Finally, the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have come to an agreenment on indexing sites; sitemaps.  The sitemap protocol is located at sitemaps.org and is already being used by Google Sitemaps. 

Luckily, the engine that powers my site (dasBlog v1.9) has the site map functionality built in.  You can see my current map here.

Without getting into much detail (read the TechCrunch article for more information), the main benefit is that my site will now be indexed uniformly by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.  The result; more traffic.  Keep'em coming guys.

First Holiday Starbucks of the season.

Recently, when ever I opened any Office 2003 application (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) I got the following message “Microsoft Office Outlook can’t load Speech Recognition files.  This feature is not currently installed.  Would you like to install it now? [Yes] [No]”.  Of course, I repeatedly clicked “No”.  I didn’t want or need speech recognition.



After a quick Google I found that I had to remove the speech recognition from the computers regional settings.

First and foremost, close all Office applications currently running.

Once all Office applications have been shut down, go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages tab.

Click “Details” in the “Text services and input languages” group box.



Select “Speech recognition” in the list box within the “Installed services” group box then click “Remove”.



Verify that “Speech recognition” has been removed from the list box.



Click “OK” to close “Text Services and Input Languages” dialog window.

Click “OK” to close the “Regional and Language Options” dialog window.

Open any Office application.  Office should no longer prompt you to install Speech Recognition files.

Starting this week, I began a new job. Along with paper work and the normal beginning-a-new-job routine, came my new computer setup. For the most part, everything went fine and it was more a matter of locating and trying to remember all the little programs I use and installing them. That’s the easy part. The thing that always manages to trip me up is the settings I like for each program. Even that went well until I came to Outlook.

I’m sure everyone knows and loves Outlook’s many options and the many places they hide. Most settings are at least 2-3 clicks deep in pop-ups. What I wanted to change was no different but finding it turned out to be a pain.

All I wanted to do was change the setting so that each time I clicked on an email, it gets marked it as “Read” right away. Seems simple enough, right? Well, I clicked on almost every combination before I found the winner:

"Tools" menu option -> "Options..." -> "Other" tab -> "Reading Pane" button

Simply select "Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane" and insert 0 into the "seconds before marking item as read" box. Click "OK" and you’re done.