Too Many, Too Many, Too Many

Posted by on April 8, 2010 No comments

I’ve been thinking about things that have changed since I was growing up and what made them change.  And I’m beginning to point the finger at people.  Not specific people, just people.  There’s too goddamn many of them.  And they suck.  But, oh, don’t worry about me.  I’m doing my part.  I’m not incrementing that population counter at all and I’m not living past my prime.  I’m just a passing fad.

So what have we lost as we’ve gained people?  I haven’t done much thought on this topic, just some casual thinking.  So I don’t have a multi-page rant, but I came up with a few items.

Travel:  Whether by air or car, there are too many damn people travelling.  Air travel used to be luxurious.  My parents dressed me in a suit to go to the airport.  It was like going to church.  Now, it’s just a big cattle train.  With the apparent loss of manners and couth of the average American, it’s a terrible experience.

Education:  All the time, I’m hearing about how schools need to be built or expanded.  Where the hell are all these children coming from?  When I was growing up, there was no school shortage.  And with all this overcrowding, there’s no way anyone’s getting a good education and no teacher is getting paid for the effort they have to put in.

Beaches:  I haven’t always lived near a beach, but when I was growing up, there were regular vacations to a beach.  And I remember it was a lot different then.  For one, you could drive your car on the beach.  Not now.  And can you imagine if you could?  It would be a big-ass parking lot with no room for people.  Traffic jams on beaches; beach rage; idiot drivers.  Again, something that used to be a pleasant experience ruined by the masses.

Does it sound like I’m being elitist?  I don’t think so.  If the stupid humans of the world had enough damn sense that they don’t need to have more than two kids, much less 4, 6, or – holy shit – 8, then there’d be enough resources for everyone.  There’d be enough seats on a flight.  There’d be enough roadway for everyone.  There’d be enough beach for everyone to lie out and for some to bring their car. 

As humans, we’ve lost any concept of humans as a race.  And we’ve stopped thinking about the big picture, and we’ve certainly stopped thinking of anyone but ourselves.  2012 can not get here soon enough.

Driver Formula

Posted by on March 10, 2010 No comments

I think I’ve come up with a formula to determine the assholosity of any driver on a highway.  The formula is simply:

x*abs(y-z)

Where x is the number of lane changes per mile, y is the average speed of the driver, and z is the average speed of the rest of traffic.  Spoken, the formula is: the number of lane changes per mile multiplied by the deviation in speed from the flow of traffic equals the level of asshole on the road.

This formula is a great step forward in the field of Asshology, of which I consider myself an expert.

It’s Just Money

Posted by on March 5, 2010 No comments

Why is this conversion to Quicken so goddamn hard?  I think I’m a reasonably smart person, so why does my money keep getting screwed up in Quicken?

Whenever I use Quicken, it’s laborious.  And not because it’s different, I’ve come to learn the differences in the 4 months I’ve been using it.  It’s dumb.  And I pity the people that have been using for years and years, because MS Money had a much better user interface.

My latest fiasco occurred this morning when I got a notice from a bank saying a transfer was cancelled due to insufficient funds.  After confirming that the balance in Quicken differed from the bank web site, and after a short walk to calm the hell down, I discovered that I had six deposit entries in my register that were duplicates of downloaded transactions.  Thankfully, this was a simple transfer between savings accounts and had no effect on any bills.  Of course, it uncertain if I will be whacked with an overdraft fee or not.

The problem is, I can’t trust Quicken worth a shit.  This situation arose even after reconciling the ledger of the funding account.  Should I have been suspicious that I had unmatched transactions in my register?  Yes, but it has happened so often in my short time with Quicken, I’ve taken it to be normal.  And just now when I was downloading transactions, I had a transaction mismatched and I couldn’t find the real transaction it belonged to.  Why?  because the last time I downloaded, I thought I would trust Quicken and chose “Accept All” to auto-match all the downloaded transactions.

As far as laborious, the matching process is the worst.  The downloaded transactions are in a list at the bottom and as you select each one, it highlights the matched transaction in the register above.  So your eyes are constantly scanning up and down.  Payee?  Good.  Date? Good. Amount? Good.  Ok, next.  Three checks for every downloaded transaction.  And as I’ve found, you have to check all three, especially if you frequent a business often.

