As in previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s an option in Office 2007 that turns on additional feedback sounds. The additional sounds needed for this feature to be activated, can be downloaded from this page at Microsoft's website.

Unfortunately the installer insists on having an older version of Microsoft Office installed and refuses to work if you have Office 2007. But there’s a rather simple solution to get it installed anyway. Here’s how:

1. Download the file sounds.exe from the web page above
2. Open an execute dialog by pressing the keys WIN + R or by selecting “Execute” from the Windows Start Menu.
3. Enter this command (note that c:\download in this example has to be replaced with the path where you stored the downloaded file):
   c:\download\sounds.exe /t:c:\officesounds /c
   This will unpack the installation files and store them in C:\officesounds
4. Go to the newly created folder C:\officesounds, execute sounds.msi and follow the instructions of the installer.

All what’s left to do is to turn on the sound feedback in one of your office programs. For example, in Microsoft Word you would click the Office-Button, then "Options" and "Extended", scroll down almost to the end of the dialog and turn on the option "Provide sound feedback".

Enjoy :-)

Well, nothing really new there, but in a nostalgic mood I've started to put up some old lan party pictures in the gallery. The complete set of 2001 is now viewable. More will follow.

Edit 2010-02-19: The whole lanparty set is now available :-)

It’s Valentine’s Day, but since I’m not into this kind of stuff, I spent my time today on updating my site to the latest Habari release. The update process went smoothly and there weren’t adaptations to make. However, while I had a closer look after the upgrade, I found a few issues in my site’s theme and fixed a bunch of glitches in the comment system, the template class functions and few minor things in the main CSS set. Everything should run fine now.

Yesterday I made as small excursion to the Drupal CMS, just out of curiosity. I haven’t looked at it for a few years now, although I constantly run into it, as many high traffic sites such as java.net use it as their publishing platform. To get a grip on it, I ported my current site template to Drupal. Basically it isn’t very hard to create a template, although I had to apply a few tricks to make my template work the way I wanted it. Once Drupal’s concept is understood, it’s pretty straightforward to use it. In order to avoid fiddling with its internals, you might also make use of the vast amount of plugins and themes for Drupal. After all, I’m considering to use it for my next major web project. And before you ask: I have no intention to move away from Habari for my personal site.

Apart from fiddling with web related stuff this weekend, I also finished setting up a new home network at my parent’s house. Everything works fine, Mom and Dad are happy :-)

I highly doubt that you even have noticed that I have left Twitter a while ago. After all, I couldn’t find any gain in using it.

Roughly over a year ago I joined the hype and created an account at Twitter. While 140 characters doesn’t seem that much for posting relevant stuff, it is as sufficient for rudimentary messages as SMS is. After I had initially tweeted a whole lot of random nonsense for a while, pauses between tweets grew bigger and eventually stopped at all after a few weeks.

To some extent it was because I am just too busy (or maybe also too lazy) to keep followers updated about whatever (just see the frequency of my blog posts to see what I’m talking about). But mainly it was because I’m not the one who wants or needs to broadcast every aspect of life publicly.

Twitter might have its uses, e.g. for real-time updates on current events, like elections, sports events and so on. But, seriously, nobody wants to know what you had for breakfast, what beer you are currently drinking, or that you are about to go to the toilet. The inanity of some tweets is surprising.

Personally speaking, I found Twitter is not adding anything useful to my life, rather being another drain of time, no matter if used actively or passively. This has, after all, led me to the decision to stop using it all. I’ll keep my account at Twitter, just in case, but I have officially said “Good Bye” to Twitter.