How not to write spam

I received the following message from "Amazon";

Important For Your Online Account Access . Action Suspended

this email send by Amazon

Dear Customer

During our usual security enhancement protocol, we observed multiple login attempt error while login in to your online amazon account. We have believed that someone other than you is trying to access your account for security reasons, we have temporarily suspend your account and your access to online amazon and will be restricted if you fail to update

Your first clue to an official-looking email being a spam is how bad is the English.  We all maik misteaks and other tipos, but the above is ridiculous.

Your second clue is where do the included links really go.  I find these by just putting the cursor over the links or dragging the message to a text editor program.  In Microsoft Outlook the first shows the link as a drop down.  In Apple's TextEdit the second shows the source code of the message.  You don't really need to know that much about HTML, but you can scan it for suspicious looking items.

Speaking of spam, this blog has a lull in reverse spam from Russia.  These reverse spammers may have moved to Ukraine.  In any case, the number of pageviews from the United States has gone up but not to the level I was receiving Russian "pageviews".  I hope the US pageviews are real human readers who enjoy what I have written.

Corporate bureaucracies eat into other corporations' profits

I've often said that government has no corner on bureaucracy.  Almost any large organization, for-profit, non-profit, government, has a large bureaucracy.  They have to in order to look into many, many details that are needed to run the organization efficiently.  You read that right, an organization needs a bureaucracy to be efficient.

Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing?  Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees.  Who is going to pay and collect the bills.  Certainly not the executives.  Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.

One corporate bureaucracy is customer support.  These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions.  When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization.  When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy.  The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.

A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.

I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".

Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions.  Hoo Boy!  Talk about non-responsiveness!  This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.

Well, maybe there was some resolution.  Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared!  How often are regular meetings changed in your organization?  Sometimes changed meetings become the norm.  What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed?  Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!!  Wow!  That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement.  Guess what?  When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.

What a way to run a railroad or any business!  I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.

Misdirected ire about buggy software

In "Quote of the day - Ease of use"
I berated Steve Jobs and Apple about his quote "Everything syncs without us having to think about it" because calendars in Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, and my iPod were not synching properly.

Well, the problem was far worse than a few duplicated events.  I had dozens and dozens that were duplicated over 100 times and one possibly over 500 times.  That's a lot of shift-clicks followed by a delete.  I've spent over a week now cleaning up at least three months a day.

Why delete duplicates from nine years ago?  Because each item takes up space.  For every three months cleaned up, I would back up the calendar.  For 2004 it could take well over five minutes to backup.  When I cleaned up into 2010, it started backing up in a minute.  When I cleaned up into 2011, it backed up in less than a minute.

I also spent lots and lots of time looking at Microsoft's support pages.  Hoo, boy!  There ain't much praise there!  Message after message complains about this and similar problems.  The only posted responses are from MVPs (whatever that stands for), volunteers who try to direct users to relevant support pages.

Microsoft put out an update last week that I downloaded and installed.  However, despite people complaining about sync problems since April 6, there was no mention of them in the notes for the update.

I wonder how much Microsoft is even screening any of these comments.  I posted two comments on June 13, and they are still marked "Your comment is awaiting moderation."

This whole situation has the earmarks of upper management declaring something should be done by such and such date, middle management trying to figure out how to assign the work to too few people, and the programmers trying valiantly to put round pegs in square holes.

Shades of Dilbert!

Shades of the bad old days of mainframes!  We felt lucky to get out a new system that crashed a few minutes less frequently than the previous version.

Quote of the day - Ease of use

"Everything syncs without us having to think about it." - Apple CEO Steve Jobs, 2011-06-06, on introducing iCloud

Hey Steve!  How about coming to my house and think about syncing my iPod and MacBook Pro?  I have spent I don't know how many hours trying to restore dropped calendars and contacts or remove duplicate entries in either.

Maybe it's Microsoft's fault.  These problems seem to have started when I switched from Office 2008 to Office 2011.  Microsoft replaced Entourage in the former with Outlook in the latter.  Similar software, but as usual, the new improved version can be several steps backward.

I don't know how many times I've searched in Apple's and Microsoft's support pages.  Lots and lots of people report the problem, but few people, if any, answer with a solid long term solution.  I've tried some, and some have worked for a while.  But like the infamous cat, it always comes back.

I've called AppleCare and got some advice that sort of helped. But the cat came back.

I looked in Apple's support pages and did find a more detailed solution.  It sort of seems to have worked, but I had duplicates going back to 2002, like 20 Christmas days on the same day and six voice lessons on the same day.  I've spent well over an hour eliminating the duplicates in 2002.  At least for the holidays I won't have to delete duplicates in later years, but all those other activities, it remains to be seen.

Also, I don't know what the side effects of deleting ALL the files in the cache folder.  There was stuff for TurboTax, Google Earth, Adobe, and I've forgotten what else.  At least they are backed up on my Time Machine.

