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(By Joshua, with help from Crystal)

No, Crystal's not pregnant (the first Valentine's she's not been pregnant since we married, incidentally.)
No, Joshua didn't lose his job.
No, we're not getting a divorce (not even close, people)
No, nobody is dying.

The day started great. I got to work by 8:30, which meant I was able to get off at 4:30. We ran errands, and dropped the kids off at church where they were running a baby-sit-for-donations night to help fund their Mexico missions trip. Ran a couple more errands, first to the post office, then to the bank to deposit a check, where the ATM gave me a nice receipt telling me our checking account was overdrawn by $596. Yes, that's right, our balance was negative five hundred, ninety-six dollars and ninety-two cents. Huh!? What?! Choke!

Immediately, my mind is racing...what did I do? Did I forget a check? Did I accidentally make my last credit card payment a scheduled payment instead of a one time payment? Any other possibility? So, I printed the last ten transactions (thankfully, a free service) and I promptly found out I had five overdraft charges. Now I'm really worried, ticked (at myself at that point), and not thinking terribly clearly. I was on the phone with my dad at the time, and I'm not sure he noticed that I was a bit distracted. He may need to repeat the contents of most of that phone call. I was so frazzled that I drove away from from the ATM and left my card there. No, still haven't found it. Will call the bank in the morning to see if the ATM kept it, or someone turned it in. If not, well, then, I'm getting a new check card.

So, instead of heading to dinner, we head back home so I can pull up our statement online, and call Wells Fargo to see what on earth happened (while I was on the phone, Crystal headed back to Wells Fargo to see if she could find the card...nope). Well, it wasn't my fault, so I was able to relax a little. What had happened was that we deposited a (rather large) check given to us, it cleared (according to our statement), and then ten days later, Wells Fargo came back and said, "We're sorry, according to the bank at which that account resided, that account is now closed." So, the entire check bounced, of course, putting us in the hole. All the while, other checks cleared, plus the $23 to $29 overdraft fee for each one they honored. So, on one hand, it was the fault of the check writer for grabbing an old check, but on the other hand, Wells Fargo shouldn't have credited our account until the check cleared on the other end. They've already refunded $100 of our overdraft fees, and claim that's their maximum since it wasn't their error, but I'll have to bug them again and see.

So, after that whole debacle, Crystal and I proceeded to Carl's Jr. (which was our original plan), got our food, and came home to watch a movie (also part of our original plan), then went to pick up the kids Certainly not the most relaxing way to start your evening, but it makes for a great story.

Yes, this all happened today, Valentine's Day. Yeah, I know, we'll laugh about it someday, but right now, I think I'm still coming down from the adrenaline high. Crystal must really love me to put up with all the disruptions to her Valentine's evening. Must? Yeah, I know she does. And for that, I'm very thankful.

(Found on the net, attribution unknown...apologies to all those who have sensabilities, or thought I did )

RED-NECK VALENTINE'S LOVE POEM

Collards is green
my dog's name is Blue
and I'm so lucky to have
a sweet thang like you.

Yore hair is like cornsilk
a-flapping in the breeze
Softer than Blue's
and without all them fleas.

Tonight I was reading through SourceForge's newsletter, and one of the top 25 projects is a relatively new one call ThinWire. There are a lot of existing frameworks out there for making AJAX applications look like "desktop applications," and often they allow you to dispense with programming in HTML and Javascript. Examples include Morfik, Google Web Toolkit, and even a Python version: Pyjamas. With most frameworks, while they looked good, they were often heavy (large download), or left something to be desired in the aesthetics department. Thinwire looks to change that. Take a look at their Playground Demo for examples of the full range of the tool kit, then look at their mail demo to see just how close to the "desktop feel" they get. They are even working on a graphical form designer that is written using the framework itself. Now there's power! And they claim in only a 100K download. Lest you think this is a toy framework, they also have a video showing a production application written using ThinWire. From their site:

This application has over 300 data input forms and dialogs with a wide range of complexity. It has a business rules engine that toggles the visibility of fields, required state of fields, limits dropdown options and much more....There are no page refreshes involved in updating anything within ThinWire®, the page is modified on the fly as a result of user actions that trigger event listeners on the server. Like all applications built with ThinWire®, no client-side code or HTML was written; all logic resides on the server.

