2007 October 15 — HighTechDad HighTechDad

October 15th is supposedly Blog Action Day. What is that exactly? Well, from my understanding it is a day that is to highlight the power that is “blogging.” For me, I’m coming up on 2 years of blogging about Technology, Gadgetry, Software and Hardware and how it relates to my life as a father. However I note that many of my posts are truly just related to helping others work through Technology issues.

Blogging for me has always been an outlet for getting what I have learned on my own, as well as through helping my family and others, out in writing. I was an English major in college and have never taken a computer science course in my life, yet I seem to “understand” computers, technologyÂ and software. People always told me that I should write a “How To” book, long before “blogging,” Web 2.0 (or even 1.0) or mainstream digital publishing even existed…however, I never had the time, nor the venueÂ to do so. Then along came blogging and it becameÂ my way to contribute to the community at large, write my “how-tos” and develop an online presence for myself.

The barrier to entry has been dramatically reduced over the past year or two. You can create a blog through WordPress or Blogger extremely easily now. Many ISP also offer this option as “Installers” and there are software programs that hook in well (like Microsoft LiveWriter, iWeb, EctoÂ or many many others) to current blog hosting offerings. And, the choices continue to grow. Now, people are becoming more and more focused on monetizing their offering (which I hope doesn’t dilute the quality of content out there), but the other trend is the “personal blog” where people write about their life experiences, a day to day journal of what they are doing, etc.

Where will blogging go? I’m not really sure. I just can encourage people to find their niche and try to contribute. What someone thinks and writes about off-handedly, might be the solution for somebody else. For me, if I find a solution for something, I try to write it up and get it out to the community at large. It’s similar to how there was always one person in school who asked a question with many others who have the same question but just didn’t ask. “Build it and they will come” is the type of mentality that people should take when it comes to blogging. [click to continue…]

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Update #1 – Making me look like a fool!

This is a very obscure error that I came across today with a client. He was having issues where every time he would hit ENTER, his machine would type a backslash “\” and it was proving to be very unnerving. Rebooting did not help nor unplugging his external keyboard. There was only one Google Search result that showed a thread on the issue (that I could find) and there was NO resolution.

After some digging around, I THOUGHT was able to resolve it. Below are the steps that seemed to work…but the problem CAME BACK! For historical information, here are the steps that I thought worked. The UPDATED, “low tech” approach actually fixed the issue (see below the steps).

Open your Control Panel
Find the “Regional and Language Options” item and open it:
Navigate to the “Languages” tab and click the “Details…” button:
This will launch “Text Services and Input Languages” panel. Navigate to the “Advanced” tab.
Under “System Configuration”, if the “Turn off advanced text services” box is unchecked, recheck it (if it is already checked, I’m not sure what is going on in your case:
Click “OK” to close “Text Services and Input Languages” and then click “OK” to close “Regional Language Options”.
Test it out again and see if hitting Enter now does NOT show the backslash