I waited through a month of uploading slowly to get a few hundred gigs saved. And I tried to talk to Tech Support several times to find out why I get this rotten behavior from the CarboniteDaemon:

• Hogging CPU while it shows as idle in its control panel
• Shows 0 bytes to back up when there are new files to be backed up (and they even show up as pending back up in the control panel details) — after waiting for DAYS
• Frozen at the same size for a month now, no additional files backed up

At the suggestion of tech support I rebuilt permissions on the drive, etc. No change. It feels like poor quality software, and I’m sorry that I invested all that time setting it up. I guess it’s time to find another backup service. I’ve heard good things about Mozy…

Skepticism.

If someone is telling me about a way to do something that hasn’t actually been completed yet, and they don’t exhibit any concerns or critical wariness about what they’re depending on, I start to feel that they’re 10 years old and shouldn’t be playing with knives, or carrying other people’s money. The fact is, things go wrong in information technology all the time, for many reasons (good and bad). Someone who doesn’t recognize that and incorporate it in their own plans and their communication about them either has limited experience of the real world, or fails to learn important lessons.

Invention

There’s a lot more to say about this, but it brings up an important related point about inventing things in information technology. Invention can be fun, but it is an expensive and typically risky endeavor. If it wasn’t expensive and risky, then everyone would be doing it a lot more and reaping the benefits. Of course, if there aren’t really benefits that balance the costs, then you need to ask why you’re doing it on someone else’s dime. This is a mistake that I see being made all the time by people who have good intentions and work hard, but for a variety of reasons they aren’t challenging themselves about the value of their plans. These days, the software ecosystem is incredibly rich and commoditized for the vast middle ground that most applications fall into, including consumer-facing high-volume web apps. At the very high end, there’s a legitimate need for invention because the problems associated with being Flickr or Facebook or Google aren’t addressed by the rest of the herd.

Whatever that quality is that questions assumptions intelligently, in the service of skepticism about needing to invent something that isn’t the core intellectual property of the enterprise — it’s disturbingly rare.

Wrong.

The phone works as a modem with the cable just fine. Despite T-Mo’s less-than-stellar data network speeds, it’s workable for email and with a little patience the web is usable too. But I just wanted to get rid of that cable. Why? Some rotten misfiring synapse of geek desire. My loss.

About three hours later I had tried almost every combination of Broadcom drivers (they make the BT chipset) up through the latest (.4000 series), all variations of the DUN dialog options (with encryption, without), and still no success. As others before me appear to have found, I can pair with the phone (good luck with that piece of pain) and then get it to dial and connect. But right after the “Registering on the network…” message, I get the dreaded “Error 734″ about the PPP link failing. Take my advice: give up. I am very bad at walking away from problems, but if after 3 hours of really trying it’s still this hard then what it really means is there’s a bigger problem and it’s not worth your time to make bad parts fit together. I’ll stick with my cable for now.

I’ve been a Shutterfly user for years, mostly for holiday cards and occasionally wallet prints for grandparents. It’s been fine. But making a photo book was rendered impossible on top of being frustrating because the software was broken — images wouldn’t show up on the pages once placed so there was no way to see what the pages looked like. The preview mode just blew up without showing anything. I’m running Firefox 2, and this is 2008. QA? I don’t think so.

Snapfish was brutally frustrating because the default layout for a book was a varied layout for the pages so that to get a consistent one-per-page-with-same-background it seems you have to click through each page and set the layout and background manually. I tried the little checkbox for “Apply to all pages” but no luck there. At least the pictures show up as you drag them into place, and adding pages wasn’t too bad. But if you use a picture twice, there’s no indication so it’s up to you to notice. User Experience design? I don’t think so.

As for Ofoto, I was so disappointed in the quality of the printed book I ordered from them a few months ago that I’m not going to give them another chance to show me more poor software.

My daughter suggested that next time we should just print them ourselves and make our own book. She may be right.

I manage my library of MP3s with MediaMonkey, a pretty good app that comes in free and paid versions. I upgraded for faster ripping and some other features, but it’s cheap ($20?). The UI beats iTunes, and it turns out that it handles iPods very nicely as well. I followed this quick note on how to use it with iPods, and it’s easy.

So now I can forget about iTunes except if I want to sync photos or settings, or something. I don’t have to keep 50MB of iTunes library files around, or remember to import from my library to keep it updated.

Much better.

It’s a sad statement when you wish that Windows Mobile would come and eat their lunch.

Ironically, in 1993 I did some software development for RAM Mobile Data, who had packet radio modems built on RIM’s chipset. I built the first Windows and Mac email clients by porting a DOS stack — and got to be one of the few (only?) people in NYC at the time doing wireless email on my Mac and Windows laptops. Blackberry was a ways off, but the RIM stuff worked reliably if slowly. And that’s really the part that still works today — if only they would hire a decent design firm to redo their interface…please.

But here’s the bad news: Google logos start showing up at odd intervals, superimposed on your images. Not all the time, but not acceptable. As with all things Google, it’s a little awkward to complain about free wares, but I’m torn between having it do exactly what I want and not being able to find a way to stop that logo from displaying as well.

I haven’t decided whether to give it up yet, but I’m going to go looking for an alternative. Given that Picasa stores the album definitions in simple XML files in a known location, it shouldn’t be that hard to write something to read through them.