Let's start with support. In January, I had a time entry record become corrupted. Don't ask me how this happened. In fact don't ask Intuit how this happened. Two days of tech support hell resulted in a "we don't know how this happened and we cannot fix it, have the user re-enter their time. We will delete the bad record". Well here we sit in the last week of June and the bad record is still there. So that means every time I have to download time sheets, I have to navigate the bad record, otherwise my download fails. Luckily QuickBooks is intelligent enough to tell me that it failed for some unknown reason. I guess I could call them back, but I don't have 2 days to waste again. Of course, the fun part of always calling QuickBooks tech support, is working through the accents of "Tom in technical support". I get why Intuit ships their support overseas, I don't agree with it, but I get it. But, can't the people on frontline support at least be able to speak English clearly so that we users can communicate our problem, without having to do it 5 times to 3 people?

So, my second latest and greatest cluster F of a problem. Somehow, don't ask me how; I can no longer download credit card charges from American Express. I have scoured the internet looking for possible solutions, and I have tried them all to no avail. If I edit the account in my chart of accounts, and look at the online tab there is a place to put in my Customer Id. If i trey to enter my federal tax id in the format that QB tells me I have to, QB immediately crashes. Of course it wants me to send an error report to Intuit (which I have done, conservatively 10 times), and then simple shuts down. I cannot enable the account for online access, I cannot change the customer id, I cannot import a file from AMEX. There is no way, short of me entering transactions ny hand, of getting my information into my account.

"But, Pete", you say, "Why don't you call tech support?" See the paragraph above that starts with "let’s start with support". I am stuck, there are no alternatives in the market that I can turn to, QuickBooks knows this, and they could care less what me and the hundreds of thousands of other people think or care.

QuickBooks sucks, plain and simple.

Point your IE6 or higher browser to http://www.petermadsen.com/danes

And learn about the many differences between these two great cultures.

Open up Audio MIDI Setup, which is an app in your /Applications/Utilities folder. Verify that the Output sample rate is 44100 Hz, and that all the other settings are correct.

thats it.

I have been trolling for a solution, but did not have much success. I tried reinstalling both drivers and wmp11 but had no success. I was about to give up when I found a post that suggested a tweak to the registry. I hate these types of fixes, but since I was desperate, I decided to try it, and it worked. So if your wmv files suddenly stop playing audio, here is the tweak.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\NodeCLSIDs\{95037DA1-6ED9-4B27-8CFF-9AD3DFB0B2F2}]
"Priority"=dword:fffffffb
"AutoInsert"=dword:00000000
"Name"="WMPlayer SRSWow DMO"

I found that mine was set to "AutoInsert"=dword:00000001"

Changing that to 0 fixed the problem.

Good luck - and please be very careful whenever you are in the registry.

I tried it.

Speedtest.net is a pretty cool web site. If you want to test your access speed, give this a test

Technorati Tags: software

After, using it for a little while over the last 2 days, I can tell you, I don't think it is ready. Yes, Rob correctly stated that it is still part of Google Labs, and so it is not an official release yet, and yes the keyboard support in a web app is cool also, but frankly I think it stinks.

I read my blogs this way:

I subscribe to blogs a, b and c - each one about totally different things. When I am ready to troll through the hundreds of entries that are clogging my rss reader I like to do it by category. For instance, if I want to read about the latest automotive news I will look through Autoblog or BBC Formula 1 news. I use Newsgator and in one second I can quickly see how many unread items I have in a particluar blog - can't do that in Google Reader. Google Reader lets me tag my supscriptions (more work) but still does not let me know how many unread entries I have.

I also like to keep some blog entries for future reference - can't do that in Google Reader.

In its current state Google Reader seems to not understand when I have entered a new subscription. Rob suggested reading the Creating Passionate Users blog. In under 1 minute I had subscribed in Newsgator. Not so in Google Reader. I subscribed, nothing appeared, I re-subscribed nothing appeared, tried a third time and got a message telling me I was already subscribed, yet no postings, and nothing in my subscription list would indicate that this is true.

Finally, why does Google Reader insist on keeping all the unread blog entries I have for subscriptions that I deleted? I have dozens of unread entries that I now have to process.

So in summary, having a web based news reader that is accessible any where is a cool idea, but until it can easily manage my subscriptions, and let me read entries the way I like to with minimal effort, I will not be using it.

Technorati Tags: google, rss reader, software

If you are running your own site I strongly recommend you install this tool, but don't blame me for any poor results you may also be experiencing.

Did I mention that it is FREE?

2. I am a Will Ferrell fan

Do you see where this is going?

Yesterday, I was at the 10:55 am opening of Talladega Nights, and I have to say that both my wife (who is not a NASCAR fan), thought the movie was very funny. It is not a laugh riot, and there are some points where the film is a little slow, but overall it was quite good. My friend Lou and I were surprised that NASCAR would be involved with the making of this movie. If you have seen the trailers, you might think the same. While the film certainly makes fun of the 'good old boy' culture of the south, the racing scenes are actually filmed fantastically. There is one scene, where the camera starts from behind and above the car, moves through the back window, past Rick Bobby, out the front window and ends on the opposite corner above the car. Of course it was all done with computers, but it was still very cool.

The point - the racing is taken seriously - and so it makes sense that NASCAR would approve.

If you liked Old School, or Anchorman trust me you will like this movie as well.

Nick and I both have HI-DEF sony video cameras. My mac is a 17" G4 powerbook, Nick's is a new Dual Core Block Macbook. Nick is going to blog about his experiences in video editing, which I am eager to follow. On my G4, it is absolutely pointless to play with HI-DEF. It takes 4-6 seconds to pull in every 1 second of video. Yep, 4 to 6 seconds. Then actually manipulating the video is painfully slow, and so I have completely given up working with video on my mac. It is a shame, because I have done some work with standard video and actually had a lot of fun doing it. It gives you a great stage for exercising the creative juices, and every time I did play with video, I would learn new tricks.

So, I have an unopened copy of Final Cut Express HD waiting to be installed on a faster computer, and I look forward to reading about Nick's experiences.

If you are into software development at all you must check out my friend Robs new blog.

Rob is starting a new learning experience in Ruby On Rails, and I promise you, you will definitely learn something.

Charlotte North Carolina