The bill payment is very confusing.  The idea that you can pay a bill in Quicken, but that it doesn’t really get paid until you update your accounts is dumb.  And I certainly got misled by “One Step Update”, which I thought would make an immediate payment, but instead merges payments and transaction downloads together.  You mean there’s an even dumber way to handle online payments in Quicken?

I haven’t even dared to test out the reporting and projection tools.  I’m actually scared.  Not that anything would get messed up, since you can’t change anything when running a report, but I think I’m scared at how disappointed I will be or at how confused I will get looking at the results.

This has been one problem after another.  I spoke to a co-worker one time about a business application we use and she commented on how stupid she felt after training because none of it made any sense to her.  It was because the program is so un-intuitive, it made her have to think differently about everything she wanted to do.  That is how I feel and I do not think it is my fault.

Great Observations

Posted by on February 27, 2010 No comments

Following up a previous post on financial voyeurism, here’s the headlines for stocks for a period of time:

  • Monday: Stocks close lower on caution about economy
  • Tuesday: Stocks retreat after disappointing consumer report
  • Wednesday: Dow slips on Greece, domestic concerns
  • Thursday: Stocks backtrack but still fall on economic fears
  • Friday: Dow Rises 4 on Good GDP Data, Bad Housing News

The lesson here is: the stock market reacts to bad news in a bad way and good news in a good way.  Who would have thought such a thing?

I Never Really Believed in Curses Until…

Posted by on February 6, 2010 No comments

…I started travelling.  There’s some pretty bad mojo brewing up whenever I want to go back to my home state.  Last time, I was delayed a day and it was because I took the last flight out and because of previous delays, it was impossible to make my connection.  This time I scheduled the first flight out, meaning I got up at 2:45 in the morning to get ready.  Despite the plan that I could be bumped to later flights and do to people what they did to me the first time, the flight was still a no-go.  Thank you, blizzard.

And I thought I did everything I was supposed to.  I checked the flight status before I went to bed and when I woke up – all good.  When I checked in, I asked “any news?” – no, the flight is still active.  I got to the gate and within 10 minutes I hear my name paged.  Damn it, I know what this is about.

Similar to last time, I could make my first leg, but the second leg was cancelled.  I had the option of going to the first airport and trying to get on the next flight at 5:30.  That’s a 10-hour layover with a great chance of the flight either being overbooked or cancelled.  No thanks.  So after rescheduling for tomorrow,  back home I went.

I call the car rental company and modify my reservation.  Apparently, when you take one day off your reservation, you’re not in the “special rate” anymore and it suddenly costs you over $100 more.  So a brief check on Yahoo and I’m now renting from another company.  However, I’m still out $5 for my brief time of parking at the airport.  And gas, and time.  Luckily, no hotel reservations to change like last time, where they knocked me for $90.  I swear, companies make the most money when their customers are miserable.

The Biggest and the Bloatedest

Posted by on December 19, 2009 No comments

My personal domain name is up for renewal.  I’ve been with Network Solutions as my registrar for a very long time, 15 years, maybe.  A whole lot of low-cost registrars have popped up during that time, but I always stuck with the leader.

Now, recent re-evaluation shows I don’t really have a need for any of the services NetSol offers, so why should I be paying a premium price for their services?  Let’s take a look and see what the cost of renewal is with NetSol.  I just want to renew my domain.

This is where NetSol has really shot itself in the foot.  Not only is it a premium-priced registrar, it seems they are so money-hungry, they want to take every attempt to get more out of you.  After clicking renew, I am taken to a series of advertisements about other things I should be buying.

First, a pitch to add additional domains.  These are variations on my existing domain.  No, I don’t see any need to have three more domains with less-recognizable suffixes (or TLD’s for the technical). No thank you; next.

Next, a pitch to make my registration details private ($9/yr).  Other people have complained about this before.  Why should I have to pay extra for privacy?  And had I bought extra domains, multiply that $9 per domain.  Next!

Next, a pitch for web hosting.  New domains, hmmm. ok.  Existing domains, you probably already have hosting.  If you were transferring a domain, that would be another valid opportunity.  But, no.  I’m fine where I’m at.

Next, a pitch for forwarding web requests, mail hosting, custom website design (even if you selected no web hosting), and an SSL certificate.  Jesus, isn’t this simple renewal request ever going to end?  This is four full pages of advertising! 

