Wednesday, January 15, 2003

11:58:12 PM   Forbes: "Somewhere in Burbank a mouse called Mickey is smiling." [via Scripting News]

11:24:54 PM   " but I also sense that the public is beginning to grasp the scale of corruption that has led to incessant copyright extensions  " - Dan Gillmor:  [via Scripting News]

7:11:52 PM   White Sox acquire Bartolo Colon - Yyyyyeeeessss !

7:10:17 PM   "Peace is also patriotic" - The United States of America has gone mad

4:52:43 PM   Intuit's Turbotax Activation Scheme Irks Users - Intuit sucks.  I've been down this road with them with Quicken Small Business.  They advertise in the software that you can upgrade at anytime, so I bit when I formed the business.  I went through the web process it took me to and paid for the product.  It then proceeded to generate a magic number needed to unlock the software.  As it went to install the new Business portion, it wanted to uninstall the current program.  I stopped at this point and decided backup is very important if it wants to uninstall.  I stoppped the install and backed up all my finances.  I then returned and tried to use the magic code, no luck, must call Intuit.  This is where it gets fun, 30 minutes on hold to find out that it generates a new magic number everytime and I now need to get the magic number and give it to Intuit who will give me another number based on the first number to unlock the software.  I tell them this sucks if I ever change machines.  They tell me it sucks even worse now because their system won't verify I paid for 24 hours so I have now paid, spent a half hour on hold and I can't have or use the software I just paid for.   I warned them this is not a good idea and long time users like me would bail on them.  They are an arrogant Big Co. so they could care less.  Bye bye Turbotax it's been nice knowing you, as for Quicken, this is harder to dump but you can guarantee I am looking at ways to dump it.  Unfortunately, the other option is Microsoft Money.  Which is the lesser of these two evils ?