I really appreciate your enthusiasm for jumping in…after a beer and a sleep, of course. It’ll keep.

This is the software I’ve been talking around for way too long. Finally delivered it. Even if it was a premature delivery.

But maybe the timing was perfect. It had just achieved good-enough, and as soon as it was up and running Zoners started finding the bugs and design flaws. I couldn’t ask for a better review of it.

Some things would have been smoother in a couple of weeks, but the concrete would have set more solidly around some things too. From my perspective the good’s offset the bad, though I know that there’s more than one community member these days who feels like the change was decidedly on the bad side of the ledger.

Ribbit.

Pretty soon I was the resident expert on the computer and on the software. I crashed the computer countless times but I learned it and the software. I loved SmartWare. I took a college course on programming in it and created a bookkeeping system in it for our very large clinic which ran a lot of clinical studies. I programmed it and it did a wonderful job. I had it automated to the point where all I had to do was enter the checks and the deposits as they happened and hit a button at the end of the month and it automatically created a spreadsheet and deposited all the information into it, formatting it totally. I had a double entry bookkeeping journal a the end of every month, with quarterly summaries and an annual budget at the touch of a button. It was wonderful.

Then along came Microsoft, the Great Satan, and our new administrator informed us we had to use Microsoft and only Microsoft. He took the SmartWare off the system. I realized why rather quickly. He did not want me to see his books because he was screwing us over.

So everyone went to Microsoft because of their marketing tactics and SmartWare was left behind. MS word has always been a piece of crap IMO, working when it wants to. Word Perfect was a far superior product but too many people found it too difficult to master because you had to memorize all the shortcuts. Of course, wimps could use the menu bar (if they could find it) but it did everything and was great for manipulating documents.

How much better off we would have been had Bill Gates never gotten into computer programming. I still miss SmartWare and for more complicated word processing, Word Perfect.

Piss on progress. It isn’t always the best thing. You guys are right; computers do not save us time; they create more work for us to do. OTOH, they can make life interesting.

I clicked on Site Admin and looked around a bit but was afraid to go deeper yet for fear of deleting our new home.

Needless to say, this situation long predates computers. John Henry looking at that goddam steam hammer…

But one day, you sometimes just wake up and tell yourself “Why am I putting up with this crap AGAIN? I don’t have time to deal with all this overhead, it is getting in the way of doing my job.” That’s when you realize you are no longer in your prime, and you start looking for a Plan B. You may still have a lot left in you, but your best days are over, and it isn’t fun any more, and you know it. If you aren’t there yet, you’re lucky. But you will get there eventually. We all do. Be ready for it.

There is no doubt that most upgrades are serious improvements in capability – particularly in CAD. I can do things on my computer that would have taken a fifty-man effects shop fifteen years ago. But why not pay more attention to the interface? Figure out ways to ease people into the new stuff while making sure the old stuff still hooks up right?

It’s not age. I’ve always felt this way. It’s not that I’m stupid – I taught myself ProEngineer from the ground up while having to create product with it at Gravity Probe B. By the time I was done, I was out in front of a lot of the Lockheed people, and trying to get them to change their design maturity protocols to match the new solid modeling capabilities we had. I have no doubt I could do the same with any software. It’s just that right now I don’t have much of a market for that part of my skills while I’m focusing on writing.

That’s exactly how I felt a few years back when the mapping software I was using at work, ArcView, which I had spent a lot of effort and heartbreak mastering and which I now used instinctively, was suddenly replaced by ArcInfo, a totally different user interface and data structure I suddenly had to learn (not to mention upgrade my whole shop to).

You’re right, most of these improvements are driven by marketing. It sounds like a cliche, but they really DO need to sell you something new. Its more about profit than progress.

It’s really a difference from when I used to work for an Image Processing system vendor. Even minor but absolutely essential changes to our software had to be carefully explained and painstakingly justified to our User’s Group because they bitterly resisted any interruptions to their production flow and established protocols made necessary by new technology.

Now the vendor says, “We have a great new idea and you are going to have to buy it. And no, it is NOT backwards compatible. Love it or leave it.”