Then, finally, you get to see the price of renewal: $35/yr.  4x the amount of other registrars?  For what?  4 pages of ads when you renew?  Now, you can see that NetSol has been overtaken by salespeople and scammers.  Granted, there are discounts for multi-year renewals, which is how I’ve stayed with NetSol as long as I have.

The way I see it, when you click renew, you should be taken straight to the shopping cart where a line item shows the domain(s) for renewal.  Under the line items, a line with a checkbox for each of these offered services should be shown.  Clicking the checkbox would expand the section to let you choose which renewing domains will get the service.  Obviously a “Learn more about service” link would be provided.

That’s quick, simple and to the point.  One page, all options available.  Instead, NetSol is afraid that if they don’t shout the features and prices at you in a full page ad, you might not take them up on their overpriced services.  In the virtual world as well as the real world, overselling, overhyping, and shouting drives me out the door.

Farewell, Network Solutions.

The Quickening II

Posted by on December 18, 2009 No comments

Like a bad sequel, I get to continue a story that should have ended.  As I discover some things in Quicken I don’t like, I check the opinions of blogs and Quicken’s own support forums and I am saddened by what I learn.  I guess none of my gripes are new, but they are mine.

I’m sure I’m going to have lots of fun matching transactions as time goes on.  I’m convincing myself that the real numbers matter starting next month – a fresh month of a fresh year.  But right now things are off.  One of my accounts had to have an adjustment posted to make it match with the last bank statement.  That worries me.  As I cleaned up the categories for my transactions, I found that when I would categorize a transaction as a transfer, it would helpfully create the other side of the transfer for me, duplicating a previously-downloaded transaction in another account.  So with all the credit card payments I categorized, I suddenly had a massively negative balance in my checking account.  More cleanup…

As I worked through these various screens I found myself missing a Microsoft standard: the Back button.  I remember years ago when I tried out the Zune at Staples, I thought to myself, “MS loves the Back button.”  The Zune has one.  And you know, it is the easiest concept for anyone to understand.  I also was a little weirded out at how some screens are windows of their own and some are in the main window.

And continuing with UI issues, I found the little things to be the most annoying.  Like being unable to resize columns.  The text in a column is truncated, but you can’t expand the column to see it.  You have to mouse over each row to see the tooltip.  I’m slowly getting used to Quicken’s way of doing subcategories – using a colon.  Money had that format as an option, but I turned it off.  The UI, overall, is definitely from another line of thinking – and not very much in line with Microsoft’s design recommendations.  I’ve had the argument before about how being consistent with Microsoft design helps a user understand your application quicker.  The additional time it is taking me to understand how Quicken works is a fine example of this.  Holy crap, I just discovered that some (4) popup windows I thought had closed actually didn’t.  They’re in a pseudo-taskbar at the bottom of the main window.  Good god.

Now the bigger issues.  The biggest being that the filtered view in the register does not maintain the proper running balance.  It shows a running balance of the transactions shown.  This makes the filtered view useless, but Quicken users have been living with it since the feature was introduced.  That’s nearly a deal-breaker, but I’m going to stick it out.  The other big one is there is no transaction entry form (that I can find).  You have to enter all your info directly in the register.  This brought back a very distant memory of when I first used Quicken and I didn’t like that method of entry.  Money provided a more presentable form for entry and it was a significant selling point.  Money also allowed the option to enter transactions Quicken-style.  Funny how Money tried to implement a more Quicken-esqe experience and ended up being the one that failed.

I feel a bit sad that Quicken is now the only major player in this software category.  Mostly because I know they can never make the changes needed to satisfy the MS Money crowd without ruining the experience of legacy Quicken users.

The Quickening

Posted by on December 17, 2009 No comments

So I’m at the 7th and final stage of grieving: acceptance.  I have accepted that Microsoft Money is gone and will not be coming back, so I must move to Quicken.  It’s not without trepidation that I purchase Quicken and try to recapture the enjoyment of tracking my finances with a new program.  I had used Quicken a long time ago and was not as pleased as I was with MS Money, which is probably why I’ve used Money for over 10 years.

