Office 2013 error: “Sorry, we are having some temporary server issues” – remove KB2768349 to fix it

Recently we began using Office 365 accounts with the Office 2013 desktop suite, and during a roll-out session for staff, almost everyone in the room got this error message when trying to load the sign-in screen for their Office 365 account for the first time:

“Sorry, we are having some temporary server issues.”

The error occurred even before asking for any login details, and a quick check of our Internet access logs revealed that Word wasn’t even attempting to contact a server. I hadn’t seen this during testing, and we couldn’t work past the error when we encountered it, so the roll-out session was a bust. To say I was irritated is somewhat of an understatement.

Dear iWork users

Stop sending your stupid Pages files to people via email.

Some of us use computers for actual work and not just dicking around, so we have Windows computers. Even those die-hard Mac users who actually do work on them tend to install OpenOffice or buy Office for Mac, rather than use iWork.

I’m tired of trying to convert your documents for you because our staff have no idea what to do with them, so either sort your Mac out with a proper office suite or BUY A REAL COMPUTER.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Plain text emails appear in a white (invisible) font in Outlook 2013

Shortly after upgrading to Outlook 2013 from Outlook 2010, one of my users complained that some of his emails were showing up with invisible text in the message body. He knew there was text there, because he could highlight the invisible text and copy & paste it into Word.

I quickly determined that it was only plain text emails that were affected (rather than those with HTML or Rich Text formatting), which led me to investigate the font options. Sure enough, somehow the font option for reading and composing plain text emails had been set to a white font.

You find this option by going to File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts, then clicking the Font button under Composing and reading plain text messages.

The font colour should normally be set to Automatic, and in our case it was inexplicably set to white. Setting it back to Automatic immediately solved the problem.

Bizarrely, even though the Font color was set to white (as shown in the above screenshot), you can see that this was not reflected in the preview on either the Font dialog or the preceding Signatures and Stationery dialog. I’m also 99% sure the user didn’t change this himself, since the aggravation it was causing him far outweighed the value of doing it to wind me up.

For fsck sake

“Why is this remote restart taking so long?” I wondered, watching a successive stream of Request timed out messages being returned from PING.

One long walk to the server room later…

GAAAAH CTRL+C

Say what you want about Windows, but Windows Server doesn’t spontaneously decide to do a disk check during restart.

Yes/No/What was the question again?

In today’s edition of “Stupid Error Messages from Exchange”, we have this gem of idiocy from the Exchange 2010 Management Console:

Yes, Yes to All, No or Cancel. But… Yes to what? Am I saying, “yes, I want to continue,” or perhaps, “yes, I agree that is a silly idea so don’t continue?” Am I suddenly in the middle of an MCSE exam and have to decide whether this is the expected behaviour or not?

ASK ME A BLOODY QUESTION IF YOU WANT A YES/NO ANSWER.

No more spreadsheets. Long live spread sheets!

Really, Microsoft? This is a spelling mistake? The dictionary term that you use on your own website to describe the function of Excel is marked as a spelling mistake?

Yes, we’ve been here before with the grammar checker. But this is just depressing.

Dear SMART Technologies

If you are going to put required fields on your online registration forms, it really does help if you actually mark it as required, so I don’t have to see stupid red error messages when I click submit.

And you know what? Actually labelling the field at all would be a good start.

Oh, the irony: Google Maps gives wrong address for Google offices

If you search on Google Maps for the address of Google’s offices in London Victoria, you’ll be taken to the correct address. However, if you then click on the location marked ‘Google London’, the address it gives you is for a different office building in Soho about 2 miles away:

(The address given is the location of their separate sales offices that opened last year, but that hardly excuses the place marker being 2 miles out of place).

Dear Facebook. About these Ads…

You know I work in a school. You know I’m married. You know these things because I dutifully filled them in on my profile so you could sell my data to advertisers.

So, when you show me dating ads entitled “Meet Your Girlfriend” with a picture of a girl who looks suspiciously under-age, this is not just badly targeted or inappropriate, it is actually downright offensive.

STOP IT.

 

Edit: This page used to contain a screenshot of the ad in question, but this was removed following receipt of a DMCA takedown notice on 2nd April 2013. See the below comment for more information.

You do not need to defragment this volume

I think I’ll be the judge of that.