One teaser that caught my eye is on their front page where they say you can develop using Java, or "alternatively, use a scripting language." I can't find further explanation of that, but if I could program in this framework using Python, I think we would have a real winner.

They are gunning for the Duke's Choice Award, so if you have experiences with ThinWire, or want to try it out, they are looking for company and developer feedback as part of the nomination process. I'll certainly be following the development efforts.

I suppose I should have known better than to get a credit card from Chase Bank, but it was several months of no interest, so I thought I'd give it a try, as we are trying to do some debt reduction.

A couple weeks ago I got a call from someone whose English I could barely understand, inviting me to enroll in Chase's payment protection plan. You know, where you pay the bank a monthly fee to protect them in case you can't make your payments? I told them no. And listened to them explain all the benefits again. And told them no again. Well, they called back about a week later. Again, it was a person whose English I could barely understand. After about sixty seconds, I said no, and hung up. I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't. Today, I got I got a letter in the mail thanking me for enrolling in Chase's payment protection plan. Huh!? I immediately called the number, and let them know that I was very aggravated, and that I never signed up or authorized this. The lady on the phone was helpful, but she was sticking to her script. She told me that chase would "never charge me without my authorization." Hmmm...I beg to differ...they just tried. If Chase cares to dispute my record, I would like them to come up with the two phone conversations I had with their telemarketers. After the nice lady agreed to cancel it, she tried to explain once again all the "benefits" of remaining enrolled, and finished it off with something to the effect of "so why don't we leave you enrolled today?" Sneeeeeeeeky! And deceptive. In the end, it was canceled, and as soon as that card is paid off, it will be canceled too.

I know Chase has a shoddy reputation...and today I learned first-hand why.

A few days ago, I blogged about Vista being a complete miss. I may have been wrong. It might end up being a complete flop, instead. Scott Finnie, whom I quoted in the aforementioned post, put the final nail in the coffin that have been his reviews of Windows Vista: after trying Mac OS X for three months, he's completely jumping ship and converting to Mac. Now, understand, this isn't just a random computer guy who was on the fence about which way to go. This is ComputerWorld's Windows expert. This is someone who has done several reviews of Vista. This conversion, despite the fact that he's still looking for software to replace some functionality he had on Windows, and he had some really "fun" things to convert, such as 500+ e-mail filter rules in his e-mail program. So, with glitches like these, why is he converting? Well, because "things just work." He says that despite the learning curve (and there is a learning curve, even if Macs are "easy to use), you spend more time working, and less time getting your computer to work. I've already been recommending Macs to people for a couple years now (I use Linux, personally), and I am certainly going to recommend Macs to people now who are wondering about whether to upgrade to Vista from XP.

I also came across an article on Forbes that really barbecues Windows Vista. I'll let you read the article, but the thing that really impressed my about this article was the fact that this was in a major business magazine. I'm wondering how many upgrades to Vista won't happen because of what was written.

I got a phishing e-mail today that wanted to try to convince me to log in and "unlock" my Bank of America account since it was locked. Oddly, enough, however, the "From" line said it was from E-Bay support. I guess when you're sending out millions of e-mails, trying to scam thousands of people, little details get overlooked.

For Elizabeth, the word "datch" translates to "watch." It can mean either the time-keeping piece, or the verb "phrase" as in, "I want to watch what you're doing." When Elizabeth "datches" you, she often uses either a step stool (at home) or a folding step (out at Opa and Oma's - her paternal grandparents).

Tonight Elizabeth and I were reading The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear. I pointed to the mouse dragging the (very long) ladder out of the house, and asked Elizabeth what it was. After hearing "moush," I clarified that I was pointing to the ladder, and she answered quickly, "datch." Well, of course, it's something you use to climb up so you can "datch."

Makes sense to me.

Michael Urlocker writes that Vista is "overshot." That may be a generous assessment.

