Found fix for Excel row auto-fit

Using the Format menu in the Ribbon. So annoying when double click doesn't work.
http://www.uwec.edu/help/Excel07/ws-rowcol.htm

Solution to "this is not a valid copy of windows" and VMWare Fusion

Here's what happened to me. Was happily running VMWare 3.0.2 on Macbook Pro. Had Win7 Enterprise installed as a bootcamp partition and would open that up on the Mac using Fusion - basically allowed me to use Win7 for Outlook and MS Project while doing everything else on the Mac.

Saw an enticing notice that Fusion 3.1 was now available. Downloaded, installed and updated VMWare tools on the bootcamp partition. All of a sudden Win7 started telling me that the activation was no longer valid and that I needed to reactivate. Tried everything under the sun in order to try and get it activated to no avail (restarts, going to microsoft.com/genuine, using slmgr.vbs, grabbing the key using Produkey, etc.). The weird/good thing was that whenever I booted natively into Win7 it was fine. It was whenever I booted into Win7 using fusion on the Mac side that it wasn't valid.

Finally had to call in the IT guy at work and he figured it out (go Mike!). Basically two combined fixes:

a) VMWare networking sometimes gets confused (tell me about it). He ran the following in the terminal to reset it:
sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

b) This was probably the key - he changed the perferences in VMWare such that before the Fusion image loaded that it was set to use Bridged networking from the beginning. I had it set to NAT and then tried switching it to Bridged after launch, but that probably wasn't good enough. Once he did that the Fusion Win7 instance was able to find the KMS server inside the firewall and all was well.

Glad that only burned a whole day from my life...arg...

Produkey to the rescue

Good tool to find Product Keys from an existing legit installs (for when I'm about to format a machine and the user doesn't have their original disks/serials anymore). Produkey from here:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/productkeysactivation/tp/topkeyfinder.htm

Shopping robots to check out

"Shopping robots, such as PriceGrabber.com and Shopping.com, are good places to comparison shop and may be particularly useful before visiting any liquidation sale, says Dworsky. One of his favorite sites, PriceSpider.com, posts historical prices; the range of prices should help you determine whether the price is likely to hold or continue to drop."

Great article showing the upcoming pain for Europe

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/europe/23europe.html?hp

The best way to diff Excels

Florencesoft DiffEngineX
one of the few pieces of shareware type software that I was happy to pay for (or rather my company did...:)).

Interesting stats based on culture vs. wealth

By David Brooks

Lifehacker tip on how to get the date in the Mac menu bar

Here