SOLVED: SugarCRM Inbox Hangs With Data Error

So your SugarCRM email inbox has suddenly frozen... After several minutes, you see "Data Error". SugarCRM itself might slowly grind to a halt, forcing a reboot.

Yet the SugarCRM log lists no errors... and other email clients have no problems.

The SugarCRM forum shows plenty of complaints without useful advice.

Diagnosis: Email Pollution. At least one message harbors crud SugarCRM cannot digest.

Treatment: The Solution to Pollution is Deletion. Find the inbound message(s) with the offending characters, and delete. 

Hints: 

• It's probably one of the last messages logged.
• Cyrillic chars can bung-up English/Latin messages

Prognosis: Possibility for recovery = 100%.

(Note to chemists: I know, I know... It's "dilution".)

Larceny and Craigslist

One stolen printer, two attempted short-changings, and several "let's get to know each other" messages.

This was the downside of my 15 ad experiment with Craigslist:

• The angry printer buyer claimed it didn't work. I quickly took it back... only to find that she had swapped my working unit for her junker.
• A car buyer handed me a wad of bills that a spousal audit revealed was $100 short. He shrugged, then sheepishly produced the missing c-note from his shirt pocket.
• The buyer of a $25 bed frame asked for directions to a bank, as all he had was tens.

The upside: Sold 11 of 15 items, most of which might have ended life in a landfill.

Lessons learned:

• Record serial numbers at the point of sale;
• Always count the money (thanks to the spouse);
• Have the ones, fives, and tens on hand for making change, and finally...

Craigslisting is easier and more lucrative than land-filling.

Can Caffeine Really Cure Infectious Alzheimer's?

Infection Update: The gang at UTHealth noticed that Alzheimer's looks awfully similar to mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. While the latter diseases are infectious, nobody has accused Alzheimer's of same. Once that light bulb was lit, they just had to poke some mice with Alzheimer's. Bingo! Demented mice!

The researchers surmise that Alzheimer's is infectious... they're trying to figure out just how infectious it is. Although this study is ugly news for the afflicted and those who care for them, it does help explain the rapid expansion of the disease over the last three decades.
 
Luckily, the UTHealth effort was preceded  by several mouse studies that determined that the mouse-equivalent of 500mg/day of caffeine can retard the effects of Alzheimer's, so long as the mice were on that track. That's five 8-oz. cups of Folgers or a couple of ventis at your local Coffee Hound.

Granted, it's a small consolation... but a consolation nonetheless.

Quick and Easy Refresh for Stained Woodwork

When your house was new, the halo-like woodwork glowed about the windows, while sharply defining the nexus of walls and floors.

Now? The halos have slipped as the glow waned... Sharp lines have gone fuzzy.

OK. Here's how to grind out the fix, the Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Do crowd way: Remove the trim from the walls, apply stripper, remove the finish using a combination of elbow grease, steel wool, sandpaper and curses; sand thoroughly; stain; sand with finer paper; apply clear topcoat; sand; re-apply topcoat; sand; re-apply topcoat; patch walls where you damaged them pulling off trim; prime and paint patches; re-install trim; fill nail holes.

No? Well... If you're in a bit of a jamb* for time, you could try this simple touch-up: Wipe-on stain, then rub off vigorously. Use a clean lint-free rag. Keep rubbing till the rag isn't picking up any more stain.

Finally, pop a tab and wait for the spouse to heap praise upon your glorious self, you insanely handy person!

Just remember... Any stain that didn't fill a micro-crack or hole will never dry right. Instead it will just set on the surface of the wood, waiting to transfer its goodness to a wedding dress. Tha'ts why you'll want to make sure you rub the excess stain off real good before tossing your rags. (Once dry, your trim should look and feel like it's newly lacquered.)

Also, when selecting stains, avoid any mix that contains urethane, and every can with "Poly" on the label. 

This trick won't work for every finish, so try it inside a closet before going hog wild on the house. Nervous? A milder c-y-a** solution is bottled in Old English Scratch Remover... It's 97.6%*** spouse approved, so long as you wipe it off.

Now. Get handy... ish.

* pun intended.
** cover your heinie.
*** ok. I made that up.

The New Testosterone: Brown Mustard???

Build lean muscle mass while slashing fat. That's the promise of anabolic steroids like testosterone. Only one problem: they're illegal.

So what's a bodybuilder to do?

You might want to try slathering brown mustard on your Wheaties. No kidding.

Researchers at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology discovered that, when they fed homobrassinolide to rats, the beasts increased the Big Three: lean body mass, muscle mass and physical performance.

Downside risk? None so far. The EPA says that, since brassinolide is in virtually every plant everywhere, humans grew up munching it.

You'll find the brassinolide mother lode in the rapeseed family, which outputs canola and mustard... especially brown mustard.

Are rat studies usually applicable to humans? Nope. But since when did that stop a body-builder?

Pass the Boetje's, please.

It's Here: The Chip Inside... You

After the doc installed the new Intel co-processor, your brain function flipped from slipping to tripping. e=mc2? Child's play!

That's the brave new world promised by the the world's first transistor for humans.

Researchers at the University of Washington have actually created a prototype of the world's first transistor designed for embedding in you.

The key difference between a plain-old-transistor and the living-transistor: the electro version uses ions to transmit ones and zeros, while the humanized form does the job with protons. Beyond that... A transistor by any other name is still a transistor.

Once you have mastered transistors... well... We've seen this movie before: Switches, timers, memory, cpus. Cures for everything from paralysis to dementia.

And finally, the Culmination: Bugs, viruses, around-the-clock security fixes, and of course, the even-numbered upgrades that wipe everything out, forcing the Geek Squad to re-install your brain from scratch.

What? You didn't make a back-up?