Did you know that 2008 was a dual leap year? Probably not since I made up the whole "dual leap year" tag, but what I do mean is that we had a February 29th this year and we’ll also have an extra leap second added to our clocks tomorrow night.

The problem is that Microsoft won’t really catch up with that second until later.

It turns out the deal is that Microsoft doesn’t recognize (or ignores) the alert in the atomic time codes that says a leap second is being added to the time adjustment. When the leap second is added at 12:59:59 tomorrow night, Microsoft won’t catch it and will just adjust the clock on your computer the next time it syncs after tomorrow night.

As you can see in the image above though, I can’t connect to the time.windows.com website URL to update my time anyway. Makes me wonder if their working on a fix right now maybe even though their Knowledge Base Article 909614 states otherwise.

Does anyone really care though? Are you going to stress out over it? If you’re Microsoft maybe you can smirk and know that at least for a little while you can really claim you’re a step ahead of Apple on something.

Hat Tip: Douglas Karr at Marketing Tech Blog

Image: Snagit of Windows Time and Date Properties Dialog box

I’m trying to get things back online and organized on my laptop for working with clients. One of the things I used to do is have many of the frequently used files for clients set to be available offline when I’m disconnected from our network.

The problem was that I quickly ran out of available free space on my hard drive to maintain all the files I may need along with those programs and options that are run locally from the machine all the time.

Here’s my question, can I easily redirect and RELY on moving my default offline files location to my portable, Western Digital 250GB USB drive?

Obviously this is my work machine and it needs to be reliable and no major unexpected issues arise when I’m not expecting them.

For my “day” job, I work with a number of custom database applications that we develop. One of them being our complete task, CRM, project management solution. Normally, my business partner and I are connected to each other through the same network or a switch so I can almost always see his machine and run off a single copy of the SQL database back end connection.

Today though is a different story, I ended up having to work remotely at a coffee shop so needed to run off my local back-up copy of the database. The only problem is that when I used my standard link to the application running on my machine, it keeps telling me it can’t find the database. NO DUH!

No instead of forcing me to step through a long series of one-option dialog boxes, how about you let me have another box that immediately lets me jump into my connection settings and tell it to look at my local SQL server and not my partner’s?

If someone’s got a solution for this, PLEASE let me know, because it doesn’t happen frequently enough to be a huge issue, but becomes annoying quickly everytime I have to deal with it.

One of the new features of the recently upgraded version of ActiveSync for PocketPC is a troubleshooter feature. Screen shot of some of the steps it goes through is below.

The only problem with it for me is that it said I wasn’t running Outlook 2000 or later. I’m running the Outlook 2007 beta which is later, but obviously I understand the issue being it’s beta software.

I think this little troubleshooter should help more people though using more standard installations and needing some help or solutions to their problems. You can also send the results to Microsoft when there are problems. Hopefully if they start getting baraged with more problems, they’ll be able to fine tune more of the application and functionality.