Crappy Support Policy

Yesterday, I went to see about contacting support for VMWare Fusion to see why my el cheapo negative and slide scanner wouldn't work as no one responded to my forum post (on their forums). After poking around the site, I discovered that they only offer 30 days of complimentary email support. After that I have to pay per incident. Wow, that sure doesn't make me want to use their product. I can understand complimentary phone support for a period of time, but limiting email support, that seems ridiculous. Yes, I realize that some people abuse it, but what about the average Joe who only contacts support with an issue, more over, a bug in the software?

If someone has gotten the VuPoint Slide/Negative Scanner running under VMWare, please let me know

Broken iCal - Application Needed to fix it

After my calendar didn't sync today using BusySync, I started poking around. The BusySync log gave a Google error saying that I had exceeded my quota. I'm not sure what it was pushing or pulling, but I took the opportunity to clean up my calendars. I had events back to 2002 in it that I didn't need. In iCal, I selected the option to delete events older than 60 days. I quit iCal and restarted it a few times. That didn't help. Next a tip said to search for 'a' or 'e' and then delete items in the results. Well, that was tedious as iCal kept crashing and freezing when I did that, but I managed to delete a lot of events. Then I went back through my calendars and looked to see that old events were still there (most had an 'a' or 'e' in it). I deleted those. Before all this I exported my calendar and then re-imported it. That didn't help. My calendar was so screwed up after years of using iSync, trying to sync to Google and lots of testing, that some events were duplicated 50+ times.

Someone needs to write an app that goes through and cleans up the calendar with options like, delete items older than x days and delete duplicates (you can key off the title and date and time for a duplicate). Of course, this is a one time or infrequently used app, so the demo mode would have to be quite limited or no one would buy. I would write it, but I already wasted my time fixing it by hand. I should file a bug with Apple that the delete events item doesn't work.

Disappointed in new MacBook Pro Offering

I see that Apple released new MacBook Pro machines today. The upgrade seems quite minor. I was hoping for more. While I will get a new machine (after I pay the tax man and see what is left), I really wanted something faster than 2.5 GHz (the 2.6 GHz upgrade for $250 is a waste in my mind) with a larger 7200 RPM drive (the largest 7200 RPM drive I can get is 200 GB). In any case, it will be a nice upgrade from my almost 2 year old MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Core Duo with 100 GB hard drive). Apple is still out of whack with its RAM pricing; I can go down to The Chip Merchant and buy 4 GB of RAM for $110; Apple wants $400.

Hypocritical government

This shouldn't be news to most, but our government is quite hypocritical. Today I was reading about a bunch of men that were arrested in Saudi Arabia for flirting with women. They were arrested by the religious police. Here is a country that has no religious freedom and is a dictatorship, ummm, I mean kingdom. Yet, the US considers Saudi Arabia an ally and hasn't made moves to invade it. The US has tried to intervene in other countries that are dictatorships and have governments that the US doesn't like, but because Saudi Arabia has oil and is strategically placed, the US keeps it as a bed buddy. Is Saudi Arabia any different than communist governments or say Cuba?