The number one rule of business is to not make it hard for people to give you money. Defying that time tested rule, is Intuit with their upgrade path from Quicken 2008 to Quicken 2009. From what I was told if you are trying to upgrade the edition of the quicken (i.e. basic to premium), then you can get the upgrade price from the 2008 version to Quicken Premier 2009. However, if you already own Quicken Premier 2008, you have no upgrade path to Quicken Premier 2009. Instead, you must pay the full price.

So, the message that is being sent to the customer is that Intuit wishes to reward customers that paid them less by allowing them to pay less again. However, they wish to punish customers that paid more previously by having them pay more again. Beyond that, now you as a customer must evaluate whether there are sufficient features in Quicken 2009 to compel you to upgrade from Quicken 2009. There are not. There are some niceties, but not nearly enough over Quicken 2008 to compel one to upgrade. 

Intuit has really been hurting to add compeling features to Quicken over the past few years. There have been some features that were worthwhile like the mutual fund evaluator and a few others but nothing that would compel me to pay for the product as if I never had previously.

So, I go to pay my Southern CA Edison protection money...eh...utility bill today online. The bill is due on 27-MAY so I schedule my payment for 26-MAY. When I submit, I get an error telling me that 26-MAY is not workday. Presumably, this is because of Memorial Day. Who the F!@#$% cares? It is not like there is a monkey in an office somewhere manually submitting my payment, right? So who cares whether the day and hour it is submitted is a workday or it is the middle of the night on New Year's Eve? What business analyst (had to be. I have to believe that the developer would not have implemented this) decided this was a good idea?

So, my machine committed suicide the other day requiring a complete rebuild. In doing that, I re-discovered a dirty lesson about reinstalling all of your software: you have to do it in a specific order. In my case, I had an instance of Access 2000 (bleh), Access 2003 (newer bleh), Office 2007, VS 2005 SP1, SQL 2005 Developer with SP2, Red Gate SQL Compare, and Data Compare, DBGhost, SourceGear Vault and host of other stuff. On installing in the order that I did I got this gem from help within VS:

The selected filter contains an error that prevents it from being applied.

None of help categories were available. Lovely. After a day and half of uninstall/reinstall hell, I finally downloaded the MSDN library from Microsoft and used that. Miracle of miracles, it worked.

It would be peachy if Microsoft issued a tool you could use to ensure that none of the files were corrupt. I had used this very install previous with no problems but now it was suddenly corrupted.

Some of us have use password managers such as Roboform to manage passwords. Since Roboform allows me to generate a random password of any length, I want to know how many characters to make my password when I create a user for a site. Unfortunately, most sites do not tell you the characters allowed much less the the maximum number of characters allowed. When it is a newspaper that does this, I do not care as much but when it is a bank or financial institution it is a true annoyance.

The worst type of annoyance is the site that not only does not tell you the maximum password length nor which characters are allowed, they quietly accept whatever you give them and shove your round peg entry into their square hole system leaving you without the ability to login. For example, I encountered a site recently where they did not set the MaxLength property on their textbox entry. When I entered my randomly generated password, it accepted it and saved it to their database which promply truncated it at its maximum number of characters, also without throwing an error. Logout. Login. Bad Monkey. On having them send me my password (also a bad policy, it should reset to a random password, send that to me and require I change it but that is another rant) and having encountered this problem enough, it was clear what had happened.

I have come to accept that most sites will accept passwords of 10 alphanumeric characters. If they are kind enough to tell me the actual length and characters accepted, then I adjust Roboform accordingly.

Thanks to Scott for finding this.

public static string SayHello(string name)
{
    return String.Format("Hello, {0}!", name);
} 

 

You can read more about it here.

In Southern CA, the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle or Carpool Lanes) are setup with double yellow lines and intermittent breaking white lines which allow for entry and exit. You can only enter and exit carpool lanes during these breaks.

Why restrict when drivers can enter and exit? Who cares when a driver with multiple passengers enters or exits the carpool lane? How is it any different from someone using the lane next to them to pass? If anything, these restrictions add angst to drivers who worry whether they will legally be able to exit the carpool lane before their exit. The rule should be simple: you can enter or exit a HOV lane if you qualify to be in the lane. If you have enough passengers, then use it as you wish. If you don't, you cannot use it under any circumstances barring an emergency. CA spend millions on painting double yellow and in some cases quadruple yellow lines for the perceived worry that cars might use it for a passing lane which ought to be treated no different than any other lane.

By contrast, the Bay Area is far more intelligent about carpool lanes. Their carpool lanes allow for entry and exit by qualifying vehicles whenever they wish. In many cases, they also have time limits on the HOV lanes so that if it is the middle of the day on a Saturday for example, anyone can use the HOV lane.

The second problem with carpool lanes is that their primary purpose is not being served. The primary reason for HOV lanes was to encourage people to carpool and take drivers off the road thus easing conjestion. However, in no way does it serve this purpose if the other passengers are not legally permitted to drive. In other words, the rule should be two or more licensed drivers not just passengers. Thus, soccer moms ferreting their minions should not qualify for the carpool lane.