February 22, 2005

Dad and I met out in Perry this morning and ended up spending the morning working until almost noon. He really needed to get some food into him so we went over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant and got some lunch.

I have had to do a lot of work with QuickBooks recently and I have been more and more coming to the conclusion that I really do not feel that it is a good product. From an accouting perspective it does a lot of really good stuff and it is pretty easy to use. But from the technology persective, it is a totally embarrassing product that is, apparently, intentionally bypassing the standard safe guards and backup procedures of the Windows operating system and making itself incredibly unstable so that they can blast you with advertising for their own backup services which you wouldn’t need if they weren’t keeping you from making your own backups. In fact, we are pretty sure that under certain circumstances, the QuickBooks program is actively deleting copies of your files just to make it more attractive to use their “online backup” services. I am really happy that Microsoft is bringing out a competing product later this year. As long as QuickBooks doesn’t give me any option but to be on the Windows platform, I would definitely prefer working directly with Microsoft. If QuickBooks were to consider working on different platforms, I might consider them still – but I really don’t see them removing their heads from their proverbial storage locations quickly enough to keep Microsoft from taking their lunch money and someone else moving into the Linux space leaving Intuit dazed and confused.

We are still having problems with our phones today. This is going to be a never ending issue for us, I can tell. Once you get weird problems like this, they never stop.

On my way back home, I had to swing by dad’s house to pick up the spare routers that were sitting over there. We just found out that my grandmother has lost her hearing and they have started to have to write messages to her because she can’t hear anyone talking anymore. Her hearing has been getting worse recently but we weren’t expecting anything sudden and dramatic like this.

My big project this week is going to be preparing some sort of lesson plan for Min to teach from on Friday. I am going to be busy all day on Friday trying to get as many computers working in Castile as is possible in one morning. I did manage to maneuver some of our equipment around here and come up with a switch that we can use over at the school to at least let Min start teaching this week. We were worried that we weren’t going to have any way to hook up enough computers to really do anything but we are just barely going to have what we need. But she will have to work on the laptop for herself because there just isn’t enough computers for her to use one of the ones that they have.

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