I had the chance to meet Rev. Tomkin Coleman this evening to help him fix the broken superdrive in his Apple MacBook Pro 17". He contacted me a couple weeks ago for help and I was able to point him to an online store that sells these OEM drives at a really good price. He proceeded to order it and kept me updated once the superdrive arrives so that we can set up a time for me to perform the replacement on his Mac laptop.

Normally this procedure of replacing an optical drive on a MacBook Pro would take over an hour to complete which I quoted Mr. Coleman through our brief phone conversation. However, he told me he would have to run in 45 minutes upon my arrival. He said I can stay to finish the job, but I felt that wasn't going to work for me. That put me on the hot seat to get it done in 40 minutes or so. Boy, was I glad to see it took me less than half an hour when I put the last screw back in the laptop.

Since yesterday, many have noticed that they're seeing something strange in their search results on Google. Well, wouldn't you like to know that real time search came to Google yesterday? The new addition is live feeds from Twitter being streamed to the top of Google search results. You may now be able to keep up to date with who's the latest attention-whore who claims she's one of Tiger Woods' mistresses.

Click here to watch video demo of Google real time search

Many web designers prefer to build their websites in test folders and when their development is over to move their Joomla applications to the root folder of their hosting accounts.

For the purpose of this post, let us presume that we have a Joomla 1.5 installed in the public_html/test folder in our account and we want to move it to the public_html directory so that it will be directly accessible through www.yourdomain.com. This change consists of the following steps:

A very interesting question was asked of me earlier this evening about how to print return labels using Address Book application in Mac OS X. A lot of us may have used this print feature before to do mass mailing and it does save us a lot of time, if we know what we're doing. I was caught off guard as I have never used this feature and didn't quite figure it out on the spot.

So on the drive home, it occurred to me that Address book would only understand there is just one return address associate to the main account. Thus when one tries to print this return address, there is only one return address and lots of empty space.

The goal is to fill this empty space up with one address, and creating a new group for this purpose is the right approach. I ended up making a new group and named it "return labels". Then copy an address to use as the return address, and paste it in this group 30 times (or as much as your labels sheets can print). This works great and takes about 5 minutes to make your mailing task a bit easier.

The toolbar you see on this website is hosted and powered by Wibiya. It is a great social tool, all is in one place without cluttering up your website layout. One downside however is that it doesn't play nice with Javascript (and this site uses tons of scripts). I was struggling for days seeking a permanent solution.

The main problem is Joomla uses mootools and Wibiya toolbar loads in jQuery javascript which have known incompatibility issue when run together. A quick search on Joomla's extensions section yielded SC jQuery, a tool that sets "no conflict" mode to allow usage of scripts such as the Wibiya toolbar with mootools, and other libraries. After installation of this plugin, it seemed to fix the problem. It was not long for me to find out that some of the modules were still acting strange.

So the search was still on. I went to the developer's support forum and came up on a post that perked my interest which eventually fixed my problem (you still need to have SC jQuery running).

UPDATED: Wibiya has since changed their code and no longer would one need the add "&nc=0&pl=1" after the ID number. SC JQuery still needed. I stopped using the toolbar because it takes much longer for the side to load.

I got an email from Sandra about a strange problem she’s been having with her email program, Microsoft Outlook Express. For some unknown reasons, whenever she tried to print out an email, the printer would not spare any tree. We’re talking huge fonts on the print out which takes up several pages for a short email conversation.

So I responded to Sandy saying this would be an easy fix, simply thinking it was a wrong setting somewhere in the printer’s driver. Today, hours before driving to her house to fix this problem, I searched around and gathered a few possible solutions. One of which stunned me because it was nothing close to what I suspected.

I managed to fixed her email printing problem in about 10 seconds. You will not believe what was wrong with the printing setting. It turns out Internet Explorer controls how emails in Outlook Express would be printed. How stupid is that? Please fix this, Microsoft engineers!

I strive to provide excellent customer service. Below, you’ll find testimonials from my happy customers from all over the Twin Cities metro area. If you want to leave a feedback, please do so by writing a comment to this post. Thank you!

Truong Nguyen – The IT Sage