Microsoft Office 2008:Mac - Office did not install correctly

Come on.... it isn't even Monday. It's Friday for crying out loud.

What happened you ask? Well.....

I got an e-mail with a XLS file attached (I know.. shit happens). So I tried to open it, but I got a reminder that I hadn't (re)installed Office 2008 on my new iMac. But not to worry. I have the official Microsoft Office 2008 DMG (with matching serial number) on my Drobo, so the installation was done in a matter of minutes.

This is when it happened. Starting office resulted in this error: "Office did not install correctly". It even had a link to a Microsoft article explaining I needed an update. But the update wouldn't install since it was for OSX 10.4 (or something). Installing the latest update didn't solve it either.

Well, remove Office and reinstall it then... That didn't work either. Still the same error.

Searching the Interwebs resulted in a suggestion to remove everything Microsoft from the Mac.... And so I did. Especially the locations like:

/Library/Preferences/
~/Library/Preferences/

should be free of everything Microsoft. After trashing the Trash I reinstalled Office 2008. This time I was asked to enter my name and serial number. Something that didn't happen the first times. Then it occurred to me; I had copied my preferences (and other settings) when I migrated from my old to my new iMac. I guess that Microsoft doesn't support that.

It would have been nice if they had an option in the Removal Tool (which they generously supply) to remove EVERYTHING. I think that they didn't forget it. I think that this is by design. Just to screw with us Mac user.

TrueCrypt Bug, or Hardware Failure

For the last couple of years I've been using an offsite backup method. And today the drive I use for that failed on me. My backup program reported that it could write (or read) data to the drive.

Investigation showed that several directories in the TrueCrypt volume were gone!!!!! Thankfully, the data on my Drobo and server were still pristine condition.

Disk Utility and several other tools reported problems with the drive (or at least the TrueCrypt part/volume). So I erased the drive, and re-initialized it. No reports of trouble while I did that. After that I recreated the TrueCrypt volume and restarted the backup to the drive (which takes forever).

All I can do now is wait for the backup to finish, and pray that the house doesn't catch on fire.....

After that a new case for SpinRite.

A Slow Week

Biggest (techno) news in the Netherlands was probably the failure of the Internet. The largest ATM Internet backbone massively failed in the Netherlands. This resulted in thousands of people without any Internet access for 1-3 days.
Currently the problems are temporarily patched, but they are still on high alert.

For the first time I wasn't affected. Normally this only occurs to me.

Purely coincidentally, I found a South Park episode (s12e06/Over Logging) in which the Internet fails. This results in mayhem in South Park (just like it did over here).

Furthermore, I drove 170 kilometer today, and it took me about 5 hours. Traffic jams due to spring rain (????) were to blame (according to the traffic information services). Basically, because people are egoistic when they're driving, and won't anticipate (when they're reading the paper, shaving, and/or applying make-up using the rear view mirror) on their surroundings.

So no Internet (for large parts of the Netherlands), and traffic jams from here to Tokyo. So 'slow' might be an understatement.