Infinite State

Having just wasted an hour of my evening installing and struggling with Quicken Deluxe 2005, I will only say this: if I worked for Intuit I would be embarassed. It’s an amazingly bad piece of software from a company that used to have a decent reputation. My sales rep will find my RMA request in the morning’s inbox, and I will do my part to let people know to avoid it. Unfortunately, I was swayed by CNet’s high rating for it. I have since discovered that Amazon’s users universally panned it. Now I know where to check for real reviews.

@#!$%

I’m very happy with my new manual USB switch. Now I can share my ergo keyboard and trackball setup as well as other USB devices between my two desktop machines. The switching time is not bad, a few seconds, and so far it’s been solid. Best of all, no software installed on either machine. I’m using the Cables To Go “Port Authority 2″, which beats out my prior Belkin 2×1 unit that lacked a manual switch and required a software agent on each machine.

Walking home up Broadway this evening I saw some fine young men playing with a basketball, pretending to slam dunk on the Walk sign, and I had this idea: Instead of bright orange Gates in Central Park, why not put up bright orange basketball hoops on every streetlamp on Broadway?

About a month ago, the excellent voice recognition in my Tablet PC stopped working. I eventually concluded it was related to a Windows Update because shortly afterwards my wife’s tablet behaved identically, and her updates typically lag mine a little. I wasted a lot of time Googling, reapplying updates, uninstalling and reinstalling Speech components…all to no avail. The consistent faults point to sprseng.dll, about which there is very little information availabile.

This is incredibly frustrating.
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I’ve been looking into the state of software tools that specifically support project management for agile development methodologies (see Agile Alliance for more info). I started (of course) with the free stuff.

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I’m writing this on my Fujitsu Stylistic 5010, which is a pure slate (no keyboard) Tablet PC with a 12.1″ screen and a 1GHz Pentium M CPU. I’ve been using it as my primarily computer for the past 13 months, with a very high degree of satisfaction. I recently wrote up my experience of it for my colleagues in the New York CTO Club, and figured it might be of interest to others.

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