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Using the well Vodka produces too many headaches

From PC Magazine: Windows 7 Vodka and the Microsoft Hangover: Microsoft can’t change perceptions if it doesn’t get its marketing and PR acts together by John C. Dvorak

Having followed Microsoft’s exploits since its inception, I can safely say the best anyone can hope for with Windows 7 is moderate success. For all of the fanfare surrounding the new OS, Win 7 is really just a Vista martini. The operating system may have two olives instead of one this time out, but it’s still made with the same cheap Microsoft vodka…

What I like about the article, and what many of the commentators missed, was the whole issue of attention to detail. If you can’t form a good sentence and use proper punctuation in marketing materials how can you expect to build world-class software. It really is about a corporate culture lacking in attention to detail. Like building your martini, if you pay attention to detail and spend a little more on quality ingredients you end up with a better result.

I gave up on PCs long ago and have actually saved money by switching an entire household to Mac. No maintenance headaches, no required security updates every five minutes, no anti-virus software and loads of other expensive software. I look at total cost of ownership, not just up-front cost. If TCO is low you win, and that includes the cost of not spending time with your family and friends because something needs fixing or updating.

Christian Witness, Media, Perspective, PNCC, , , ,

The best of the best

Two things I wanted to mention.

Everyone Prays at Holy Etchmiadzin

During the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity our local ecumenical group held its meeting at St. Peter’s Armenian Apostolic Church. Fr. Bedros was the gracious host as always, providing for our needs, both spiritual and material.

Those who read my posts rather regularly might note that I have a great deal of love and admiration for St. Peter’s and its people and pastors (past and present — currently Fr. Bedros, and previously Fr. Stepanos, and Fr. Garen). The parish staff at St. Peter’s generously support our little ecumenical organization by looking after mailing lists and other administrative duties. In addition to all that – they always prepare a wonderful meal.

Fr. Bedros was good enough to provide for a viewing of Everyone Prays at Holy Etchmiadzin. The production was slated for viewing on ABC affiliates across the country. Unfortunately, our local ABC affiliate, WTEN, declined to air the film noting that they ‘don’t do religious programming,’ or words to that affect. The Capital Region lost because of that attitude.

I highly recommend the firm. It has a distinctly ecumenical overtone, and shows the Church as one with its faithful and its communities. One of the most moving parts was the descrioption of the Holy Muron and the visit of His Holiness Karekin II, Catholicos of All Armenians, to the United States. Imagine the Bishop of Rome visiting New Orleans, rolling up his cassock sleeves, and painting homes being built by Habitat for Humanity and you’ll get the picture. The film is available from St. Vartan’s Bookstore for only $20.

The Hours on your iPhone or iPod Touch

As you may have noted, I link to the Universalis site which provides the Liturgy of the Hours. I was pleased to learn that Universalis has published Universalis on the iPhone. The application is rather expensive, but well worth it (as opposed to buying the four volume set of the Hours) and it is reasonable in terms of the convenience the application provides.

It should be noted that a few of the readings for the Office of Readings are still missing, and the application is currently being updated so as to include all the antiphons. The updates are free. The other nice thing about Universalis is that you do not need 3G or Wi-Fi to access any of it, it sits right on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Universalis for the iPhone and iPod Touch (available at the iTunes store) has enhanced my ability to pray the hours wherever I may happen to be. It is convenient, easy to use, and works seamlessly with the accelerometer. If you have an iPhoe or iPod Touch I highly recommend this app.

Everything Else, , ,

Final moves to the Mac

Over the past two weeks I’ve been making my final moves to the Mac. I’ve been running Boot Camp with a copy of Windows XP because I needed to run a few programs. The things I delayed moving to the Mac platform were:

I had delayed in moving these because they had tons of data and take a bunch of work to get moved.

Quicken to Moneydance

The toughest was Quicken. The Mac version of Quicken is notoriously difficult and not everything transfers smoothly. In fact there are no programs out there that convert Quicken data easily or cleanly (i.e., don’t be fooled by anyone’s claims).

The other issue with Quicken is that the Mac version is way past its prime. They keep discussing a new version “coming soon” but I still think that they have not invested enough in their Mac line to make Intuit the software of choice.

In switching you just have to look at the scale of difficulty involved in all the available options and read a lot of reviews, hopefully locating the one that entails the least amount of pain. I chose Moneydance 2008. It took about two days to clean up all the transactions (note that they went back to 1993!!!) In the conversion there was limited duplication of entries. The biggest, most significant problem was with accounts where balances were brought forward from an archiving process in one account (like a checking account) and where the same transactions were not archived in the second account. To clean everything up I created a “Prior Transactions” account and moved the unmatched and duplicate transactions there. At the end I simply zeroed the Prior Transactions account balance. Not very elegant, but it worked. I just have to accept it as a one-off problem. Note too that I did not delete transactions because doing so makes the situation worse. If you have any accounting background think “T” accounts and having unmatched entries.

In the end I am finding Moneydance easier to use than Quicken. There is less in-the way and you get a clearer picture of your financial status. Quicken had simply evolved into bloatware. A lot of fancy bells and whistles that get in the way. Moneydance is simply clean, inexpensive, core Quicken – the Quicken I fell in love with years ago.

Legacy Family Tree to Reunion

Genealogy programs tend to transfer data easily. Gedcom files are the standard and most of the programs on the market, whether proprietary or freeware, export and import smoothly. No problem here. 2,535 individuals, 1,896 families all cleanly transferred.

The Reunion interface is much like the Legacy interface so it lends to a sense of familiarity. I like Reunion’s Mac look and feel. It also makes taking stuff to your local LDS Family History Center or National Archives Centers easier because it ports to your iPod.

Paperport to Yep!

This wasn’t a bad transition. I used Paperport for years, probably going back to version 9 or something earlier. Can’t quite recall. Anyway, I used it to store those all-too-important documents like explanations of medical benefits, bank statements, appliance manuals, etc. It helps to keep the paper down and I really dislike digging through old file folders.

In the newer version of Paperport those items are all stored in pdf format, but the older Paperport files are .max files. Paperport 11 has a batch converter so I changed all the .max files to pdfs. Yep! stores pdfs and is a the sort of application any blogger would love. It used tags to ID documents!!! It is great because you can get to documents through a tag cloud. You can also use as many tags as you like to describe a document. It allows new documents to be scanned in and is really easy to use.

On importing all my existing pdfs it automatically tagged them using the directory structure of the imported files (I simple copied over the “My Paperport Documents” folder and deleted all the extraneous files, i.e., those that were not pdfs).

Others

Publisher is gone – as I noted above I no longer need it. I’ll use iWork (even though I have Mac Office) for all my document publishing needs.

Homescan is the last holdout. They’ve been promising a Mac version of their apps. I hope that they hop on it. Mac users – let them know. Actually I would think that they would want to capture the Mac demographic.

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