Customizing the Contact form in Outlook 2010
Most of my Outlook contacts are personal contacts, not business contacts. So I don’t have their business phone or address. By default the business phone field is the first on the list of phones on the contact form. And the business address is the only one that shows by default.
With a lot more work that what it should be, I was able to change the fields from this:
To this:
I was only able to do this on New Contacts, I did not continue trying to figure out how to edit my existing contacts to use this new field format.
To do so go to Outlook 2010 and add the Developer Menu Item by going to “File > Options > Customize Ribbon“ and select the Developer item on the tree view:
Hit the OK button to save your changes.
Go to your contacts and hit the “New Contact” button:
Change the fields to your liking by hitting on the drop down arrow next to the field name:
Go to the Developer item on the Ribbon and select Publish Form As:
Give your new form a Display Name and a Form name and hit Publish.
The form name is the one you’ll look for when setting the form as the default form, the Display name is the one you’ll see on the “New Contact” button.
Close the “New Contact” window you have open, if it asks you if you want to save changes say no.
We now want to make our new published form the default Contact form. To do this , right click on the Contacts folder:
Hit properties. Then update the “when posting to this folder, use” field to your new form and hit OK to save your changes:
Your new contact form will now be used on all new Contacts.
Sadly I could not find a straight forward way to make existing contacts use the new Form. If you figure out how to do this, let me know!
3rd tooth coming out!
Anika has been really fussy lately, specially around bed time. We’ve been cutting down on her acid reflux medicine (per doctor’s orders) and we were worried that maybe that was the cause.
But today we saw this:
A third tooth is coming! It’s hard to see in the photo so here is a closeup. It’s coming on the right side (Anika’s left side) of the two teeth you can clearly see:
She’s growing so fast! She’ll be 8 moths old on the 21st. And hopefully she’ll be acid reflux medicine free in a short while =)
C# controlled lights via USB port
At work, we thought it would be cool if we could turn on some siren lights when a server goes down.
Step #1 to make this happen was to be able to control simple electronics from custom code. I love C# and the USB port is what is common now so I researched and found the FT245RL “USB to FIFO” chip. This chip made it really easy for me. It plays well with drivers known by Windows.
When I plugged in the chip to the USB port, Windows 7 immediately recognized it and installed the drivers for it. You can use a couple of drivers the default is the simpler one to use where it turns the USB port into a virtual serial (COM) port.
Writing to serial ports is really standard so this is the code that outputs a byte through the chip:
private static void WriteByte(byte byteToWrite)
{
using (SerialPort vcp = new SerialPort())
{
vcp.BaudRate = 9600;
vcp.DataBits = 8;
vcp.StopBits = StopBits.One;
vcp.Parity = Parity.None;
vcp.PortName = "COM5";
vcp.Open();
vcp.Write(new byte[] { byteToWrite }, 0, 1);
vcp.Close();
}
}
Anika is exploring foods!
People always say “we started giving our baby solid food”.. But is rice cereal and purees solid? I think they say that because it’s shorter than saying “we started giving our baby something other than breast milk and/or formula”.
Last Thursday October 27th, Carol gave Anika rice cereal! Anika got a hang of swallowing after about 4 spoon attempts. She ate about 2 ounces and I think that’s pretty good for being her first time.
I fed Anika for the first time this Saturday. It was fun but it certainly takes longer than just giving her a bottle! At the beginning she was really eager to be eating, but after a while she would wonder and was not ready for the spoon that was coming. So I thought she was not hungry any more, but then Carol gave it a shot and Anika finished the remaining half of the cereal!
The pediatrician suggested trying different foods every 3 days so yesterday (Sunday) we gave her pea puree. We cooked them and then ran them though the food processor with some water; we could see the pea skins but I thought it was not a big deal so we gave her some spoons just like that. Carol then freaked out and said that we really should strain the puree to remove the skins, so we did. I don’t think we needed to but I didn’t mind if we did and Anika didn’t mind either way as well.
She finished 2 ounces of pea puree, she wasn’t as excited as rice cereal so I’m thinking she didn’t love them but thought they were good enough to eat.
Bike commuting is over
It has actually been over for a long time but I haven’t posted about it. I didn’t bike to work at all last week. It’s just too dark and I realized that even if I got a front light, cars would see me but I would not be able to see pot holes or other obstacles on the road.
