Bad Relationships
I have a lot of bad relationships in my life. Several come to mind immediately: American Airlines, Chase Manhattan bank, American Express and few ex-girlfriends and ex-clients. My relationship with my teammate Tom Halligan, while good for so many reasons (including the triathlons), is not good for my relationship with alcohol. No, no I won’t torture you with the details of my 3pm to midnight 9+ hour party like a rock star drinking binge that ended with me passing out on his sofa. (I hope that Scott Hanselman did not just read that.) Apparently at some point I exchanged cell phones numbers/email addresses with the waitress-when did this scene get so high-tech? At least we woke at some point on Sunday and rode 40K in the park (with a lot of stops for water bottle refill).
Anyway, I digress. The worst bad relationship in my life has to be my relationship with Microsoft Outlook, and particularly Outlook 2003 beta 2. This is like one of those abusive relationships that you know that you just have to cut the cord, but you’re just in too deep and you just can’t bring yourself to do it and you continue to live in pain. “You mean so much to me” you say. You have that feeling that there just is nobody out there that you will ever feel the same about. Sounding familiar? I love Outlook 2003 for so many reasons. Tops have to be the preview pane. The new UI is just oh so sexy. The junk filter works like a charm.
So why the love-hate? Well it is slow and crashes a few times a day. I mean, like about 5 times a day, easy. I have traced the source of some of my crashes to the using of Word as my email editor. But since Andrew Brust convinced me that my constant typos are unprofessional looking, I HAVE to use Word integration. I am addicted. See the love-hate?
So what do we do, not install betas? Stop, we are techies you know. But the beta is soooooo good. At the same time it is soooooo bad, so does that just cancel it out? Techies are just so hungry for betas, we will install just about any piece of crap Microsoft gives us. I know that when this is released to the real world, it will rock the house and my constant bug reports to Microsoft even helps that process. So I guess what I am saying is that we are all adults and made the decision to install the betas, so no complaining!
Now isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black…..
9:55:34 AM 
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