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July 28, 2008
Contributing to those WILFing moments
A past colleague with an American sense of humour calls it "Futzing Around". The Poms call it WILFing (What Was I Looking For) moments. The Reuters article is a little narrow in the definition of the phrase, but it just happened to me. I reckon, I'm pretty cluey on being productive with Windows machines but once in a while, there's a flurry of hard disk activity, molassing of the input devices and then, yes, the "what was I actually trying to do" moment.
It went like this. I was setting up a free collaborative workspace with a new client, using Microsoft Office Live. This is a free facility where you can establish partitioned workspaces, put documents and files, then assign sharing permissions to other people - they don't have to be in your organisation. I went there in my heavily customised favourite Firefox web browser.
Didn't work, lah. I easily fired up Firefox with my alternate clean profile, without hassle. I soon got in. Some FF extension had been in the way. I sent an invitation to the client, things looked good.
But I really wanted this to happen in Internet Explorer 7 and for even smoother flow, allow Office 2007 to seamlessly Open and Save files to Office.Live.
Silly me. I fired up my IE7, normally loaded with my favourite Add-Ins and....the rotating version of the classic hourglass sat there, spinning. Hmmm. Must be a Javascript error caused by interference with one of the IE7 plugins. But wait, Microsoft has kindly created a clean profile for you as well, under Start Menu > Accessories > System Tools > Internet Explorer (No Addons). How do I know? Cause I took the time to handy dandy Google search - it just jogged my memory of such a mechanism.
But it didn't work still. Ok, try running IE7 the normal way, manually disable all the Add-Ons, even those I trusted. In the meantime, just to prove that IE7 itself would not be a problem, fired up my handy dandy virtual machine - yes, got in fine. Except that once alive, the Virtual Machine advised me to carry out Windows Updates. Subsequently followed by hard disk fervernt hard disk activity.
In the meantime, IE7 on the host was in and I started to download the Office Live extensions.Well one setup.exe led to a wlogin.msi and then there was the olconnector.msi. By that time the Virtual Machine had finished hard disk activity and could be put to sleep again.
Now, what was I trying to do, remind me.....
Posted by Anandasim at July 28, 2008 07:25 PM
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