Author: bill

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New Treatment for Tendon and Ligament Injuries

“A medical device derived from the lining of urinary bladders of specially bred pigs shows promise for healing equine tendon and ligament injuries, according to Rick Mitchell, DVM, of Fairfield Equine Associates in Newtown, Conn. Mitchell recently addressed a group of veterinarians at Emerald Downs in Auburn, Wash., about the technology and his positive experiences with it in his practice.” [thehorse.com]

For those of us have dealt with slow healing ligament and tendon damage this looks promising since this promotes healing rather than just minimizing the symptoms.

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AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 Email Server Edition

I have been kicking the tires of various anti-virus packages for my SBS computer. The folks at Trend-Micro are a favorite among the SBS consultants while I have a lot of experience using McAfee and Symantec on workstations. All the virus checkers appear to be good. In my opinion the primary entry point for viruses on my systems appears to be email. Since my spam checking software has identified all email containing viruses and deleted the email on the ISP, Symantec has not identified a virus in a long time. The email I receive into Exchange is virus checked at AT&T Worldnet. The email I receive off of Yahoo is virus checked by Symantec on my workstation. It may be checked at Yahoo, too. They haven't told me but I think it is part of some recent changes to their email system. So you are probably wondering why I am evaluating AVG if I am already covered. The reason is AVG is inexpensive($120 for two year license) and I needed a fileserver anti-virus checker. The comparable product from Trend-Micro would cost about $300 for two years. The cost of renewing my two existing Symantec licenses is about $15 year. I think there is a small advantage being covered by two different anti-virus checkers.

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Donating another broodmare to Va. Tech

We donated another broodmare to Virginia Tech yesterday. We bought her in foal and kept the colt. We need to wean our two young colts and do not have enough stalls. We decided it will be a long time before we breed again. There are just too many young horses on the market and not enough buyers. The drive was beautiful and we made it in record time, a little over 6 hours. We had a nice meal last night and then returned today.

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Yesterday I learned an important lesson about array formulas. I saw a nice tip from PCMag on trimmed averages in Excel but I could not get it to work until I learned how to correctly enter an array formula with ctrl+shift+enter. Powerful  stuff but easy to screw up. It makes me wonder how people audit spreadsheets for inadvertant changes. When you edit the formula and press enter the formula continues to generate an answer. The problem is that the answer is wrong.

Sourceforge has released two new updates, tortoisecvs and ultravnc, and my buddies at firetrust have updated mailwasher. I updated my system with latest version of tortoisecvs and mailwasher. I am a regular user of Mailwasher and it has some small bugs I would like to see go away. I have only played with Tortoisecvs but I to integrate it into my work. I cannot get to sourceforge.net at the moment to get ultravnc. Seems they are having an unplanned outage.

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Presidential Quote For The Week

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

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Problem installing QuickBooks Pro 2004

I ran into a problem installing QuickBooks a few days ago. I kept getting a popup message ending with “Interface not installed” whenever I tried to uninstall QuickBooks 2003 or 2004 Beta. Thinking it was a QuickBooks problem, I called QuickBooks support but they generally were not helpful except to say that I would have to re-install WinXP.  That was not an acceptable solution so I started hunting around to see what I may have done to cause this. After a little more checking I noticed that IE was not opening a new window when I clicked on a link and NAV was not updating the virus files.. This was in addition to the problem I found with uninstalling QB. After a little bit of sleuthing I noticed that I uninstalled a free program called CDBurner Pro XP just prior to the upgrade. I used the system restore feature of WinXP to take me back to just prior to the uninstall and now everything works. I have upgraded to the production version of QuickBooks Pro 2004. Someday I will go back and fix this problem.

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It has been snowing all day. Yesterday's forecast was for the snow to stop by early afternoon. This is not the weather I like to schedule farm chores but I have waited too long and not they need to get done. The manure pile needs to be dressed up so I can get more in. This stuff gets more compact as it composts. The composting process is more efficient if you stir up the pile every week. If you let it go too long, it is a real mess to clean up because you do not have any room for the tractor to maneuver. I spent a few minutes trying to un-install QuickBooks 2004 beta and failed with an error message, “An installation support file could not be installed”. I will call the support line on Monday.

We saw Lord of the Rings after my son got out of school. This made for a challenging trip home from the movies. The roads were sloppy and lanes were hard to see. I am glad we did not go to Va. Tech today. I imagine West Virginia/Southwest Virginia roads can get real hazardous with weather like this.

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I ordered my free copy of disk 3 for SBS2K3 today. The form is available. Our trip to Va. Tech to donate a mare was cancelled due to snow. Hauling a horse trailer through West Virginia in the snow is just not fun. Instead we are going to see the Return of the King tommorrow. That is how I like start the Christmas holidays.

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Dell Server Bargain?

Don't get me wrong, I like Dell. Last week I went to a local TS2 meeting and the presenter talked about the cost of servers has gone down and gave Dell as an example with a server starting at $299. Two days ago I decided to find out. I went to Dell website and priced out the Dell server. I started out with the $299 barebones server and loaded it up with a typical selection of components for a small SBS server. I ended up with $2852. The 2GB of ram was the big ticket item af about $1000 but most of the components were much higher than retail. $1800 for the rest of the server is still too high for an entry level server. Hmm…