Fall bike rides
This weekend Cody, Shaun, and I did our Alpine ride. We start at Corner Canyon on Draper, and go over the mountain to the Alpine side where we go by the natural water slide, the bike ramp that ends into a pond, we ride the “blood chute”, and go through a ranch that has camels. Yeah, camels in Alpine Utah, strange…
The leaves were falling and changing color. We rode through several spots where the ground was covered with orange/brown leaves and the trees had reddish leaves. It was cool.
It was a tough ride, it took about 3 hours (I haven’t downloaded my Garmin watch data).
I’m still biking to work but I need a front strobe light because it is pitch dark when I leave my house. This morning a car did not see me when doing a right hand turn to merge into the main street I always ride; I had to stop really hard to avoid hitting it. It didn’t catch me by surprise because I always ride thinking nobody sees or respects bikers so I was ready for that hard stop. Besides, it was part my fault for not having a front light.
For safety’s sake I’ll stop bike commuting until I get a front light, which I hope will be after work tomorrow. The commute is getting cold in the morning but it is still not too bad; the night low is still in the forties. I’ll stop riding when the low gets below below 40F. There is no snow or rain so my guess is I still have 2 to 3 weeks of bike commuting.
Anika has mastered sitting down!
For the last month or so, Anika could hold the “sit down” position for a little while, like 10 seconds totally unsupported. When placed on the position she would wobble and then start falling to the side slowly.
But two days ago Carol placed her on the floor and she was able to keep herself balanced! She now does it all the time with no problem. We can’t remember when was the last time we sat her down on the floor, we usually sat her on the bed without realizing it was harder for her to keep her balance on a soft surface.
So we now place her on the floor with some toys around for her to play with. We also put some pillows around so she doesn’t hit her head if she falls.
She’s also starting to enjoy more sophisticated toys like the one you see on the picture. She hits the buttons to play the music, we’re almost certain she does it because she wants to hear the music. She still prefers her old toys though, she can lift those and put them in her mouth =)
Anika’s first cold =(
Boogers and watery eyes did not stop her from smiling yesterday afternoon when I took the picture. But she did have a tough night. She woke up every couple of hours because of a stuffy nose. And had a fever at 3am so Carol gave her some acetaminophen.
I’m totally the one that gave her the cold … It’s one of those mean colds. I hope she’ll feel better tonight…
Anika’s first tooth!!!
There it is! The first little white one! Carol discovered it today when Anika bit her finger. Anika just barely turned five months 5 days ago.
We’re now thinking this is why she has been drooling sooo much for a month now. Actually it was much worse about two weeks ago. And she was crying a little more than normal last week.
Anika has grown sooo much it is unbelievable. For a while she’s been able to roll to pick up toys but it used to be hard for her now she does it really quick. And she started picking up her binky when she drops it! And she puts it back in her mouth… This still takes her some time and she sometimes gets frustrated but it is still truly amazing how babies learn so much so quick!
Rode 67 miles (108 km) today
Today I rode the Heber Metric Century Ride with Cody, Nicholle, and Jeff. I had a great time, nothing like a long ride with good friends. The scenery was awesome too, we went through rural roads with a lot of green fields and green mountains with very blue skies. And the leaves started changing colors around Heber so we would also see some bright orange trees in the middle of the mountains.
We rode through some isolated roads which were really smooth to ride. Well, most of them where, there was 2 miles of hard packed dirt road. And since my butt was already hurting a little, those 2 miles definitely wore it out and I was in pain the rest of the way…
I feel like muscle-wise I could have ridden the 100 mile ride (as opposed to the 100km one). But my butt was definitely not ready for the challenge. Humm,,, well and now that I write this, I remember that my knee also began to hurt a bit at mile 40 so I took some Ibuprofen (400mg) and that made things be normal for the remaining 17 miles.
This knee thing means I’m not doing long rides any time soon. I might do 50 milers but no more than that. I’ve been really good with my knee this year. I really have not made it hurt since April’s SLC Marathon. And today doesn’t really count.
I didn’t take any pictures of the ride =(, but I took one of my “farmer’s tan” when I got home:
After the ride we went to grab some food and a couple of beers. Carol and Anika met us there but they would not let them in! It turned out the place was a bar and not a restaurant/bar, so you had to be over 21 to get in. I gotta start thinking about that when we’re out with the little one.
Carol, Anika, and I then went to check out Jonsons Mill, a nice bead and breakfast where we might stay some day. We hung out on the gardens, pond, and stream that goes through it. They had a cool thing with a rope where you could make it spin as you grabbed the rope and flew over a stream, it was pretty cool.
