Pretty Stupid For a Smart Guy

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!