I didn't think it was possible, but I believe that we actually resolved all of my Quicken upgrade tech glitch issues. This might not sound like much of a reason for glorious celebration to you, but believe me, if you had seen all the numbing problems we had to deal with (and "we" included the great tech support guy, Kelvin), and the number of times Kelvin said, "Hmmph, I've never seen that before," you'd be overjoyed and stunned, well. Round Two started early this morning, when he called from South Carolina at 7:15 AM -- not to worry, it was pre-arranged, so I was expected it -- and it took another 2-1/2 hours until we fixed it.
That makes it eight hours of phone tech supports the last two days, and this doesn't count the two hours I took trying to track down the problem in the first place, before waving the white flag and calling tech support. (You can read Part One of the story by clicking here. Or just scrolling down to the previous tale...) This was really a total tsunami. And it wasn’t anything I did wrong when upgrading – at one point, for instance, Kelvin uninstalled all versions, did an additional clean-up of them, downloaded a new version directly from Quicken, and re-converted fresh, clean data files I had happily backed up on Saturday. [NOTE: Always back up!!] And yet with all that, it still was horribly screwed up. In fact, he couldn’t log in with his own name and password. I won't even begin to describe the bizarre, horrific mess. Tons of huge problems I didn’t think would ever get resolved. The big one this morning we dealt with was that that my checkbook didn’t carry over the running balance for most items, so they were blank, and my ending checkbook balance was several trillion dollars. (I could only wish…) We finally tracked down several hundred anomalies, which we "zero’ed out," figuring I’d have to reconcile the account later. (Once again, as with yesterday, “Hmmph, I’ve never seen that before,” he said. And so I explained to him the Why Me, Lord Syndrome.) I had one hope – because these anomalies didn’t make the slightest sense, I had the feeling that they all get entered into my checking account by mistake and were, in fact, zero entries. After we deleted the very last one, I then checked the balance…and it was right to the penny! O freaking joy!!! But here's one example of something which was a huge problem but could have been resolved easily with a better design – it picked up “Bill Reminders” from 2003, which sounds okay, except that (get this...) it actually carried them ALL over from the intervening 13 years! And there was no way to turn it off. You could turn ON Bill Reminders with one click, but you couldn’t turn them OFF. You had to delete each one manually. And there were 1,500 of them!! (There’d have been more, but that’s the limit Quicken will save.) Never mind that the dollar amounts it was reminding me of were bizarre, like in the tens of billions of dollars each! Really. And because there were 1,500 reminders, it used up SO much memory that it kept freezing up the program for 15-20 seconds after each deletion. We did it one…by…one. At the end, I offered a suggestion – “In the next version of Quicken, how about if they add an option to turn off Bill Reminders with one click…” He agreed that that would be a good one. After 20+ years of Quicken, I'm boggled that this was never something they did, Believe me, this didn’t touch even touch the surface of the problems, which I really thought could be unfixable. And which was mind-numbingly disconcerting when I though all my finances were screwed up at best or lost at worst. But Kelvin really was wonderful, and after eight hours got it all resolved. By the end, we – honestly – had developed a great rapport, and he said he was sending me his email and work phone, if I had any problems in the future. (I think also he appreciated that I never screamed at him and told good stories. And that I'd actually worked on a movie in Columbia, where he lives. Staying Together with Sean Astin, Dermot Mulroney, Daphne Zuniga and others, directed by the actress Lee Grant. Plus, we had so much time that we got into discussion the upcoming South Carolina primary. They're already being bombarded by TV ads, he says.). So, Kelvin was great. And the program now will hopefully run just fine. I've always good a fine experience with Quicken. But WHAT A DISASTER getting there. I'm absolutely certain that this isn't even close to typical, and that usually it goes smoothly. But a very-techie, knowledgeable about such things friend said to me that Intuit/Quicken has a reputation for sloppy software. As I said, my experiences before today have been good. And the company clearly has a huge user base, so people tend to like the products. But...this was just horrible. But it got resolved. Thanks to Kelvin. I've written already to his supervisor. He was a gem. The only thing I'm still really upset about is that that whole several "trillion dollars" in my checking account wasa glitch, too, and didn't pan out.
