1. I turned it on and pressed the maps app.
    2. Pressed the search button
    3. Pressed the voice search button
    4. Spoke the words “Panama Canal”

3 presses on the screen, 2 words and a total of 15 seconds later I had a map showing the Panama Canal. I first zoomed out and showed him exactly where it was in relation to North and South America. Then I zoomed in and followed the canal to the Atlantic side locks. I was able to zoom in to show just a single lock and the satellite image even had a ship in one of the locks.

I explained how the water in the locks is controlled by gravity and replenished by lot of rain fall throughout the year. He loved hearing about how the trains pull the large ships through the canal and especially how small a pirate ship would have been if it went through the canal.

All-in-all, a very informative 5 minutes. Perhaps sometime when Jack is not getting ready for school, we can spend some more time reading about the Panama Canal on Wikipedia.

I use 3 licensed applications extensively and two of them failed in the same day. Fortunately, all the open source applications I use don’t and probably will never have a similar problem. Just to be fair, I think the Office problem started because of the fixes necessary to get the creative suite working.

So you might say, just reinstall or repair the applications and your back to work. Not the case. I could not repair them, reinstall them and in the case of Adobe, I couldn’t even delete it.

At Adobe’s request, I used the following 2 programs to resolve the problem.
1. MSICUU2.exe – This is a program from microsoft which allows you to remove programs that the standard microsoft installer will not uninstall. AKA Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301)

2. Wincs3clean.exe – An adobe program that cleans up the registry. I think this cause my office problem.

I reinstalled Adobe, Adobe worked and Office did not. I could install and uninstall Office, but the current user could not run any applications. After some searching on the Internet, I found that you could run the applications as administrator.

There is a program called SetACL.exe that allowed me to fix the problem. This modified some permission in the registry that I would rather not have changed, but after 24 hours of unproductivity, I was getting desparate. Anyway, this did the trick.
setacl -ot reg -on “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components” -actn setprot -op “dacl:np;sacl:nc” -rec yes

Since then, I have had a couple Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes due to my video card and running multiple monitors. I have updated the display driver but still got a BSOD. After more searching, the problem is being seen on both WinXP and Vista, both 32 and 64-bit systems with both ATI and nVidia video cards. One person said installing a second video card and running one monitor off each video card works rather than plugging 2 monitors into the same video card fixed their problem.

That doesn’t seem like a good solution to me, besides I don’t have a second PCI express 16x slot for a second video card. Some people reported multiple crashes per day. I am doing much better than that.

I guess I am just lucky that way!