Please don't hate me! I only use Excel because they make me and I substitute OpenOffice.org Calc for Excel whenever I can. Ok, with that off my chest I'll tell you the tale of my latest battle with Excel. Seriously, people use this thing and like it?

We use a number of spreadsheets at work for keeping track of IP addresses and the like. By default Excel locks an open spreadsheet so that others who open it can only do so read-only. Well, most of the time I'm looking up information and not changing it, so it would be better the other way around. With a little googling I figured out the commands for adding a shell option to open a spreadsheet read-only.

I got this bounce message caused by a virus, which I'm guessing I didn't cause. It came back because my domain was used as the sender. Full headers weren't included so I can't be sure where it actually originated. That's part of my problem. But read the email and hopefully you'll see why I now hate Declude. That's right. They're officially on my not-invited-to-parties list.

I've got an account on a Windows 2000 Terminal Services machine at work. For some reason it won't allow me to change the file associations. I need to change the program that opens EML files, which are Outlook Express mail files. Since generally I'm looking at this mail because it's spam or viruses, there's no way I'm letting Outlook Express come within 10 feet of it. That would just be an invitation for disaster.

So here's how to change the file assocation via the registry instead.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.eml

Add a new String Value with name "Application". For the data, put the name of the program you'd prefer to use, such as "gvim.exe".

That's all it takes. Pretty cryptic, huh?

Scam artist have moved into the digital world. With pretty much everything being done electronically these days, it's easy to see why. Just by snagging a couple key pieces of information, like account numbers, passwords, or social security numbers they can wreak some major havoc. Who raised such rotten people, anyway?

Luckily, there's a few simple things you can do to separate yourself from the rest of the herd. Just like the old saying goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."

To a computer, all data is just bits. It has no way of looking at a series of bits and just knowing what sort of data it is. So that picture of Aunt Lulu is completely indistinguishable from your web browser. That's actually a great feature but it has some drawbacks, the most annoying one being that when you double click on a file the computer can't know with 100% certainty what to do with that file. Instead, programmers have come up with some clever ideas to tell the computer what type of file it is.