So I’ve gotten Quicken Deluxe 2010 installed and the first thing that pisses me off is that it has put icons on my desktop.  Not just one icon, which is tolerable, but 4.  One for the application and three sales pitches.  This is a terrible first impression.  One shortcut is to a co-branded version of FreeCreditReport dot COM – one of the biggest scams out there.  One is for their BillPay service, at $10/mo.  Even Wachovia, a premier bank, only charges $6/mo for integrated BillPay.  Unless Quicken doesn’t have 2-way integration with Wachovia, which is practically a dealbreaker for me.  MS Money had it. (Turns out, yes, Quicken does support online payments through Wachovia)  The final offer is for a typical rewards credit card provided by Chase.

First Launch: I am prompted to “Get Started”.  I have to enter my banks and their login info so Quicken can download transactions and whatnot.  I’m mildly impressed.  In MS Money, this was a separate step after setting up accounts.  It picks up my Wachovia account without a problem.  Then I do my Chase account.  Oops, there was a problem.  It says to try again later.  So I think, “Maybe it should be entered as a WaMu account, since that’s where it was originally opened.”  Nope.  Not found there.  It’s later now, so I try again under Chase.  Quicken crashes.  Ok, my impression of this program is sinking fast.

Second Launch: I get all of my accounts set up.  And I am quite impressed with how well it handled ALL of my accounts.  If I had a login for it, Quicken handled it.  I got my loans entered and the wizard was pretty easy to work through.  I browse through the preferences and set a few things to my liking, like two-line registers.  Now, I am downloading transactions for an account that doesn’t have real-time transaction updates.  And it’s frozen.  However, I was able to close the window (X) and it seemed to be a successful update.  We’ll see how that turns out on the others… ok, three of the four I had to close the window, but they seem current.  Not sure of this is going to be an annoyance or it’s just a fluke.

I’m going to give it an honest try, since I have no other choice, really.  I’ve tried GnuCash and that was definitely a step down.  So we’ll see how quick things get.

The “have it” habit

Posted by on December 1, 2009 No comments

At dinner tonight, I had the opportunity to train a new employee.  Not directly, but because nothing I ever do is simple, they got to experience exceptions to the order-taking routine.  At the close of the transaction, I was going to say something to the effect of “Enjoy your employment, lucky person” but decided against it.

As I ate, I considered this a little further.  I’m (still) employed.  I’m doing ok.  But at the same time, I’m a responsible employee and a quick learner.  I could have that job!  And since I’m still employed, I’m more desirable to employers because it shows I can keep a job.  I should have that job.

But what kind of flack would I take for doing something like that?  I’d be taking jobs away from someone who really needs one.  “You already have a good job.  Stop hoarding the jobs, jerk.”  This transitioned my thinking into class warfare: the “have’s” and the “have not’s”.  I think this needs revision.  It’s the “have not’s”, the “have enough’s” and the “have more’s”.  See, I want to advance from “have enough” to “have more”.  And I could, because I’m not currently in the “have not” crowd.

But like I said, that’s not really fair.  The rich get richer, as they derisively say.  I would be suppressing the “have not’s” – the class below me – from advancing to the “have enough’s”.  So, in order to spread some of the wealth, I will take that job.  And another.  And maybe another.  Then I will outsource my jobs to another person who could not get the job on their own.  Wait, it’s not really outsourcing, is it.  Insourcing?  No, not that either.  No, it’s reverse subletting.  I am going to sublet my jobs at a lower wage and take the difference as a “convenience fee”.  It works for property, why not jobs?

But as usual, I’m so far behind the times.  Of course, this is already done with day laborers, contract positions, and other temporary positions.  But those are all handled by businesses.  Businesses run by rich people.  The “have more’s”. Once again, I’m getting held back by the man.  It’s so hard to get ahead anymore.  Woe is me.

Philosophical Murder

Posted by on November 27, 2009 No comments

Man: “I can’t date a woman who smokes.  Do you smoke?”

Woman: “Only on a rare occasion.”

Man: “Then you mean to say yes.”

Woman: “Ok, wiseass.  I can’t date a man who has killed another person.  Have you killed anyone?”

Man: “Gee, I don’t know.”

How would you know?  I let that big SUV cut in front of me on the highway.  Did that give the driver the extra time needed to get to where that pedestrian was run over by a big SUV?