This is a post I made in an old blog over a year ago, but that blog no longer exists and I had to go hunting for this information again today. So here it is.

October 19th, 2005

I have been through hell trying to figure out how to permanently delete the annoying little PDFMaker toolbar that Acrobat 7.0 installs in Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. This toolbar cannot be turned off by any ordinary means. It pops up in different places in the application, sometimes making a two-tiered toolbar set into a three-tiered one. It’s in the way, it serves no purpose when all one has to do is print to PDF anyway.

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I use both pMachine Pro and Wordpress for blogging. pMachine Pro is a really handy little program; basically you just put PHP includes in your existing site to use it.

But it’s kind of twitchy sometimes. Occasionally it will refuse my password and I’ll have to change it. Here is the process I use to do that - kind of simplistic, but this is applicable to any simple login process when trying to recover a password.
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I’ve used OptionCart for a number of websites in the last 14 months. It’s an administrative front-end for Mal’s E-commerce, a cart provider I’ve used since 1998 for my retail website.

OptionCart is inexpensive, works quite well and as open source software has a LOT of potential for customization (all written in PHP using a MySQL database).

But what really sets them apart is their outstanding tech support. Susan and Sherri have sent me many lines of custom code to accomplish some pretty demanding requests from clients… They are always exceptionally helpful, timely and polite and go way beyond the call of duty.  No other company I’ve dealt with as a web designer even comes close.

If you’re a user of Mal’s cart system (which I also highly recommend) and need more functionality for your clients, really consider checking out OptionCart. They offer a reseller program for web designers and developers too.

I migrated from Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird a few weeks ago. I really like Thunderbird, especially the adaptive junk mail filtering…

Just a few minutes ago I was checking my mail and suddenly everything in my inbox was blank. It was there, but I couldn’t view anything. This had never happened with Outlook so I was (1) terrified momentarily that all my recent business mail was gone but then (2) resolved to find it….

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