Recently I took a business trip to Chicago to visit several clients.  While there, I had to rent a car from Hertz, rather than the usual Enterprise Rent-a-car that I prefer.

Here are the reasons I won’t be renting from Hertz again:

1) Much more expensive than Enterprise.  It was between $20 and $40 per day more expensive with Hertz.

2) “Top up” fuel is crazy expensive.  If you don’t bring the car back full (or don’t pay for the suckers game of buying the tank of gas and returning empty), the charge to fill up the car (or even just top it up) was nearly $8 per gallon!  I didn’t pay it (brought the car back full as per usual), but it was really an offensive number.

3) And the item that breaks the camel’s back: If you happen to get a violation in the car, of any kind, they will charge you an extra $30!  So I got a parking ticket (not unusual in Chicago) and pay it within a day or two of receiving it.  More than a month later I get a bill from Hertz saying that since there was a violation, I’m being charged an extra $30.  For comparison, I’ve gotten parking tickets before while renting from Enterprise and never received any additional billing.  And no, I’m not a serial violator, but when you’re with a client, you don’t necessarily want to race out to move the car.

So there you are.  Hertz is now on my boycott list.  Hope they enjoy the time there with their Days Inn companion.  As an update, I’ve spent dozens of nights in hotels since the Days Inn fiasco, and I have yet to stay at another one.

I just stumbled across this page.  Take a few minutes and read through them.  Good stuff.  Hopefully the right to bear arms won’t be too restricted over the next few months.

After all, gun control means putting three bullets through the same hole at 100 yards.

I cannot believe they let this slide.  We have QB installed on one of our network servers, and when we try to create an accountants copy, it fails to create it.  In the event log there are errors from QuickBooks, and one of them points to some random directory on our E: drives.  The problem is, none of our computers use E: drives!  So I'm not surprised that it cannot find that drive.

We tried this on multiple computers and finally had to go find help on it.  It turns out it's a bug in QB, but they're not exactly forthcoming about it. 

The solution is to copy the QB directories from the server onto a desktop and generate the accountant copy from the desktop. Of course, in order to keep your house in order, you then need to copy the desktop copy back to the server.  Make sure you have backups!

Here's a link to one of the conversations: https://community.intuit.com/atc/post/show_mini/coVidceBmr3zw9abTJhmjm?help=true&show_answer_button=false&show_comment_button=false&tags=tag305

Combine this with the inability for people to effectively print things such as reconciliation reports due to a problem on Vista 64 and I'm really wishing for either a better accounting program, or for Intuit to get off their collective asses and fix their software.  There are a set of steps to go through to fix the Vista 64 printing problem - go look at : http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/knowledgebasearticle/1007856

Software sucks.  Have a great day!

Another Tampa Code Camp is in queue.  On Saturday December 6th, starting at 8am (registration at 7am), Keith and others (Joe!) are putting on another code camp.

As per last time, I'll be doing a session on CRM, focused on client side programming.  Of course, with only 60 minutes (including time for Q&A) there's not much time to go into what should take days, but what the heck, I'll load up on caffeine and power through it.

There are also sessions on everything ranging from WCF to DotNetNuke to Understanding Lamda Expressions (bahhh?  Oh wait, that's a Lambda expression...).  Take a looksee at the agenda and come check it out.  It costs nothing, and your payment is fully refundable if you're not happy.

In a recent update of Gmail, Google has added themes.  While dorking around with the available themes, I discovered "Terminal."  As an old school geek, this really takes me back.  Try it out, you'll either love it or hate it!

I dropped off my XBox 360 at the UPS Store this afternoon.  As this is the third time I've had to send the unit back in two years, I thought I'd make a joke as I walked into the store (we have a mailbox there, so the guys there know me).  Brandishing the unmarked box I walk in...

"I bet you can't guess what's in here..." says I.

"Oh sure.  Sixth one today." says him.

Yeah, six 360's dropped off today alone, and this is in a small suburb of Tampa, not anywhere near the "heart" of Tampa (wherever that might be).

Wow, MS really screwed up on this version of the XBox!

I am *so* pissed.  Like everyone else, I installed the next generation user interface on my XBox when it came out.  It look pretty good, and the Netflix setup went smoothly (I already have a Roku so I knew what to expect).

Unfortunately, ever since the upgrade, the machine has been locking up.  At first it would play a game for a few minutes, then die.  There are real "intensive" games like Zuma and Jewel Quest - in other words, the machine isn't even breathing hard.

