I wonder how many sites are losing hits (and their advertisers losing potential customers) because of the pesky practice of requiring registration in order to read a story?

What really annoys me is to be reading an article on a site such as ZDnet and find a link to what looks like an interesting article. When I click it, it takes me to another site altogether (in the case that inspired this post, that was http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/download.aspx?&scname=Software+tips&docid=267098 

The description there sounds interesting, too, so I click "View Now" - and am taken to a login/registration page. Sure, registration is free, but it's annoying to have to spend a couple of minutes filling out a form. But hey, the content is free so I'm not really complaining about the time it takes to fill in the form. My real gripe is that, once I finish the registration process and log in, I'm not taken to the article I wanted to read. Instead I'm taken to the site's front page, and I have to go find the article all over again, wasting even more time. There has to be a better way.

Oh, and do they really think that, when I fill out that form, I'm giving them my real telephone number and address? C'mon. I'll give you a valid email address (i.e., my hotmail or gmail address), but no way are you going to get my personal contact info just so I can read an article. Why even require this information when all but the most naive Internet users always put bogus info in those fields? It's just a way to waste a little more time.

Then I finally get past the login and back to the article and discover that I can't just read the thing on the web. I have to download it. That means temporarily allowing popups and then opening a PDF.  When at last it opens, I find that it's actually a TechRepublic article I read months ago, but the PDF isn't on TR's web site; it's coming from http://smart.nde.state.nv.us/docs/10_obscure_Word_tricks.pdf 

I wonder if they even got TR's/CNET's permission to post the PDF.

Why, oh why can't sites just put their articles in HTML instead of making us download PDF or Word documents? Microsoft itself is one of the worst offenders in this category. I don't know how many times I've gone looking for information on TechNet and been forced to download a Word doc instead of just being able to read the info on a web page. Those few extra steps required might not take all that much time, but in many cases it's just enough of an extra hassle to cause me to say "forget it" and go on to something else.

Am I the only one who's annoyed by having to jump through hoops to read something on the web? If you want to charge for content, that's fine. If I think your content is worth it, I'll spend the money. But please, don't waste my time on needless steps I have to go through to read a free article.  Time is more valuable than money in today's hectic world.

Christmas is past for another year and as always, all those great parties and dinners added a few unwanted pounds; for the next few weeks I'll be sweating on the exercise bike more than usual to get back into my jeans comfortably. But my body isn't the only thing I need to reduce.

With all the photo opps during the holiday season and a new Nikon to play with, I took hundreds of high resolution pictures. I shot at high quality because, well, why not? It doesn't cost any more and that way you can crop as you wish and make large prints if you want. But when it comes time to post them on the blog or send them to friends in email, those large file sizes can be a problem.

Resampling a single photo or two is no big deal. You can use most any photo manipulation program. But what if you want to resize a whole batch of photos at once? Well, I found a neat little freeware program that works in just about any Windows operating system, including Vista; it's called Easy Thumbnails and you can download it at http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/ .

Just select the photos you want to resize (or put them into a folder and select the folder), as shown here (click on the graphics for an enlarged version):

You can set the maximum height and width to whatever you'd like, and as an added bonus, you can adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness and rotate photos within the resizing operation, as shown here:

It's a very simple little program and it simply works. The new resized pictures don't replace your originals; they're saved with a new file name ("tn_" is appended to the original name of each) so you don't have to worry about losing the high quality version.

Here you can see the file sizes of the originals (without the "tn_" designation) compared to the new thumbnail versions:

If you have a large number of photos that you want to trim down to sendable size all in one fell swoop, I highly recommend Easy Thumbnails.

Remember Microsoft Publisher? As Word has gotten more and more sophisticated, it has taken on many of the characteristics of a desktop publishing program. Few people seem to use Pub anymore.

I installed it as part of Office Ultimate but had never opened it until today. Ironically, just a week ago my son was asking me if Pub was still around and if there was ever any reason to use it instead of Word. I couldn't really think of one.

Today, though, I wanted to design and print a custom business card. I went to Word first, because it's what I'm used to. I downloaded the business card template (after being checked to ensure that I was running "genuine Office") and tried to create the fairly simple card, which did need to include a company logo for which I had a graphic.

But Word wouldn't let me place the graphics and text boxes where I wanted. The text wrap option was grayed out, and I couldn't overlap images as I wanted to. After fighting with it for about fifteen minutes, I gave up in frustration and opened up Pub 2007. I clicked "Business Card" in the publication types pane (no need to wait while my genuineness was checked out), put together the card exactly as I wanted it and was printing it in about two minutes. No fuss, no muss.

So I guess the answer is "yes - Pub is still around and there are still reasons to use it."

About three days ago, we configured a new server on the Dell web site. Today, Tom went back to actually buy it, and the price was almost $1000 more. Wow. I understand sometimes prices go up, but that's pretty ridiculous.

The sad thing is that Dell is still the least expensive of all the major vendors for a similar configuration. And there aren't that many vendors who sell servers in the first place. This system, a quad core 2.0 with 8 GB of RAM, came in at under $1800 on Monday. Today it's priced at over $2600 from Dell. Same thing from HP is $2800+. From IBM it's even more.

I feel as if a thousand bucks just slipped down the drain. Of course, if we go ahead and buy it now, it'll probably be back down to the old price a week later. And if we don't, it'll go up even more. Just can't win sometimes.

My Windows Mobile 6 PDA phone (Samsung i760) will no longer work with the Vista Mobile Device Center. In the beginning, MDC detected the phone easily and connected beautifully every time I plugged it in via the USB cable. Then suddenly I started getting a message that said simply "Error" (gosh, that's helpful) whenever it tried to connect.

I tried removing the partnership in hopes that I could set up a new one. No go. Now the Sync Center doesn't even see it at all. I tried a different USB cable (the one that came with Tom's phone) to no avail. Then I tried connecting Tom's phone - yep, it connected to my Mobile Device Center with no problem. I tried connecting my phone to my Vista laptop. Same problem. <sigh>

I've searched the web and haven't come up with a solution. I'm wondering if the drivers for the SDHC card that I installed recently caused this. Tom hasn't installed them on his phone yet. But I need the high capacity storage more than I need to be able to sync with the PC, so removing those drivers is not an acceptable solution.

I sync my mail, calendar, etc. with my Exchange server over the air, so that's not a problem. And I can transfer files by copying them to the micro SDHC card on my PC's card reader. I can install new programs as long as I can get the .cab file. So it's an annoyance, but so far just an annoyance. However, it was awfully convenient to be able to just plug the phone in and transfer files or install programs from the PC. If anyone out there has experienced this and found a fix, please let me know. And if I solve this one, I'll be posting here.

One thing I haven't tried yet is installing ActiveSync on an XP computer and seeing if it will work with that. I'll be trying that in the next few days.