would re-install IE7, and that should at least return those files and make Outlook semi-usable again. So I did the re-install, and then Outlook worked fine! Case closed?
Apparently not. The next morning, Outlook became very slow again. But now I had a clue. That morning (and probably the first morning after installing IE7) there were two updates processed from Microsoft automatic update. Checking these out, I found that one of them was in fact causing the Outlook problems, and upon checking in the MS user community online I found that many people were seeing the same problem. Now, what to do about it?
One of the people on this MS forum had MVP status; MVPs are MS's designation for people who are not MS employees but who had advanced knowledge and can help. An MVP suggested a work around that seemed like it had nothing to do with the problem, but it fact it did resolve it.
So, all is well. But I am still left with some questions: Why did the IE7 uninstall not work properly? Why did the System Restore not function properly? Why should an update for IE have any affect on Outlook? Why did the strange Outlook fix help when it was totally unobvious?
Questions I have resigned myself to never know the answer to.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)