This evening, it locked up several times before I could even get into a game to test it.  Then it locked up while signing into XBox Live.  Then it locked up before a user interface could come up at all.  Now it just gives the red ring of death. 

The best part is, when I call support, I'm going to have to go through all the stuff about where my XBox is located ("no, it's not buried in a shag rug"), the power situation ("what do you mean it *shouldn't be connected to a UPS?!") and all the other hoops they make you jump through when in fact, the update broke the damn machine.

Go look in the XBox forums for more people experiencing the same thing, or Google for it.

If I have to pay to get this thing repaired I'm going to be super disappointed.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with no.  No mention of them wanting money.  I brought up the RROD and they immediately started the repair process.  They say that it can take 2-3 weeks to repair.  Ouch.

I'm not happy, but at least I didn't have to fight them.

I did it!  After many months of keeping my inbox down to around 40-50 items, I have finally reached nirvana - no items in the inbox!

Now of course the trick will be to keep it down to that.

Keep your fingers crossed, and don't send me email just to try to fill up my inbox! :)

1 - if John McCain wins, under no circumstances will this be accepted by the losing side.  Plan on screams of stolen elections.  I don't think McCain will win, but if he does, oh boy, prepare for a heck of a show.  McCain said it best in this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ql1RLDVWzY.  It is a hilarious bit.

2 - No matter what they say, they can't "fix" the economy.  Ask Argentina about that, or any other country where the government mucks around with all aspects of the economy.  If the government hadn't basically ordered banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford them, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.  I read a great article in the New York Times this morning that was dated before Bush took office regarding this exact problem.  I can't find the link, feel free to hunt for it!

3 - If / when Obama wins, there will be heck of a honeymoon.  Everything positive that happens over the next 4 years will be to his credit, anything negative will be blamed on Bushychimplhitler.  Just remember, Bush got blamed for 9/11 even though he'd been in office for "only" 9 months.  I say we treat that as the benchmark.  Anything that happens after 9 months in office is the fault of the current office holder.

4 - I'm just disgusted with the whole thing.

5 - Who is John Galt?

When you don't have children, and you don't have much family that is close to you, it becomes quite difficult to figure out what to do with whatever is left after your own death.

In my case, obviously everything goes to my fiancee in the event that something happens to me, but not to her.  However, if something happens to both of us it gets a lot more complicated.  This is really the first time I've given thought to how I want whatever assets I have left to benefit friends, family and humanity.  It's a tough balancing act, and one I'm not sure I can ever be comfortable that I got "right".

In giving some thought to this one thing I want to do a bit of is give something to charity.  That however also turns into quite a bowl of monkeys since so many charities spend so much money on administrivia and not on helping the people they claim to want to help.  This led me to thinking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - clearly they don't need to spend a huge portion of donations on administration, but they are reluctant to take donations and request that you donate directly to the recipients of their grants.  Also any donation I left would probably just be able to pay for their daily coffee bill so... 

<sigh>

Maybe I'll just leave everything to a grant to fund monkey fights or something.

Of course at the end of the "day", if I didn't get it "right" I'll still be dead, so maybe I should set it up so that whoever I leave it to has to perform some really embarrassing task to get the money.  Maybe monkey / human fights!  Yeah, that's the ticket!  Give the monkey a gun and the human a banana and see how it works out.  Woohoo!  I have a plan!

I was happy to see that Regal Honda/Acura apologized fairly quickly (see comments in my previous post) for the misleading marketing piece.  I'll be keeping an eye out on their physical mail to see if they mis-use the "Urgent!" warnings, but I'm still not enabling them to email me again.  I'm not in the market for a car, and I'll get it serviced at the appropriate locations based on the service needs, so their email will just add to the clutter, which is something I'm trying to cut back on!

This morning I received an email titled: "Urgent Service Notice from Regal Honda/Acura".

Thinking that perhaps there was something in there regarding a recall or something, oh I dunno, "urgent" about my TSX, I opened the email.  Of course, based on the title of this post you can imagine that there wasn't anything urgent in there at all.  It was just the usual pitch to bring the car back to them for service, whenever it might be due.

Now they might think this is a harmless bit of marketing, but it resulted in me unsubscribing from their email updates.  Because they were idiots trying to get me to read an email *that I would have read anyway* they have now thrown away that channel of communication.

I like the dealer, and I like Acura, but you cannot abuse that relationship and not expect it to blow back on you.

