Isn’t Office Assistant your friendliest best friend.
My university had an unexpected, not so welcome suprise. Here is an excerpt from a mailing I received, explaining the situation.
Over the last few days, some employees and students at TU Delft have had regular problems sending e-mail correspondence to external relations. This is because the central e-mail servers at TU Delft have been regularly included on the Spamcop blacklist in recent weeks. Spamcop is a system used by a large number of organisations to combat ’spam’ or unsolicited e-mail. Spamcop checks the source of an e-mail message and if it is included on a blacklist, all e-mails from that source are blocked by the receiving party. After a thorough investigation, the ICT department has discovered the cause of this problem.
We mark unsolicited e-mail as ‘*****Spam*****’ before sending it on to the addressee. In cases where the person in question has activated his or her Office Assistant, an e-mail is sent back. Over the holiday period, so many of these ’spam’ emails were sent back and forth that we ended up being registered on the Spamcop blacklist.
LOL
Pleasant Microsoft Surprise
August 10, 2006
A week ago me and my girlfriend cleaned up our laptops. Backed up the things we wanted to keep and reformatted the hard-drives for a new clean install of our Microsoft Windows XP OSes. In my case everything went fine, but Sylvia’s OS refused to activate with the message that the number of installations for her license was exceeded. We kept the OS in the unactivated state, but installed security updates and service packs by downloading it via my laptop and then installing it on Sylvia’s system (Windows Update does not work in a unactivated Windows), hoping that the problem would solve itself in time. We where guessing that Microsoft erroneous was still counting Sylvia’s previous installation as a still existing install. After a few days, we lost hope that the problem would solve itself, but I was reluctant to contact Microsoft. So I Googled for the problem, but found no cure for the problem. I did found however a advise to prevent this problem, which I will follow up the next time I reinstall a Windows OS on a machine. You can backup the following two files:
C:\windows\system32\wpa.bak and C:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl
After reinstalling Windows, you only have to replace these two files with your backup and reboot to activate your copy again. This trick only works when re-installing the OS on the same system. The activation files contain hardware information about your PC. Different mainboard’s and video-cards will probably not work.
Unable to find a ‘dirty’ way to activate Sylvia’s windows. I turned to the Microsoft customer service. I was amazed about this really nice experience that I had with them. I found the phone number in the Windows activation Wizard, the phone number was free (I’m a greedy Dutch) and I was helped right away. The nice lady, believed me on my word, that we had not used the same Product Key on an other machine and provided me with a special key to activate.The whole phone call took less then 2 minutes!
Liquid Space 2.0
August 1, 2006
Two weeks ago I was with Sylvia at the “5 Days Off” festival in Amsterdam. On this pictures here we are exploring “Liquid Space 2.0″, a interactive cocon designed and realised by artist Daan Roosegaarde. Daan took this pictures. Thanks Daan!
Nothing beats a pile of pancakes
July 2, 2006
Hello world!
May 9, 2006
Hello world.
