Outlook, PST tools, and matters of sovereignty

View 730 Monday, June 25, 2012

We’re back from the beach a bit early. It has taken me a couple of hours to straighten out Outlook. My practice has been to copy the pst files onto my laptop, run outlook while I am on the road, and when I come back copy the pst files back to my main machine. I make intermediate backup copies. This time the outlook.pst file has gotten swollen, and had a bunch of stuff in that, and needed doing an archive job on it as well as compacting.

I also discovered that I no longer have the scanpst.exe file that is supposed to come with every copy of Outlook, and indeed it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on my system. I could be wrong, but I sure can’t find it. I can recall outlook telling me it didn’t want to open and had to scan the pst file; this time it didn’t want to open, and told me to run scanpst.exe, only I couldn’t find it. I managed to get past this, but in doing it I may have lost about a couple of hour’s mail sent this afternoon: if you sent me anything important on Monday from about 10 AM to 3 PM, send it again, please. And if you know what happened to the Microsoft tools that are supposed to work on this, please tell me that.

I did discover that you can Google scanpst.exe and find all kinds of “free downloads” that turn out to run just fine – except that to save the work they did they want a hundred dollars or more. They are not from Microsoft. And the sites that used to feature scanpst.exe no longer function. There are other substitutes for the Microsoft programs. None tell you up front what they cost. And mucking about with pst files is a hacker’s dream anyway – if they’ll fool you with what it’s going to cost, whatever else will they do? As usual I pulled the Ethernet plug on the computer before trying to run the ‘free’ downloaded scan program, and did a hefty scan of the computer after deleting the pesky program after I found out it wanted lots of money. At some point I need to look into this situation. I haven’t looked very hard for stories on this, but I think there is one here somewhere. Outlook is an important program, PST files get themselves corrupted all to frequently, and the reconstruction tools used to be built into the kit that comes with Outlook. Now I begin to wonder. There was a time when I’d have been on top of this story, and I feel a bit of the old curiosity coming back.

Anyway I did manage to get Outlook running smoothly, completely delete all the trash I could find, run an archive utility, and then run the file compacting tool. Should have done all that long ago.

It’s late. A lot is happening in the world. Election in Egypt – with both President Obama and Secretary Clinton urging the Egyptian Mamelukes, who claim to be successors to Ataturk, preserving the secular nature of Egypt from the clerics – that is, they want Egypt to remain at peace with Israel, and not to impose Sharia law, and while they’re more corrupt than Ataturk’s immediate followers were, they have some of the same ideals — Obama and Clinton want them to step down and bow to the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who very likely did win the election.

Constitutional democracy is not the same thing as plebiscitary democracy, which you would expect even a junior professor of constitutional law to know. Or someone in the State Department for that matter.

Anyway, I have thoughts on this that need organizing.

And the Supreme Court has spoken with an odd voice, claiming that the Constitution puts limits on the States that had Virginia understood would be a consequence of the Union, neither Virginia nor the Carolinas would have joined the Union. There would be no United States had the original signers understood that they were giving up some of the most basic fundamentals of sovereignty.

And we are told that Thursday may be decision day for Obama care. Quite a week.

But it’s late and I need to get to bed.

I have an inquiry for advice on writing. I plan one day to revise this, but the essay How To Get My Job http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/myjob.html is still valid, and as good as I have right now.