Ah!  Time Machine, that marvelous hourly backup in the background.  Background? Hah!  When the backup is busy for over an hour, lots of other things slow down and certainly make me think about it.

No, I'm not going to go over to the dark side.  Microsoft Office is enough.

But I certainly wish you would run a company that is more efficient than the IRS, which contrary to Republican doctrine, does a nice job of co-operating with private companies to make reporting and refunds quick.

P.S. Thanks to the messed up composing page in Google's Blogger, I couldn't post this right away.  Or maybe it was because Apple's instructions to delete the cache.  I fixed the problem by quitting and restarting Firefox.

More foibles of free enterprise

I write these little diatribes against "free enterprise" not because I oppose "free enterprise" but because I get tired of those who believe "free enterprise" should be free to do what it damn well pleases and that government can do nothing right.

"Free enterprise" and government are both human creations and, as such, can do wonderful things and can really screw up.  The latest free enterprise screw up screwed up my day recently.

I use my computer and my iPod to keep my calendar.  Because I prefer the calendar in Microsoft Outlook, I have to use Apple's iCal on my computer to synchronize the iPod calendar and the Outlook calendar.  Normally this works "seamlessly", but a few times it hasn't.

Last week the calendar on my iPod became blank.  All the entries had disappeared.  Years of past data and months of future data gone without any effort on my part.  I checked iCal on my computer; all that data was gone also.   I checked the Outlook calendar and the data was all there, whew!

But, could I restore the data to the other two calendars by synching or would the Outlook data be wiped out also?

Off to the wonderland of Apple support.  With most large companies, this doesn't mean talking with an "expert" anymore.  Instead you have to rely on hundreds or thousands of other customers asking and answering questions.  This means sifting through dozens, if not hundreds, of messages that seem to be about a problem similar to yours.

There were many threads about iCal calendars disappearing, going back to 2006 (or was it 2004).  I'm using the latest publicly available version of OS X (10.6.7). Come on, Apple, can't you get this problem fixed permanently in five years?

I did find a suitable solution, which involved deleting a certain folder from the Library folder and replacing it with a backup copy from before the error occurred.  Well, the certain folder wasn't where the message said it was, but it was close enough for me to find it.  Second problem for many people is how often do they even back up their Library folder.

Fortunately, I have installed Apple's Time Machine, which frequently backs up my internal hard drive to an external hard drive.  And it backs up multiple copies for up to a month.  I selected a copy of the folder from when I knew my calendar had data.

Bingo!  The computer iCal was restored and after I synched the iPod, I had both calendars up-to-date, sort of.

But I was not home free.  After the Outlook calendar was synched with iCal, I had double entries for many events.  I still haven't removed all the duplicates.

A half day shot for the "efficiency" of free enterprise.  Those who make the false comparison between free enterprise and government either don't use computers or are blinded by their ideology.

I'm not completely unsympathetic to the problems of software.  When I closed my software business fifteen years ago, I had a problem book at least nine pages long.  That program was a toy compared to the complexity of most software today.  Much of modern software is not the product of one programmer in a home office, but of a vast bureaucracy.  The bureaucracy screws up a lot, but boy, we still get lots of great stuff from the bureaucracy, be it corporate or government.

Was Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac written by the government

After a long wait for a replacement for Office 2008, which took away Virtual Basic macros, I was able to buy Office 2011, which supposedly put macros back.

Guess what?  I'm not sure they work.

I put a simple one-line macro back in an Excel spreadsheet, and it worked.  But, every time I typed in a cell, Excel would only except one number and then do nothing.  I had to enter the data in the formula bar.  At least the formula bar seems to be standard in Office 2011; in some update to Office 2008 the formula bar would keep disappearing.

I tried removing the macro and putting it back in again, and now the macro stops with some mysterious error.

If I opened the progress bar in Entourage (Office 2008), it would be there the next time I opened Entourage.  In Outlook (Office 2011), it is never present the next time I open Outlook.

The installation process for Office 2011 ignored many of my preference from Office 2008.

Outlook changed the type font and size, and it only remembers the reset type font but not the reset size.

Outlook automatically includes the message I'm answering in my response.  I had turned this off in Entourage; I have yet to find a preference for this in Outlook.  I have to remember to remove the message in my response, and it is often below my writing area.

Outlook has put some of my old messages in the task list.

Outlook did not get my message categories right.  It put "Family" messages in "Iphone, saved to".

Outlook changed the links to many of my Entourage replies.  The linked messages sometime bear no relation to each other.

Gosh, with these errors and many others, Office 2011 must have been written by the government instead of an "efficient" private company.

To tell the truth, I do have some sympathy for the Microsoft programmers.  When I gave up on my own software programming company, for my far simpler program I had a problem list far longer than the list above.

I do wish Microsoft had had a bit bigger budget on testing.

I also wish that I could just call or email someone with these problems.  Instead, the user has to spend hours looking through forums to find a specific problem, which nobody may have raised yet.  This is part of the larger trend in far too many enterprises to push costs on to the customers.  See "Technology: A big bother we can't do without".