The answer is nothing, most of the time. But occasionally the program gets very slow and cantankerous. I have had times when the program would not run until the next Microsoft update came along.

This made me angry and sad because Outlook 2007© is central to my communication with the world. I tried other email programs and none of them satisfied me. I bought programs that saved my emails as individual msg files and one that could read these files. I bought another one to save my attachments. Yes, you can backup up your Outlook Personal Folders (pst) but you need Outlook to read them.

We at Small b Systems now use Microsoft Exchange© hosted by 1 and 1, our Internet Service Provider. It cost about $7 a month and it is the best money in our budget. As part of the service, you get a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007©. Emails are delivered to your exhange account which you can read with any Outlook installation that has been linked to the exchange account and by web mail at https://exchange.1and1.com.

When you connect to your exchange account using Outlook 2007, the computer you are using and the exhange account syncronize the data that each has so whenever, or from wherever, you connect to your exhange account, you share the same information with all users sharing the account. We also syncronize our Blackberry phones with exchange using  Blackberry software.

The exchange account is our company's backup to our communications data. But we had a few clients that had another need. They wanted to backup their Outlook contacts and emails to a databse they could control and use as needed. To that end, we have designed and written Contacts Database and have Email Database almost finished. Our program reads information from Outlook 2007 without user intervention and stores it in an Microsoft Access 2000© database. The current version database is read only. All editing and additions are done in Outlook. You can read more about the program and download a trial copy by visiting our web site http://www.smallbsystems.com.

We would like to hear your ideas on how we could make the application more usefull to you, or your company. My email is paul@smallbsystems.com

Most of my driving is in Westchester County New York. The roads are narrow and winding over mountain terrain. Great for motorcycles, sports cars and good drivers. Not so good for poor drivers. Almost every week some driver crashes due to loss of control of their vehicle. This, I believe, is because they were never taught how to drive. The driver's test requires you know the state laws of the road and your ability to handle your vehicle at very low speeds. Very few drivers are taught how to control a vehicle at 55 miles per hour on up and down hill curves. They are also not taught how to stop a car while retaining the ability to steer or recover from a high speed slide.

I took Skip Barber's Advance Driving course some years ago and my driving has improved every day since. Each student was tested at the first class. I had been driving more than thirty years and considered myself a good driver. I was a private chauffer while in college. Guess what, I was not doing anything correctly!!!

Here is what I was taught and how I have used it ever since.

1) Always hold the steering wheel with one hand at 9 o'clock and the other at 3 o'clock.
2) Never cross your hands on the steering wheel. Shuffle the wheel in your hands or, if absolutely necessary, keep on hand stationary and spin the wheel with the other hand.
3) Control the car by pressing on the steering wheel with the heel of your hand. Pushing on the wheel will hold you in your seat. Turning left by pressing up with the right hand and the left hand to turn right. DO NOT PULL on the wheel.
4) Reduce speed entering a turn and gradually increase speed exiting the curve. When the wheels are facing the direction you want to travel, increase speed to maximum.
5) While in a curve, increase speed to move to the outside of curve and decrease speed to pull to the inside of the curve. DO NOT USE THE STEERING WHEEL if possible.
6) You must control the vehicles weight. The car steers with the front wheels. At maximum acceleration, the ability to steer is decreased because the weight is shifted to the back wheels. When the weight shifts too far to either side your ability to steer, brake and accelerate a geatly reduced.
7) If you feel the car rolling too much in a curve, slightly reduce speed and straighten the steer wheel just enough to shift weight back to a more neutral position and brake gently. Now you can continue navigating the turn. This is an advanced technique and is only used as last resort. If you find yourself needing this maneuver, you entered the curve at wrong speed.
8) Most drivers cannot judge the right side of their car. I developed a way of teaching myself how to put the right side of my car where I wanted it to be. I adjusted my right mirror so I could see the full length of the passenger's side and the rear wheel. I would then check the passenger's side mirror while driving to see where I was on the road. I practiced this until I could correctly judge the right side of my vehicle while looking straight ahead. This can be critical making a tight right hand turn or passing on a very narrow road.
9) Finally, a good driver does not have any distraction to his/her vision or concentration. No cell phones, things hanging from mirror, anything that may move in hard corner or stop and gain your attention and eating or drinking while driving. If I feel my mind wandering while driving, I increase my speed to the point that my attention jumps into survival mode. WARNING: This can lead to speeding tickets.  

There are many good note keeping programs available which can be used to save and organize research.

One of the oldest and still excellent is AskSam which I have been using way before Windows existed. It is the king of free form databases. It was used by United States intelligent services to solve the Iran Contra affair in 1986.

Today I use Microsoft's Onenote® but it is too much for quick notes and screen captures that I only need for a short time.

We wrote our own Small b Systems Personal Notes which is fast and does not use many system resources. The notes are saved in an embedded Microsoft Access® database. Functionally includes a rich text formatting, formatted printing and one button backup to detination choosen by user. You can also paste images into the rich text box and they will be saved in the database.

FREE TRIAL download

We ran into a rather disturbing problem with Jet 4.0 engine and Visual Basic 2008.

A simple database with two tables. Company and people. If you add a company and move to the child table, people, you can not save the child entries due to a concurrency error. The error exist even if you save the parent entry manually before entering the child table. We repeated our logic with an identical SQL Express 2008 database and did not have any problem.

Though trial and error we found that you had to save the dataset and then reload it before entering the child table. The following is what we came up with:

Private Sub PeopleDataGridView_Enter(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles PeopleDataGridView.Enter

        Me.Validate()
        Me.DateTextBox.Text = CStr(Now)

        vAnswer = Me.IDTextBox.Text   ' The control property Visable must be True for this to work. If you don't want user to see, hide it behind another control.

        Me.Validate()
        Me.MasterTableBindingSource.EndEdit()
        Me.PeopleBindingSource.EndEdit()
        Me.TableAdapterManager.UpdateAll(Me.BrooksMasterDB_DataDataSet)

        Me.MasterTableTableAdapter.FillBy_RecordNumber(Me.BrooksMasterDB_DataDataSet.MasterTable, CInt(vAnswer))
        Me.PeopleTableAdapter.Fill(Me.BrooksMasterDB_DataDataSet.People)

' The record number is negative if not saved and reloaded

            If CInt(vAnswer) < 0 Then
            Me.MasterTableTableAdapter.Fill(Me.BrooksMasterDB_DataDataSet.MasterTable)
            Me.PeopleTableAdapter.Fill(Me.BrooksMasterDB_DataDataSet.People)
            Me.MasterTableBindingSource.MoveLast()
        End If

    End Sub

The records should be in the ordered that they where entered.