New office floor

After living in our house for almost two years, I came to the realization that my office was one of the high traffic areas in the house. Most of our downstairs is tile, so high traffic doesn't really show. The carpet in my office looked awful and I decided to get hardwood in it. I chose bamboo as I wanted a light color for the long run and it was priced better than some of the other woods. This morning, the floor was finished and I moved my office back in.

Disappointment with Garmin

This week, Garmin announced that they would have their Training Center software available by the end of the year (2006) instead of by the spring of 2006 like they said way back in January. I can understand software delays, but it should have been quite predictable from January. However, I'm pleased that MotionBased has a beta of their Mac plugin that works quite well and the interface is easy to use. In addition, they are quickly rolling out new features and might even bring a feature or two to us Mac users before the Windows users.

Government incompetence

I received a notice last week that I hadn't paid the tax for my company and I owed $70 in penalties. This had me fuming mad because I had a copy of the check I sent in March and the check was included in my tax return; how did the state process the tax return to know how much I owed without seeing the check? I called the Franchise Tax Board on Friday and spoke to a representative that said he'd send a note for the returns people to look for it (the check hadn't been cashed) and he'd give me a call back. Today is Tuesday and I never heard from him, so I called back. The problem with calling back is that the automated system wouldn't let me wait on hold because the system was too bogged down. So, 10 or so calls later, I got put on hold and then transferred to someone. The lady said that I needed to stop payment on the check (she didn't bother looking up my account), fax in a copy of the stop payment and send a new check. She didn't bother giving me the fax number.

I started looking at stopping payment on the check and sending all the stuff to the state. My bank wants $20 to stop payment on the check. So now that the state lost my check (I did send it), I'll be out $20 and hours of my time trying to resolve this issue. I'm going to call back tomorrow to find out if they found my check and what they'll do about covering the $20 stop payment fee. How can the government be so incompetent?

Drawing conclusions in bug reports

When I was become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), we were taught to observe and report without making a diagnosis, because we were not trained to do so. This concept also applies to bug reports. Over the years I've seen users/customers report bugs and attempt to say why the bug is happening. Unfortunately, many times the user is completely wrong. Without seeing the source code, knowing how things work, and/or not knowing a particular standard, it is nearly impossible to draw a conclusion as to why a problem is happening. I wish that bug reports would do what I was trained to do becoming an EMT; observe and report. Let the developers make the conclusions and fix the issue.