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The glitch that's keeping me from logging into my website account is still ongoing, but from what I'm reading online and experiencing first-hand it appears to be limited to the Chrome browser and may Edge. But I i'm able to access things using Firefox, which I'm using now (as well as the aforementioned Android tablet version of Chrome.) So, hopefully at least this will work when I next check in, and I'll be back up and semi-running.
[Update: I am writing this sentence in my Chrome browser, so hopefully it appears that the issue has actually been fixed. My fingers are crossed -- which makes for more difficult typing.] But this was easily the far-least of my tech issues on Thursday.. There is a condition that I have named, The "Why Me, Lord?" Syndrome -- or WML, as several of my friends have given it a shorthand name, since I seem to come up with it so often. (One example. I was flying back from Europe, a 12-hour trip, and the entertainment console in front of me had a glitch where by it was being controlled by the remote for the person in the seat next to me. And hers by mine. But because of the logistics, I was able to lend her mine, so she was covered for the journey, but I...was not. The flight attendant said that he had been flying for 12 years, and this was the first time he'd ever seen this problem. I introduced him to the concept of the "Why Me, Lord?" Syndrome. He loved the name, and for the rest of the flight kept referencing it. My other problem today was less adorable. In fact, it's infuriating. I don't have it in me to give all the details -- and even if I did, it would take too long. But this is the simple version -- I upgraded my Quicken 2003 today to Quicken 2016. The old version did everything very basic I needed, which is why I never upgraded it. But in the morning I wasn’t able to print out reports, which I was trying to do for year-end taxes. After a couple hours of trying to fix it, the common resolution I read online was, alas, time to upgrade. And so I did. The instructions required a few steps to convert the file format, but they were were easy and straightforward. And then everyone went haywire. And after 5-1/2 hours on the phone with tech support (seriously) – peppered continuously with his, “Hmmph, I’ve never seen that before…” – the fellow finally had to hang up because (being three hours later on the East Coast) his day was over and he’d have to call me back tomorrow! So, the problem is still unresolved. Though there still were problematic issues, the program was at least installed. So, left to my own devices, I tried to play around with Quicken a bit on my own to see what I could get done, and -- well, let's just say it's even more screwed up than I thought. Some recent data is missing (though happily most is there), but it runs horribly and tends to freeze up at most anything, continually getting “Not responding” error messages. (As I said, I’m leaving out all the specifics. Just know that it’s deeply mucked up, and the tech guy eventually had to bring someone else in to assist, and together they boy kept saying, “Hmmph, we haven’t seen that before.”) One example they haven't seen. Quicken sets "Reminders" of when payments are due. For whatever reason, it is showing "Reminders" ongoing since 2003. Over a thousand of them. And it slows the program to near-uselessness. Which has brought about one of the, "Hmmph, we haven't see that before." Most "Why me, Lord?" Syndrome occurrences are annoying. Risking all one’s financial data transcends that and has no whimsy to it. WML… Sorry, but we're having a big tech problem with the service provider of this website. I can't get access to the blog editor and only got in through my tablet. I'll keep trying. Updates as they occur...
