Recovered lost password for MS Outlook 2007 .pst file with pstpassword 1.12 from nirsoft

I had success with pstpassword 1.12 recovering my lost password on an Outlook 2007 .pst file!

How I got in this situation in the first place: My backup program was generating errors related to an Outlook email archive, so my system admin advised me to close the archive to try to resolve the problem. Oops! I didn't think to reset the password on the pst file before closing it.

With a company policy that requires changing passwords every few months and at least one upper case, lower case number and special character, and being admonished, don't write down your passwords, the odds of me remembering the password on an email archive I created over a year ago were slim and none. So there I was stuck with all my 2010 emails through July locked just out of reach.

I went looking online for a freeware password recovery tool for Outlook and found plenty of commercial offers and dubious looking claims, but pstpassword 1.12 from nirsoft.com seemed to stand out from the noise. After extensive searching, I couldn't find anything really bad about it. There were some discussion on a PCReview forum in the UK about it being tagged as a false Trojan. The discussion made sense to me, so I downloaded it (on my home PC). I made a copy of the .pst file on my portable USB drive and was able to run pstpassword against it (after extensive scanning the download with antimalware and antivirus programs).

It quickly gave me three passwords to try against the file. The first one looked like part of an old password that I might have used, but didn't work. The 2nd didn't work at all, but the third opened it right up. I copied the emails out of the old archive to a new one and I'm back in business. And now that I know how easy it is to crack the passwords on an email archive. Don't think you can hide something in there that you don't want found out!

So I'm satisfied. I wanted to document this so hopefully people will find it assuring that a real person found pstpassword 1.12 performed as described for me.

Clayton M. Christensen article on personal success

Clayton M. Christensen wrote in Harvard Business Review about allocating personal time, energy, and talent to ultimately shape your life's strategy. He asks his students use management theories to find answers to three important questions of life: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Here are some highlights. The full article is a must read. Access to the article is free for the month of August.

1. Know your purpose: Christensen promises his students that if they figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at Harvard Business School. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity of purpose trumps many any other kinds of knowledge.

2. Allocate resources: Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

3. Build a culture: There comes a point when parents wish that they had begun working at a very young age to build a culture at home in which their children instinctively behave respectfully and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do.

4. Avoid the marginal costs mistake: It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

5. Remember Humility: If your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.

Quoting from the conclusion:

The metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched. I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Christensen is an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Read more on Success by Bessie Anderson Stanley of Lincoln, Kansas

Best,

Chuck

TurboTax price games just get better....

After my last post, I decided to look further to see if I could find a better offer on the TurboTax State edition. I thought I was on to something, when I found a link to a 35% discount on TurboTax available through Bank of America. (see below).

Turns out when you arrive at the TurboTax - Bank of America Portal, the prices are marked up so much, that even with BOA's discount, the end cost of TurboTax Deluxe is 41% higher than what I paid through Amazon. Just in case you can't read the prices on the 2nd picture below. TurboTax Deluxe is shown for $69.95 marked down to $52.46. Now, if you do the arithmetic, taking $17.49 off of a $69.95 price is a 25% reduction, not 35%. If you took 35% off the inflated $69.95 price, it would still be 22% more than I paid at Amazon. Go figure.... Not a way to instill confidence or customer loyalty in either Bank of America or Intuit.

TurboTax state -pricing funny business is not funny

I've been working on software pricing for over 5 years, and was very disappointed with the pricing to add an additional state return to TurboTax Deluxe. I shopped around for the best price I could find on TurboTax. I bought a downloadable distribution of TurboTax Deluxe which includes 1 state and efile from Amazon for $37.17. Because VJ, my wife, works in neighboring Massachusetts, I need to file two states. We've always done the MA non-resident return by hand, which is kind of a pain, so I thought I would splurge and do the extra state in TurboTax this year. However, Turbotax is asking more to add a second state to my return than I paid for the TurboTax Deluxe package, which includes the Federal, one state, plus efile. Not only that. If I order the extra state through the application, the price is $44.95, and if I download it from TurboTax.com, the price is $39.95, 11% less than downloading it from the application. Just to add the icing on the cake, the feds tell me that my tax preparation software is not deductible, because my miscellaneous expenses are less than 2% of my adjusted gross income.

Now granted, Intuit tells me I can file as many state returns as I like with the "extra" MA copy. I only need to do one. Yes, they can charge whatever the market will bear, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me to charge more to add one state than they charge for the complete bundle. And it seem even more unreasonable to charge 11% more if I order the extra state through the application vs. from their website.

Supporting details:

From TurboTax 2009 when adding another state:

From http://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/state.jsp

From my Amazon download confirmation

	TurboTax Deluxe Federal + State 2009 + efile [DOWNLOAD] [Software Download] , Price: $37.17 Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

MS Excel 2007 Pivot Table Quick Reference

PivotTable I: Get started with PivotTable reports in Excel 2007

Overview of PivotTable reports and PivotChart reports
Design the layout and format of a PivotTable report
Select different source data for a PivotTable report
Group items in a PivotTable report
Connect to (import) external data
Connect to (import) an OLAP database
PivotTable II: Filter PivotTable report data in Excel 2007

Elicitation in Competitive Intelligence

Many research professionals invest a lot of of time sifting through electronic resources in search of meaningful information. Search engines fall short when it comes to efficiently delivering deep insight. The information primary researchers seek often doesn't exist in databases or accessible online repositories. It exists in the gray matter between the ears of other human beings.

Skilled primary researchers can glean tremendous insight through conversations with key industry participants, information that might otherwise never be found or is not available through secondary research. This is the main reason why primary researchers prefer to go to the source, and recognize the need for a deep dive into the watery recesses of other minds.

For skilled researchers seeking specific data or opinions, there is no faster path to current information than direct communication with a well-informed source.

Professionals within corporate Competitive intelligence departments are often constrained by the nature of their own employment arrangements. It is considered improper for a corporate employee to pick up the phone and elicit sensitive information from an employee of a competitor. This can raise contentious legal issues.

Read the full article by David Carpe from his drinking from the fire hose column in Competitive Intelligence Magazine here.

Amazon EC2 pricing, billing, use cases

Here is an overview of Amazon Elastic Computing EC2 pricing, billing and use case info.


Annual Cost Comparison (100% utilization)
35 m1.small & 10 m1.large instances Linux/UNIX instances at steady state for 1 year.

__________Do-It-Yourself___EC2 On-Demand___EC2 Reserved___EC2 Reserved
________________________________________(1 Year Term)___(3 Year Term)

TOTAL COST ____$ 81,305________$ 57,951________$ 38,878.50_____$ 30,566

m1.small = 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform.
m1.large = 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform