iPhone

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by g.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

It is here. My company has come through and provided me with an iPhone. It has been a long wait, but well worth it. I’ve already put Google maps to good use navigating unfamiliar areas of London and enjoy being able to get information from the internet while out and about.

The iPhone is an interesting device. Many of my co-workers got phones with technically “superior” features to the iPhone including GPS, G3 and built-in modem. In reality these features aren’t worth much because they aren’t usable. Even basic functions like sending a text message require going to the “start menu” (on a phone? are you kidding me?) and “clicking” 5 times with a stylus just to get to the point where you can get to start with the actual message.

That is where the iPhone excels — usability. What it does, it does well. Browsing the internet, e-mail, navigating with Google maps — and of course the phone basics of making a call, sending a text are all easy and accessible. While there is aalways a desire for a few more features here and there, overall I love having an iPhone.

3 comments.

Will They iPhone?

Posted on November 12th, 2007 by g.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

As K mentioned, my phone dilemma at work is a bit different from hers.

I have been thinking about getting an iPhone for several months. I considered buying one in the States a couple weeks ago, but the UK launch was right around the corner — so I waited. K has been encouraging me to get it despite the fact it is a bit of a luxury. My last couple phones have been very basic/cheap, so it would be a welcome upgrade.

I had talked myself into it and was finally planning to buy one this weekend. I mentioned it at work last week when I learned that my company may be buying everyone phones. And not just phones, but iPhones (our CEO really wants an iPhone too). We are in the midst of finalizing our second round of funding, so we have to wait until that is completed first (and make sure the investors are in agreement). We are a mobile services company, so it is justified, but it could be a month before we know. And, it may not happen.

So, we visited the Apple store this weekend and I drooled instead of purchased. Can I wait another month for a company iPhone? I’ll do my best.

0 comments.

To Blackberry?

Posted on November 10th, 2007 by k.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

The dreaded question has come…Yesterday, my boss asked if I had been given a corporate mobile. I said no and the discussion went on. My boss is great…and was sensitive to the reasons NOT to have a corporate phone (ie the reason I now HATE phones…the fact that if it rings you feel obligated to answer it). In fact, he brought them up first and said not to feel the pressure to get one.
So. I successfully avoided the question with my boss…he was going to let me off without a phone! Then, later in the day, another AD (one that joined 2-3 months ago and hadn’t been offered for some reason) went on and on pitching why HE needed a corporate mobile to my boss—essentially negating my option to avoid one. And it’s not just a phone…it’s a Blackberry. Darn!

But, my boss will still support me if I don’t get one. Though, I think politically it’s best to oblige. Silly over eager, unknowing account people who haven’t yet learned the trap are spoiling the fun for the rest of us :)

1 comment.

The Quicken Death Rattle

Posted on March 25th, 2007 by g.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

The personal finance software program Quicken has served me well for 10 years when it easily supplanted my rudimentary spreadsheet system. Unfortunately, it looks like Quicken’s days are numbered.

Mac Compatibility

In switching from Windows to Mac last year, Quicken was the one program that held me back. There is a Mac version of Quicken, but it is the unloved, red-headed step-child. It is an entirely separate code base, not compatible with anything, has a clunky UI and is missing half of the features of its Windows brethren. To be honest, it shouldn’t even be called by the same name. Of the many lacking features, the missing support for multiple currencies was the show stopper with our our impending move to London.

I spent some time last year reviewing a number of different personal finance options for Mac including, iBank, Liquid Ledger, iCash, GnuCash, and Moneydance. Many weren’t suitable alternatives though a couple showed promise. Not ready to make a jump, I was saved by the release of Parallels which would allow me to run the Windows version of Quicken on my Mac. While not ideal, it has worked well enough and I’d probably continue on in this setup if it weren’t for the other developing problems.

Sheltered At Home

The Windows version of Quicken does support multiple currencies, but I have come to find out that it doesn’t handle them very well. The program choked when trying to import data in Pounds reporting that it was expecting Dollars (despite the fact the account was in Pounds). Reports always default to Dollars and can’t show mixed currencies. However, the most glaring problem that I encountered is their budgeting tool.

All budgets must be in US Dollars. This is a bit of a challenge when we are earning and spending in British Pounds. At best, I could perform the tedious process of translating our budget from Pounds to Dollars, but reading the reports would be like trying to decipher secret code. And the practicality of it is that it is impossible because a change in the exchange rate throws off the entire budget.

Playing Nice With Others

Intuit decided not too long ago that they would stop supporting the file format that has been used for years to import and export data from Quicken and other personal finance programs. While this upset many people, it was replaced with a newer, slicker, standard file format that was supposed to eliminate many of the problems with the older QIF.

That sounds great. Unfortunately, they changed the standard OFX file slightly, dubbed it QFX and only allow importing from this guarded file type. To make it worse, the file format has codes that represent various financial institutions, and the program only allows imports for banks that have paid the annual subscription fee. To make matters worse, there are separate fees for Mac and Windows and apparantly by country. So, my bank may pay the Windows fee, but not the Mac fee. Or they may pay the US fee, but not the UK fee. Or they may pay the fee one year, and not the next. Or they may decide not to be blackmailed by Intuit and not pay the fee at all.

While I learned about this a couple years ago, it didn’t really affect me that much as most everything kept working. The only exception being our credit union, which reports that the annual fees required by Intuit are not even related to the number of people that use the software, but the value of the banks assets! With our move abroad, the number of financial institutions that have paid the fee matching what I need to import my data has dropped significantly thus eliminating the ability to import from a good number of accounts. Keep in mind — I can still download the data in the correct format from the banks, but Quicken just isn’t “unlocked” appropriately for me to import the data. And there is nothing I can do about it.

Equals Not So Quick

The result of all of this is that Quicken is not so quick any more. In fact it has become a big fat burden as evidenced by the last four months worth of receipts and bills piled up on my desk. I now hate dealing with basic tasks that used to be so… quick. Budgeting and budget reporting now have to be done manually, expenses have to be entered manually, accounts have to be reconciled manually. It is tedious and I don’t want to do it, so it piles up on my desk. As a result, the data is always out of date making the reporting worthless.

It has started to become a real problem now. Being on such a tight budget (reduced to one income, additional school expenses and moving to one of the most expensive cities in the world) it is important that we keep a handle on what we are spending, and keep up with our bills. The bank fees are outrageous for even the smallest slip up and we’ve had some close calls in the last few weeks.

So now it is only a matter of time. The question is, who will be the successor and when?

4 comments.

Two Certainties in Life - Taxes and Taxes

Posted on March 5th, 2007 by g.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

Borrowing from Ben Franklin’s quote, I have been dealing with a double dose of one of his certainties — taxes. Now we have both UK and US taxes to deal with.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of enjoy filling out our tax return every year. Though, with TurboTax, it is never very hard. Simply enter all the forms received in the mail, add in a few deductions, and job done. This year, however, is a bit of a different.

Certainly, we have had a number of complexities added to our return this year — selling the house, moving abroad, earning foreign wages, and paying foreign taxes . To compound this complexity, I believe I have found a bug in TurboTax.

After completing the Foreign Tax Credit portion of the “Interview”, our refund suddenly became absurdly high. At first I was excited, but quickly became suspicious. Upon reviewing the numbers, it looks like they have included the foreign tax credits, but not the income. While, I kind of like the result, I doubt the IRS will agree :-).

Currently, I am on the phone with their Tech Support. We went through the foreign income questions (which gets stuck in an loop) and upon realizing the problem, the the poor guy asked me to wait while he goes to investigate. I am coming to the end of this post and haven’t heard back from him yet. My guess is this is a real bug — I am surprised that it is March and no one has discovered it yet. Good thing we have unlimited calling to the US!

