The Wine Commonsewer

National Inventors Hall of Fame

Gentle Readers,

The National Inventors Hall of Fame may not have the notoriety attained by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but as Gentle Reader Ken F points out,

These are many of the folks that brought us from horse and buggy, hand-to-mouth, manual everything, to the high tech world we live in today. These folks deserve the honors, money, and praise that actors and politicians are showered with in our country.

And the wine. They deserve good red wine.

Couldn't agree more.

Wikipedia entry and list of inventors here.

As Always,

The Wine Commonsewer

tip of the glass to Ken F

MS Emulates Big Government

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

TWC has gotten hundreds of requests to revive the world's longest running, floating website. For years it was essentially an email version of this website and eventually evolved into TWC. In many respects the web readership is different than the old email base, which explains the ongoing requests to revive the newsletter, which in the face of multiple spam filters and ISP blocking techniques is a daunting task and reminds me of why the email newsletter went silent in the first place.

Long way around the barn to say that the first effort to fire up the newsletter was for The Wine Commonsewer 2006 Thanksgiving Sermon. It didn't go that well. The formatting was a problem and lots of subscribers didn't receive a copy (some blocked outright and some bounced). But the worst of it were the people that Outlook wouldn't send it to. I came back from Tucson to a terse message and a long list of people that never got the newsletter.

too many recipients 2sm10223110hue

Microsoft is being cagey about it, but apparently one of the recent downloads, er ah, upgrades, for Outlook puts a limit on the number of people you can send a group email to. This is to protect you from spam.

This stroke of software engineering brilliance may as well have come from the government, which is very good at enacting half measures and mandating inconvenience so that it appears to the voting public that something is being done to solve the problem de jur.

Yes, spam is a problem. But the 200 or so big time spammers that account for almost all spam on earth are not using Outlook to send it. Surely Bill Gates knows this.

As Ever,

TWC

Dear Motorola..........

..........if all of your H-500 Bluetooth cell phone headsets have the same identical passcode and it cannot be changed why is there a passcode in the first place?

Inquiring Commonsewers want to know.

As Ever,

TWC

MS Office 2007 at Amazon

Gentle Readers,

Hold the phone. Amazon will release the new Office 2007 for retail sale on January 30, 2007 (approximately).

Prices are, well, Amazon-like, and with no sales tax. Well....Pre-order here.

As Ever,

TWC

If I Had A Job It Would Pay $8.00 Per Hour

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Governor Schwarzengroper will get his wish and likely sign Californicate's new minimum wage bill on Labor Day. TWC isn't sure that this will play politically the way Arnie envisions. We'll see.

The new law bumps the minimum to $7.50 per hour in January 2007 and another $.50 an hour in January 2008 (that's a new rate of $8.00 per hour for you LAUSD grads).

Tom McClintock, who finished a distant fourth in the melee that elected Arnie last time said.....

I can't imagine a more destructive government policy than to wantonly destroy entry-level jobs for people who need it the most. If your labor is worth $6.75 an hour and the minimum wage is $8.00 an hour, you become unemployable. I've never understood why it's better to not have a job paying $8 an hour than it is to have one at $6.75.

A little hyberbole there, Tom. TWC can imagine and identify far more destructive government policies, but it is clear that absent correlating productivity gains, the primary effect of raising the minimum wage artificially is to increase unemployment.

No Productivity Gains + Higher Labor Costs = Unemployment. That's a no-brainer.

Of course, students in public school aren't taught economics and therein lies the problem.

As Ever,

TWC

If You Can't Have Ten, Why Is It An Option?

Gentle Readers,

TWC likes to see a long list of recently used files when I click on file in the MSWord and Excel toolbars. That's because the MS interface to get a file open is clumsy IMO. But, if you click on file, pick one you worked a couple of hours ago, and click again, batta bing.......

I'm working a big project that requires a lot of different excel files right now so I think, let's change the number of files shown in the recently used file list to 10.

Okay, I go to Options and put in the number 10 and I get this:

As Ever,

TWC

How To Hire A Qualifed Employee

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

The Commerce Clearing House Small Business Guide has some slightly more objective suggestions for managing the hiring process here.

As Ever,

TWC

Quickbooks 2005 Installation Fix

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Those of us who advocate a free market understand that the market doesn't always give us the best product at the best price. Anyone old enough to remember the ill-fated Sony Betamax can attest to that (Yes, Mac users will smugly point at Windoze machines and snort in agreement).