Before vista even came out, it was already being called "XP warmed over." A pretty negative review for a company that has spent the last five years working on the replacement. After five years of no updates (save patches to XP's horrendous security, but that's a subject for another post altogether, and no SP1 and SP2 don't count), one would expect an amazing new system that would blow the socks off of reviewers, impress the users, and function in a way never before conceived, giving Vista a unique place in the OS world as a system that was a pleasure to use and generated more productivity than ever thought possible. Instead, what users are getting is a system with relatively minor eye-candy upgrades, and a restrictive digital rights management system that can actually degrade the playback quality of certain media. Wow...that's really compelling.

Something really sad about Vista, especially considering how little of an upgrade it really is, is the considerable hardware requirements that come with it. Vista will mostly likely only come with new computers, and systems sold even a year ago may have trouble running it (consider, for example, low-end systems sold with "only" 512MB of RAM and a built in sufficient--but not spectacular--video card). While I am not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination, I do somewhat agree with them that Vista will unnecessarily obsolete thousands of computers. I highly doubt upgraded systems will have a pleasent user experience.

Another theme among the chatter regarding Vista was the fact that its "new" features were features that were already in Apple's Macintosh operating system, and had been for some time. When Mac OS X was released in 2001 it already had much of the polish and eye candy that Vista is bragging about now. And over the nearly six years since, every time Apple has released an update, most users and reviewers have reported that the operation of the system has actually sped up. Something that stands in stark contrast to the slower operation and new hardware requirements of many of Microsoft's past "upgrades." Another interesting point to note is that the most recent release of Max OS X [at least the most recent version that could run on PPC (G4/G5) hardware] is that it could run on systems that were released when OS X was initially released, and in some cases, even systems released before OS X's initial release.

Let's look for a moment at the "other operating system:" Linux. Built on Open Source principles, and developed by hundreds of developers around the world, it has grown from a "hobbyist's operating system" to an operating system upon which fortune 100 companies depend. While large companies are supporting it now, it attained its status and proved its worth without the corporate backing which MS-DOS and MS Windows enjoyed since the beginning. While OS X and Linux still can appeal to widely different markets, Linux has gained popularity for the same reason Apple's OS X has: it delivers an experience which enables the user to be productive, efficient, and "just get things done." In short, delivering what the user wants.

So why is Vista a miss and not simply and overshot? It's because Microsoft is aiming at the wrong thing. In his article today, Scott Finnie points out that Microsoft's two main priorities have become

1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality)
2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy

If you have the time, go read Scott's article. No need for me to reiterate all the excellent points he makes.

There are many reasons for this, but it comes down to retaining market share. Apple and Linux are biting at Microsoft's heals like never before. OS X and Linux are serious business competitors. And once a user uses a system at work (possibly because they're forced to) they will then be comfortable using that system at home. If you lose the business market, you're well on your way to losing the home market. [Merrill Chapman, in his book "In Search of Stupidity" shows that this is how the PC took over the home market some 20-25 years ago: businesses used PC's first, so people wanted them at home.] Thus, Windows cannot appeal overwhelmingly to the consumer market, or else businesses will no longer want to use it, and will happily chose something else. On the other hand, Vista cannot appeal overwhelmingly to the business market, or it will be dead dull at home (witness Apple's I'm a Mac/I'm a PC ads). No really, go witness them...they're worth it...I'll wait. Apple and Linux, who have nowhere to go but up, don't really care about appealing to one market or the other, they just care about making a secure, easy-to-use operating system. And that philosophy is winning converts.

It seems Microsoft's aim was all (or at least mostly) wrong in this release. Instead of focusing on eye candy and crippling digital rights management (something done to keep media companies happy), there should have been more efforts invested in stability, usable security [Vista's User Access Controls is already becoming a joke. Linux and Mac OS have prompts for additional privileges (when needed, like at software install) down pat], and a better user experience (read Joel Spolsky's rant about the Vista shutdown menu for a good example of features designed by committee).

No...I don't think Vista overshot the market. I don't even think it was aiming at it.

UPDATE (2007-02-02 11:00): Zack Urlocker (Michael's brother) has more observations and humor regarding the Windows Vista launch at his blog.