UPDATE: The customer service rep came back and asked for my phone number to call me back in 48 hours after one of their software engineers reviews the issue. Working in the industry, I can say that definitely translates to, “you found a bug, we’ll try to fix it before we call you back.”

3 comments.

Texting…I love it!

Posted on February 4th, 2007 by k.
Categories: Living Abroad - Life in London, Technology.

With 6 years as an advertising account contact under my belt, I regret to think of how many years of my life have been spent on the phone. And I try not to think of the impact those wireless waves will have on me long-term…

But, here in the UK all of that chatting on the cell are OVER. Texting is a dream. The cell plans here include a marginal number of minutes and a huge number of “texts”–e-mails that you can send via your cell phone to anyone anywhere on their cell. You spend way less time on the phone and are able to access info and others conveniently from your cell. And best of all, you’re charged if you send texts to others, but they’re never charged when you send messages to them.

Has texting become more mainstream in the US since we left in August?

3 comments.

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard

Posted on November 29th, 2006 by g.
Categories: Technology.

I figure if K gets to write about Mr. Brick, I get to write about Mr. Gates or Mr. Jobs now and then. After all, this gives you a fair idea of what I deal with day to day.

The background is that for work I needed to set up a new development environment to build an application based on Microsoft’s .Net Framework. This requires installing and configuring a new operating system (Windows) along with a number of software packages such as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I figured this would simply require me to press “Next”, wait…, press “Next”, wait…, press “Next”, wait…

But it turns out that it was a bit more interesting. First up is Windows Update. This is a great feature — in theory. You click the icon, it checks for any updates, downloads them and installs them. Bingo! Good to go, right?

Well, not so fast. It turns out that Windows Update can’t just update everything all at once, so it took many rounds. It went something like this.

  • Install Windows, restart system
  • Install IIS which was included with Windows but didn’t have any option to install while installing Windows, restart system
  • Upgrade Internet Explorer in order to use the latest Windows Update software, restart system
  • Upgrade Windows Update to the newer Microsoft Update in order to get other updates, restart system
  • Run Microsoft Update to get updates, restart system
  • Run Microsoft Update again to get updates to the updates, restart system
  • Run Microsoft Update again to get the updates that can’t be installed at the same time as other updates, restart system
  • Run Microsoft Update again to get updates to the updates that couldn’t be installed with the other updates.
  • Run Microsoft Update again — okay, we’re good now.

Next up, SQL Server. There are a number of checks that are performed for compatibility, system requirements and what not. I imagine this is a good thing. Unfortunatly, my system was missing a few things — too bad SQL Server wouldn’t just install them for me. They looked like development-type components, so I went on to install Visual Studio.

While watching the progress near the end of its journey while installing this behemoth of a software package, my daze was snapped by that familiar, “ding” — Error: unable to read the file InsignificantAndDoesNothing.txt. Hmmm. That’s okay, we don’t need that file, I’ll press skip, ignore, continue… but, no. The only option is OK. At this point the progress bar does an about face and slowly retraces its journey back across the screen with the message, “rolling back installation…”

I finally work around that problem by copying all the files off the disc on to the hard drive and install it from there. So, then, back to SQL Server. Now the suspense is killing me. Will I pass all the checks? And… the… answer… is… no. Some registry counter value is wrong. I click the little help message… “go read the manual.” Thanks.

A Google search later and I have an article from Microsoft about editing registry values — didn’t work. Another Google search and I have a post on a forum about how Microsoft’s article didn’t work because I used the wrong tool to edit the registry! How many registry editor tools do you need to include in your operating system? And as far as I could tell I just need to copy a number from one place to another. Is that so hard that the installation program couldn’t have done it for me? Do I really need to go and edit the registry to install this software on a new system? Really, it shouldn’t be this hard.

Well, at this point the installation appears to be finishing up successfully and I am hopeful my troubles are behind me and I can get to some realy work — just after a quick trip back to Microsoft Update one last time…

2 comments.