No link love for Regal because I'm not going to give them that for abusing me.

While I am intrigued by Spore, despite the mediocre reviews, I won't be buying it.

Unfortunately, EA has decided to put really draconian DRM onto Spore.  Now, I can understand what they're trying to do (although we all know that every single game that has ever had DRM on it has been cracked virtually immediately), but they've taken it one step too far.

When you "purchase" Spore, you're allowed to install it up to three times, and if necessary, you could possibly call on them for a fourth install.  This doesn't sound too bad, because after all, you won't need to reinstall it all too often.

However, even if you uninstall it, you DO NOT get an installation back!  This is just stupid.  For example, let's say I install it today, and then a month from now, I need to reformat my hard drive (let's say I want to install Vista).  Well, most games will give you back an installation count if you uninstall.  After all, they "know" you're not running it on that computer anymore, so why not?  Thanks to EA's stupidity, they do not give that back to you.  So now let's say you rebuild your computer, install Spore and then it crashes, so you restore from a backup and go back to XP.  Gotta reactivate again, thus using up all of your "uses".

I'm guessing EA is trying to prevent resale of the program.  It's a good thing for EA I don't ever resell my games, but a bad decision by them as I won't have their game to even think about reselling.

Sorry guys, no gonna do it.  I'll just play games from companies that don't screw their customers, like Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire.

A few days ago I had to run one of the many Small Business Server wizards on my 2003 SBS server to repair a problem with Internet access.  As soon as I tried to run it, it came up with an error message that the wizard "can only be run on a small business server computer".  Sure, go ahead and run then!

Well, after trying to convince it run by talking to it nicely, I looked around for help.  I didn't find too many posts about it except for those referencing Service Pack 2, but this machine had not been changed in many many moons, so it wasn't SP 2.

Finally I found a reference to Microsoft KB article # 940318.  After downloading and running the hotfix (it took about 2 seconds to run), the problem was resolved.

This is just another one of those mysteries...  But at least I had to deal with it on one of my busiest days of the year.

I just tried to run the Zune software and it went down in flames.  I'm running a theme on my machine that makes the error message look a bit different, but I think you might see the problem here:

In order to troubleshoot, I need to enter that huge URL into a browser and make sure I don't mistype any characters.  That's damn near impossible.  How about making it so I could copy & paste it into a browser guys?!

I was just perusing the Dell web site to get a sense of how much a high end box from them would cost (as opposed to building one myself).  While pricing things out, I noticed that the XPS series of systems come with "Windows Vista Ultimate Bonus".  Hmmm, out of the roughly 73 versions of Vista out there, I don't recall a Bonus edition, so I decided to spend another second to find out what that meant...

Yup, Bonus means that Windows XP Pro is installed, not Vista.

I think that says quite a bit about the view that people are taking about Vista. Much of it isn't warranted, but our own experience says that there are still issues out there.  Microsoft has decided to plow ahead and discontinue XP (and I would too in their position), but obviously a few companies are finding ways around that (until MS closes that door too).

While waiting for a client's server to finish installing something, I jumped over to the Fox news site to see what was going on.  In there, there was an article about the recent ruling that Washington D.C.'s handgun ban was unconstitutional, and the filing of a lawsuit against the city of Chicago to try to overturn their handgun ban.

A large part of the article was about the trauma and losses that people have had to deal with due to handgun violence in Chicago.  Some examples:

"Nine people were killed in 36 shootings during one weekend this spring. The next week, five people were found shot to death inside a South Side home."

"Pamela Bosley lost her 18-year-old son two years ago, when a bullet struck him as he helped a fellow student unload instruments outside a South Side Church."

"Annette Nance-Holt, whose 16-year-old son was killed on a city bus last spring when someone sprayed bullets inside it, was livid with the court's decision."

"If you didn't have the guns, we'd still have our children," she said."

"I'm still trying to figure out who we are more in love with, our children or our guns," she said. "It's crazy. I'm safer being a deer knowing people are hunting you."

Each of these instances are horrible and very, very sad.  However, the thing that I find interesting is that these deaths, and all the many others in Chicago, are happening in a city that already bans handguns! The fact that a city bans handguns does nothing to decrease the number of guns in the hands of people willing to break the law.  If someone is going to rob a store and wants a gun to do it, they're not going to change their mind because having a gun is against the law.