The other day, I wrote about the wonderful current issue of Written By, the magazine publication of the Writers Guild of America. They have a special issue centered around the "101 Funniest Screenplays" list that the Guild put together. I linked here to a terrific interview with Woody Allen, and this another very enjoyable piece on Mel Brooks, called "Where Did He Go Right?" (which is an anguished lament from the film, The Producers, when Max Bialystock tries to produce a disastrous flop and intentionally does everything wrong, but the musical turns out to be a smash hit.) The article, written by Lisa Rosen, began as a look about at all of Brooks's career, but though he does talk about a lot, it focuses far more on the history of The Producers. What I particularly liked about the interview, and found most fascinating for two reasons, is that Brooks talks about the involvement of Alfa-Betty Olsen. That's the first fascinating thing, since it's something he rarely does (though has on occasion). It's always been "Mel Brooks's The Producers", indeed something he won the Oscar for, as Best Original Screenplay. So, it's intriguing to hear him address her participation, especially in the official publication of the Writers Guild. The other reason is the "mystery" of what her actual participation was. There has been a certain group of thought that her work was significant, even to the point of coming up with the idea or writing much of the script. It's certainly possible, though I've always suspect it hasn't been significant to that level, since for a work this tremendous, her resume is deeply limited and seriously uninspiring. That alone isn't even close to "proof," since a lot of very talented writers have scant produced credits and just weren't able to get other projects off the ground for any number of reasons. But completely unrelated to his reference to Alfa-Betty Olsen is an earlier part of the interview where he talks about the history of The Producers. And that's something I've never heard him talk about, and it added other very important pieces of the puzzle. For starters, Mel Brooks gives the name of the producer he worked for earlier in his career, which gave him the idea for the story. I've heard him talk about the man numerous times,but I've never once heard him give the name. Here he does -- Benjamin Kutcher. From there, Brooks talks about writing it first as a novel, but the people he gave it to found it mostly dialogue, and suggest he turn it into a play. Which he does -- but the producer Kermit Bloomgarden (who did The Music Man) was concerned that it required far too many cast members and sets. And he suggested it be turned into a movie. And so Brooks wrote another version, this time as a film. And after that, that's when he brought in Alfa-Betty Olsen, largely (so he says) for her opinion on what worked and what didn't. I have no idea if that's what her participation was, or if it was more. But given that Mel Brooks on his own wrote The Producers as a novel, a stage play and then a film script, it seems pretty clear to me that the story was absolutely his, as was the foundation and structure. This is not remotely meant to diminish Alfa-Betty Olsen's participation, but to put it in a more rounded perspective than I've ever seen it before, along with her own credits. She likely had a valuable part to play, given that Mel Brooks does bring her up. But it seems likely to me that Mel Brooks deserves his sole credit. As I said, the article deals with more than just The Producers, and a wider spectrum of his career, and you can read here. And here he is receiving his Oscar for Best Screenplay. It's presented by Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles -- the latter of whom decides to horn in on Mel Brooks's moment and almost mucks it up, but Brooks is able to politely not let him. Over on Mark Evanier's website a few weeks ago, he embedded an advertising video for a British eyeglass company, Specsavers, that features John Cleese recreating his joyous Basil Fawlty character, in an homage to a classic bit from the show. You can see it here. But here below is Cleese doing a short interview on the set of the ad, talking about Basil and the Fawlty Towers show. It's been six months since Windows 10 has been released. And a couple of months ago, Microsoft sent out a major update package to further enhance the operating system. According to the company, Windows 10 has been installed on 200 million systems. If you're interested in how it has fared up to this point, my pal Ed Bott has a terrific look at where things stand.
Most of the ZDNet column, which you can find here, is extremely accessible to understand for most users. In the few areas it isn't, he notes that this probably won't be clear to most people (including most tech writers...!). but then explains what it means. And most of those techie parts related to something I like about the article -- Ed notes that most articles about Windows 10 only related to the consumer end, which is understandable because it's most of the users, and also most tech writers are consumers, not IT professionals at corporations. But a very large part of the Windows 10 user base is business-related, so he addresses that. It's very valuable to know about and interesting to read -- but if you don't care one whit about such things, it's easy to just skip those parts. Anyway, it's a good, easy look at Windows 10 today if you've been using it -- or even if you're still thinking about upgrading. What works well, what additions are important, what needs improving, and what's still missing. And how it's different from Windows 7, for all its surface similarities. Overall, he's very positive about Windows 10 (as am I), but it's a good, objective look at things. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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