In general, markets provide a range of products at varying levels of quality and price with a rough correlation between the two. A steak at Lenny's may be adequate if you're hungry, but it isn't going to be on a par with Ruth's Chris' Steak House (this site makes you hungry). The prices of each tend to reflect the value we place on the quality of each.

That said, Quickbooks is the Denny's of accounting/bookkeeping software. It's decent enough and seems to have improved over time. It is comparatively less expensive and it isn't as difficult to use as some software packages that are superior, such as Peachtree.

One major annoyance is that QB wants you to upgrade every year and sometimes it almost seems as though that bias is genetically hardwired into QB. I suppose it could be more difficult to run older versions of QB than it is and I suppose Intuit could have included an automatic software uninstall function that would purge QB at midnight every December 31, thus forcing everybody to upgrade (I'm thinking fear of a harsh market rebuke is the only reason they didn't).

The Problem

When you try to install QB 2005 (any version) the first thing QB wants to do is install Flash Player 7. If you have a newer machine (or sometimes even an older machine) it is likely that you have Flash Player 9 installed. That triggers the computer equivalent of cognitive dissonance and an install failure. The user is then instructed to go to the Flash site and download FP version 7. Good luck.

This happens repeatedly no matter what strategy you use. Don't waste your time with safe mode or by logging in as the Administrator because neither will work. I'd skip Tech Support at Intuit because they're probably not going to know the answer and if they do they're going to ask for a credit card number.

The Fix

So there you are with your expensive copy of QB 2005 that won't install on your brand new computer, fuming because you figure QB has just snookered you into popping for a 2006 copy.

It turns out that if you go to the Control Panel and then:

click on Add/Remove Programs

click on Add New Programs

Make sure the QB disk is in your CD/DVD drive then.....

Click on the CD or Floppy button and follow the prompts

click to enlarge screenshot

Quickbooks should install without further problem.

Quickbooks Integrated Payroll

I would opt for a different service. QB payroll is clumsy to use and leaves you hanging in the afternoon breeze when it comes to preparing certain state reports. Go with a full service firm that handles all aspects of your payroll, including automatic tax deposits.

I'll spare you all but a summary of the hypocrisy play where in Act I Intuit buys the best tax prep software ever and pulls it off the market to prevent competition with TurboTax. Act II: Intuit's CEO throws rocks at Bill Gates for his alleged role as a monopolist.

As Ever,

The Wine Commonsewer

112 Degrees & SCE Takes A Powder

Gentle Readers,

It's not like we live in some third world burg like Mogadishu, Queens, or St Louis so TWC was not happy that the juice was off at Casa de las Rocas Grande from early Saturday afternoon until well past midnight. Dude, it was miserable hot too. 112 with thunderstorms (lots of humidity but it still wasn't Memphis).

Flex Your Power and Negawatts don't work so hot when most of the Sierra Club is home with their Birkenstocks up on the sofa and the A/C dialed down to 78 (more like 72, truth be told) hoping that Hell's gonna freeze over. I'm down with that though. Especially since a nature frolick this weekend woulda been a literal hike on the Highway to Hell. That'd be okay with that guy in the white F-350 4X though. Had a sticker in the back window:

Just the weekend for it.

I'm pretty sure Californicate is part of the first world and I'm pretty sure that this is the 21'st Century. Absent a drunk driver taking out a power pole, utilities should be able to meet peak demand without resorting to recorded messages indicating that they're clueless as to the cause of the outage but we're workin' on it by gosh.

Col Hogan was mad too.

As Ever,

TWC

Mozilla Firefox Review

Gentle Readers,

I've been doing a non-scientific, one-commonsewer test of Mozilla's hot browser for about a year now. I like it. A lot. 

I like it even better since MicroSoft has bloated Internet Explorer with downloads, hole plugs, and security measures rendering it a somewhat neutered, performance-less slug (remember your ancient 386?).

Although many users (not drug users)  have drifted to  Firefox out of fear of invasion through IE's flaws, that really isn't an issue for me because I have a miniature Israeli military presence at my firewall to discourage unwanted attacks.

With the exception of some government sites that aren't fully compatible, Firefox performs at least as well and generally better than IE. The controls and settings are easier to use than Internet Explorer as well.

To keep it simple I'm not going to do an in depth review as there are many available reviews online and Firefox has received the blessings of a plethora of techie magazines. Suffice it to say that my experimentation has evolved to the point where TWC uses Firefox 90% of the time. Is it perfect? Not quite, but it's on a whole higher level than the competition. I'm sold. 

And it's free. Download it here if you're interested. It's also available in other languages here.

Full Disclosure: Nobody paid me to write this nor did I get any freebies as a result.

As Ever,

TWC