The mail brought the yearly upgrade offer for Quicken; normally, I rise to the bait (either by mail or in-store), but this year, from all that I’ve read, there’s not much new in the program, certainly not enough to warrent the upgrade price.

What is the price?  Well, that’s an interesting question.  If I were to accept Intuit’s “Preferred Customer” offer, I’d pay $59.95 plus $3.50 for shipping plus sales tax, minus a $20 Preferred Customer rebate (assuming I follow the simple instructions and they actually get the coupon).  On the other hand, I could go to Fry’s and pay $59.95 plus sales tax and take advantage of the advertised $20 rebate — hey, I come out $3.50 ahead that way!  And I think it’s even cheaper at Costco, though there’s always the danger of leaving there with an extra forty pounds of Cheerios or something like that.

So I wonder why Intuit feels the need to play these games — why isn’t the “Preferred Customer” price lower than the in-store price?  And why do they play the rebate game, especially for people buying directly from them?

Preparing for the Gala

Shir Hadash is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and the 10th year for our current Rabbi.  As part of the celebration, there’s going to be a black-tie optional gala next month.  So last week, Diane went up to San Francisco with two of her friends to buy gowns for the gala — they were there all day, had late lunch at the Cheesecake Factory (they did bring back dessert, and it was good) — all in all, it was a Major Shopping Event (and even then she had to take the gown to be shortened a little bit).  Today, I went to President Tuxedo next to the Japanese fast-food place, spent seven minutes picking out a tux, five minutes being measured, and we were on our way.  I think I like my end of the deal better.

Car Envy?

Diane Reese‘s family got their new Prius — it looks wonderful on the Web, and I look forward to seeing it (and probably not hearing it) next week. We’re beginning to think about replacing Diane’s car in the next year or so (it needs a ring job, at the very least), and the Prius seems like it might be a good car to consider.

I’ve spent basically all day today getting my new, improved, faster, whiter, brighter, and less-filling computer configured and set up.  Was that the most useful way to spend the day?  Almost certainly not, but I couldn’t resist the temptation!

Oh, I did manage to submit an expense account, so I guess I got something productive done despite myself.

Shabbat Shalom!

We’re having our living room painted next week.  As part of the preparation, Diane decided that it would be a good idea to clear out some of the bookcases in there, so that the painters can move them without spilling the books all over the floor.

The first two bookcases were easy — everything went into boxes.  But then she got to the bookcase containing old textbooks, and decided that maybe we didn’t actually need to pack and unpack books we hadn’t looked at in 25 years.  It was easy to get rid of Mills’ Structured Programming and Kohavi’s Switching and Finite Automata Theory, and we decided we only needed one copy of Kernigan & Richie’s The C Programming Language instead of the four we had, but I couldn’t bring myself to discard Resnick and Halladay’s Physics because of the Pierce quote about Maxwell’s equations, and Diane decided to keep the Cress/Dirksen/Graham Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV because of the picture of the punched cards on the cover.

Unfortunately, our recycling company won’t take hardback books, so I have to throw out these treasures.  *sigh*

Diane Reese has just pointed out that I might be able to sell these books on eBay rather than just dumping them out — it’s worth a try. Let’s see, now…”rare collectable treasures from the early days of computer science”…yeah, that’ll work!

Well, somebody is trying to sell the Watfiv book, but so far, without any success.  Perhaps I shouldn’t make this part of my retirement planning after all.

More chocolate ranting

I owe Nestle an apology; the Frigor Noir is 46% cocoa, not 44% as I stated yesterday.  I still think it’s artifically bitter.

Oh, I got a new computer…

But Tom Digby is right about its value in the cosmic scheme of things.  Despite that, I am certainly impressed with how quickly a 1GHz machine can boot up Windows 2000, and depressed about how often I had to do so today.  But maybe it’ll get better after I finish setting it up and put it to productive use. 

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?  It’s not really that bad — I shipped my old slow laptop back East this afternoon so it could be put to use by someone else (who, I hope, is not reading this article and won’t be upset about getting a third-hand machine). 

Artificially dark chocolate?

A friend came back from a trip to Switzerland today, bearing the obligatory chocolates for consumption by those of us who stayed behind.  One of the brands he brought was Nestle’s “Frigor” — when I tasted it, I thought it was too bitter (like the 77% cocoa bars I’d tried to eat in Switzerland two years ago), and so I was surprised when I looked at the label and found it was only 44% cocoa.  I wonder how they make it so bitter with so little cocoa?

If you’d like to try it for yourself, Swiss Luxury Chocolate will happily sell you a box.

WYSIWYG editing in Manila

This evening when I went to edit this page, I found myself looking at the old Manila edit control — the one which shows you the tags.  Since I am, after all, a trained HTML professional (I was a member of the original HTML ERB at W3C, back when we were standardizing HTML 3.2), it would have made sense for me to stay with that version; tags don’t scare me at all.

But after typing in a couple of paragraphs, I went to the preferences menu and chose the WYSIWYG control.  There are times when I want to work close to the metal and hand-craft my HTML — but those times are rare.  Most of the time, WYSIWYG editing is more than adequate — now, if there were just some shortcuts for the tags I use most often (like <h4>), I’d be in hog heaven!

I’m on a brief break at the conference and thought I’d flip my page while I had the chance.  It was going to be a longer break, but it took me much longer to set up the connectivity than I’d expected.  It’s good to be a trained professional who doesn’t read instructions!

Another presentation bites the dust

I’m not sure that my presentation (on the Next Generation Internet — see http://www.ibm.com/NGi for more) necessarily matched the audience of this particular conference, but they laughed at the jokes and not at the rest of the talk, and I even got a question or two afterward, so I guess it was a successful talk.