This snippet grabbed from Wikipedia touches nicely on this point:

Don Kates summarizes the consensus reached by criminological research into gun control thus:

"Unfortunately, an almost perfect inverse correlation exists between those who are affected by gun laws, particularly bans, and those whom enforcement should affect. Those easiest to disarm are the responsible and law abiding citizens whose guns represent no meaningful social problem. Irresponsible and criminal owners, whose gun possession creates or exacerbates so many social ills, are the ones most difficult to disarm.

Also

Research comparing various countries' violent crime rates, murder rates, and crimes committed with weapons, have found that legal ownership of guns, including concealed carry guns, generally reduces crime rates

Of course, because of the emotional aspect of gun control and violence, people whose lives have been touched by gun violence will never accept that allowing more people to carry a gun decreases the chance of gun related violence (at least to innocent by standers - it's more likely a criminal will come to an end at the hands of a gun carrying citizen).

And remember kids, gun control means hitting your target (in this case, at 100 yards putting three bullets through pretty much the same hole - the indent to the left is from a pushpin, not a bullet hole):

Joe Healy last night apparently decided that my new nickname is crotchety bastard. Well, all I have to say to that is: "am not!" (even though my IM greeting is now "crotchety bastard".)

Besides, how cute is this - our puppy cuddling with her bunny, and stuck amongst the wheels of a chair so that I can't go anywhere:

If I was crotchety, I wouldn't think this was cute.

Now get off my lawn!

I have a problem with keyboards.  I love trying new ones.  Over the past year I have actually been using a Logitech one pretty consistently, but I keep trying new ones to see if I can do better.

My most recent adventure is with a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 3000.  Unfortunately, I love the feel of the short throw keys and the curved layout.  I say unfortunately because it uses the same old fashioned wireless adapter / technology that has caused me to get rid of other MS keyboards in the past.

As I'm trucking along working, the follow message pops up:

You'd think that I'd be appreciative of the fact that the computer is trying to help me work better - but, I think that the following picture tells the real story:

See that lozenge just past the keyboard to the left of the white speaker?  That's the keyboard and mouse receiver.  Just how much closer does it need to be to get a good signal?  I've got an idea, why don't we build in the wireless receiver into the keyboard.  Then you'd only have the wire to the receiver going into the keyboard!  It's pretty funny - if you look at the MS web site for the product (linked above), you'll see they have the receiver in pretty much the same place.

Not a set up.  No joke. 

Meanwhile I've put over 2.5 million keystrokes on my Logitech MX3200 keyboard with no wireless signal problems, a smaller adapter and I'm still on the first set of batteries.  The main reason I've decided to try this MS keyboard is for the "natural" comfort curve, which should help with my wrists creaking.  We'll see if I can find a good position for the receiver. <sigh>

Over the past few days I've had the pleasure of having Vista Business Professional begin acting very strangely on my system. 

This morning for example, it was incredibly slow.  So slow that just bringing up a Save dialog box in Notepad took over 15 seconds.  But when checking Task Manager, the system was pretty much idling.  I couldn't shut it down cleanly, so I had to force the system down.  What then followed was a two hour marathon of rebooting in order to get Vista back to normal.  It came up several times, but instead of the standard Aero interface, it was Windows Classic - which I could live with.  At the same time though, most services didn't come up, including networking, so my softphone was unable to work.  Many reboots later (each one a 20 minute+ exercise) Vista came back fully, except that the desktop had switched itself to 640x480, from the usual 1920x1200 (easily fixed, but bizarre).

Yesterday morning it had similar problems.

The fact that I cannot reboot the system and expect it to come up properly makes working with Vista a very dicey proposition.

My Windows based phone no longer syncs without me explicitly opening the Windows Device Center.  It used to work.  What changed to make it quit?  Who knows.

Additionally, several times now, in front of crowds or customers, I've had to reboot because Vista (or the Lenovo drivers) weren't recognizing the projector properly.  With the forthcoming Florida Tweener event, I cannot risk having system problems before or during one of my presentations (more to follow on those).

So, I'm kicking off a complete backup, and will be wiping the system and installing Windows XP with SP 3.  Hopefully this will prove to be a more workable and stable system for me.

The shame is, when Vista works, it works very well!  The sleep functionality is great the 9 out of 10 times that it works properly.  The fact that it takes 20 minutes to have my system fully functioning on that 10th time, isn't great.

Oh yeah, one more thing.  At a new client's office this morning we were discussing their system needs and the one thing she cared about was "I don't want Vista".  Microsoft has a real problem here.

I'm off to waste another 6-8 hours rebuilding!