I find myself posting micro-status updates on Facebook much more frequently than I end up posting thoughtful blog posts these days (although a quick look through my old blog posts would likely reveal that they are, on balance, far from “thoughtful”).  Oh well, c’est la vie.

If I am seized by a good idea that needs a more thorough treatment, I promise I’ll post it here.  Meantime, you can move along…there’s (really!) nothing to see here.

EXEC sp_msForEachTable @COMMAND1= 'DBCC DBREINDEX ( "?")'

Keep in mind that the DBCC DBREINDEX command will put a lock on the table while it does its thing, so you may not want to do this during peak times.  But from time to time, you may find need to reindex all of the tables in a database in one fell swoop, and this’ll do it.

(Found here)

Perhaps you recall that back in 2005 Blockbuster made a big deal out of their new “No Late Fees” policy.  They had to do something; even at that point Netflix was already eating their lunch with a business model that included the ability to hang on to a movie for as long as you wanted to, but no new movies for you until you return it.  Of course, despite Blockbuster’s flashy ads, “No Late Fees” didn’t REALLY mean “NO late fees”.  It actually meant something more like “a ten day grace period before we start dinging your credit card and/or simply charge you the full retail price of the movie.”

If you recall that, do you remember the big campaign that they rolled out to let you know that they decided to start charging late fees again?

No?  That’s probably because there was no such campaign.

In fact, if my experience is any guide, not only did they start charging late fees again, but they decided to do so without telling anybody about it.

We rented a couple of movies on New Year’s Eve.  For reasons that don’t need to be detailed here (suffice it to say that my attention has been focused elsewhere for good reason), I didn’t return the movie until tonight.  ”No problem,” thought I, “they don’t charge a late fee unless it’s crazy late, so we should be fine.”

Not so much.

Six days late times two movies plus tax equals $12.60 (on top of the $7 or so we had paid for the original rental).  That’s about FOUR MONTHS of my Netflix service, which allows me to have one movie at a time, no more than two in a month, and keep them as long as I want to.

“Yeah, we started charging late fees again.  Nobody was bringing back their movies,” said the guy behind the counter.

“Too bad for you,” I replied.  ”From now on, I’ll just get my movies from Netflix.”

“Oh, you should use our online service.”

Yeah, right.  You already poked me in the eye over the movie I rented in the store.  Like I’m going to give you an opportunity to do it online, too.

No wonder Blockbuster is in bankruptcy.  I can pretty much guarantee that treating customers like this won’t help their situation even a little bit.

But lately the love affair with Chrome has cooled substantially, mostly (and ironically) due to performance problems.

As Chrome has matured, more and more often I’ve encountered bizarre performance glitches.  Cases when the browser would simply hang up waiting for a page to load, or would act as if it was not connected to the Internet, when all sorts of troubleshooting proved otherwise.  The little bit of advice I can find online suggests that this maybe has something to do with the Microsoft TCP/IP stack; remedies generally involve tinkering with the Proxy settings in Chrome, which actually pull up a Microsoft control panel.  It’s consistent enough across all of my computers that I don’t believe it’s a configuration problem of my making.  I think there’s a bug in there somewhere.

Hot on the heels of all this discontent comes the beta version of Firefox 4.  I liked Firefox a lot early on, but then it became a big old bloated Elvis of a browser (you know, like 1970′s Elvis, not svelte and trim 1960′s Elvis).  I switched to Chrome when Firefox felt like it was hauling around too much baggage and had gotten slow and unweildy.  But Firefox 4 seems to address much of that.  The interface is slimmed down (much like Chrome), and the browser feels much faster than its predecessor.

So, is it time to dump Chrome?  Not quite yet, but I’m spending about equal time in Chrome and Firefox 4 Beta now, which is something I haven’t been able to say about any other recent browser versions (including, by the way, the beta of IE9, which I uninstalled within a week of installing it!)

They’re also having a special limited-time sale on their Mac and PC base packages and upgrades. Check it out!

(And yes, this post is a shameless promotion and gains me an entry into the giveaway described above, but I can say honestly that the Logos software is outstanding.)

We drove down to Manchester, Georgia today (down in middle Georgia kind of near Fort Valley) and picked peaches at Hudson Farm.  Great fun, although it was a little bit more humid than I like because a rain storm had rolled through just before we got there.  The peaches were huge right off the tree, but harder than I expected.  I guess they’ll soften up over the next few days.  Apparently this was a great year for peaches in Georgia; the rain was just right and there’s a bumper crop of outstanding fruit (which is also why it’s so cheap at the grocery stores).  We got two large baskets of You-Pick peaches for $30.  I think that was a pretty good deal…and fun, to boot!

Recently, my copy of SQL Server 2008 Management Studio began failing with this error message:

Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface
type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider'.  This
operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component
for the interface with IID '{6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA}'
failed due to the following error: No such interface supported
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).
(Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop)

(told you it was geeky)

It took me hours and more than a few gray hairs to work this out.  Apparently, the issue is caused by installing SourceGear’s Vault Client (Vault is a version control tool used by programmers to manage source code).

SourceGear has a page that talks about it:  http://bit.ly/boIRRC

There are various pages online that refer to the error, but the vast majority suggest the solution is to re-register actxprxy.dll.  In my case, the trick was to re-register C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\ieproxy.dll.

The exact procedure:

1. Launch a command prompt as Administrator (best bet is to do Start, then search for “Command” to find the icon, then right click and choose “Run as Administrator” — you’ll have to click to approve it)
2. Enter the following command:
   regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\ieproxy.dll”
   and press ENTER.

That’s it.  2 seconds.

Wish I had managed to find that one before I spent three hours installing every SQL Server program I could identify and then reinstalling Visual Studio 2010.  Uggh.

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.

I ran Microsoft Office Diagnostics (which usually can fix these kinds of issues — it’s under Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Office Tools), and it found no problems and didn’t fix the issue.

A little Googling turned up this nugget, which did the trick:

Click on Start > Run, then enter “outlook.exe /resetnavpane” and click OK.

Life is good!