Snapped this on a tram stop outside the Childrens’ Hospital this morning. It’s a poster for the Commonwealth Bank. It says “Dtermined to be better than we have ever been”. Which could mean lots of things, amongst which ” We know we’re terrible, and we’re trying to do something about it” springs to mind. It’s a bizarre marketing tack – create the impression that the company knows it’s on the nose. And make a non-specific, completely general, and probably unsupportable claim, that the company’s going to do something about it. Bizarre.

What a plonker pull. ABC TV is now calling itself ABC1 and ABC2. Which would be fine if it was like BBC1 and 2 in the UK, where BBC2 has a distinct personality and unique programming. Here ABC2 is nothing more than repeats bin and re-runs of obscure decades old sporting moments.

When we set up a new office for our collectZing.com business last year I did the usual thing – rang Dell and ordered a bunch of whichever PCs were on special, plus copies of Office Pro. It didn’t even occur to me that of course Windows XP had been superseded, and so we came to hate Windows Vista.

The best summary of my frustrations can be found in this extremely fun review of a chap ‘upgrading’ to Windows XP from Vista.

Then yesterday I enjoyed reading Charles Wright’s Bleeding Edge article in the Age Green Guide about him helping a friend downgrade from Word 2007 to Word 2003, and Charles’ quite justified criticism of the totally unhumanly sympathetic Word 2007 (article doesn’t seem to be online).

And also yesterday I was reminded of yet more quirks in the new Office. We use QuickBooks, on a Vista machine (just getting QB running on Vista was a pain, there was no QB for Vista when we bought the PC, then they finally issued an upgrade, but even now we can’t open any of the online help pages).

I regularly export from QuickBooks to Excel – it’s an excellent way to get my hands on financial data to play with, and was easy and smooth process. Actually it still is – click the Export button on a QB report and up pops Excel with my numbers.

But there’s a trick, and it took me a moment to work out something was amiss. I deleted a column – and wondered why the machine had locked up for about 5 minutes. After this happened a couple of times I poked around, and discovered the Excel file size was 4meg. I copied and pasted the cells with the data into a clean Excel file and saved – 24k. The inevitable conclusion – QB and Excel 2007 creates huge files. And another light bulb went on. When scrolling down the Excel sheet I realised I could scroll forever – every cell of all some 65,000 rows had some kind of data attached – even if the cells appeared blank.

Hence my trouble. When I asked to delete a column, it was a column 65,000 rows deep, no wonder the PC was taking time.

It’s a huge annoyance and I can’t find a way around it except to copy and paste the numbers to a fresh sheet – whereupon I lose most of my formatting. I even tried saving the file back down to 2003 format and opening it on another machine that runs XP and Office 2003. Same problem.

This is a brand new problem – never happened in QB on XP with Excel 2003. It’s an activity I perform almost every day – and it’s now completely stuffed.

Channel 10’s EPG is missing in action. Channel 7’s is just 12 hours late. The time code says 10.30pm, but Now On says ‘10.30 Seven Morning News’. Apparently there’s nothing ‘Coming Up’ – that bit is blank.

Yet again one wonders, whatever the marketing hype about digital TV and HDTV, how on earth us poor mugs are supposed to know what actual programs are on and when.

Channel 7 is launching Tivo soon. If they cannot produce a reliable basic EPG it shreds one’s confidence in their ability to run the infinitely more complex programming dataset required by Tivo.

Channels 7 and 10 have launched their HD channels but how in heaven’s name are you supposed to find out what’s on? The HD programs are not in the newspaper tv guides. Nor are they on the digital guides – indeed 10’s guide seems to have vanished altogether. I did find program info on a tv listing web site but that’s not exactly convenient.

The tv channels have made a big marketing fuss about HD but it’s hard to take them seriously when no one has any idea just what programs are available.

Had to happen. The Nigerian scammers have discovered Skype.

Deck extension all done, low voltage lighting in and working, plus fabulous fig tree and mulberry in the back corner (fig is BIG, loads of fun moving and planting).

So we go to Gold Class at Jam Factory last night to see Enchanted with the kids. We have to ask 3 times just to get someone to take our food order. They start the movie 10 minutes late because they are so far behind.

Tired old excuses – ‘we’re short staffed’. Do the maths: 42 degree day, New Years Eve, too hot to take the kids to town for fireworks, duh, do yer think families might like to go to the movies? And I booked yesterday morning, with the seating plan showing the cinema already close to full. No excuse for not knowing demand levels.

One hour after the movie starts still haven’t got any food or drinks. Staff member approaches, they’ve run out of EVERYTHING on the main menu. But we can have our choice of a hot dog or ‘gourmet’ greek pizza. But no worries about the dessert I ordered.

Another 30 minutes later food arrives. Gourmet greek pizza looks and tastes like someone poured a tin of chopped tomatoes over a frozen pizza base and sprinkled 4 olive halves and 5 shreds of fetta. Oh and my bottle of water arrived after reminding the staff again. By which time the movie was nearly finished.

We’ve been to Gold Class several dozen times, makes me wonder why we bother spending all that money just to receive zero benefit. I get so tired of the endless excuses for poor service whenever it manifests – which is constantly.

Never did get my dessert either.

Can’t resist, virtual theft of virtual objects.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/14/virtual-furniture-teen-thievery-ring-nabbed-on-habbo/