When It All Falls Down Again: TGIF?!

Well, the plans went down the toilet for the day. The writing faltered; the first sign was the phone message this morning that TSTT was going to disconnect my phone and internet access today if I didn't pay up. The next sign was when I got a phone call about having to do some rush work because... well, because.

The next bad sign was that I couldn't get a hold of buddy Vlade to find out if he got the parts for the PC I need to do the rush work - throughout the day, I left about 20 messages for him.

And the last bad sign was that when I actually got a hold of him (he said he didn't receive any calls today because of TSTT, which is still unsettlingly common in areas that are far enough away that people don't complain in person)... So...

I went, paid the bill. I dropped by the bank and deposited a check; I tried my ABM (ATM) card for another account and it didn't work. Wrong card. Which means... I destroyed the wrong card a few days ago. Duh. Doom on me.

I got home. After entering all the new numbers into the Nokia 6620, I figured I would synchronize it with my address book on Seamonkey. No, it wanted to talk to a &^%#! Microsoft product, or some Lotus product. So I import the raw data, thinking that there would be an easy, intuitive way to the data. After all, people do this all the time, and it's not special data - it's a few fields per name. Nope. vCard. 117 vcf files. I want one Comma-separated values (CSV) file.

And not ONE person has created something that sensibly converts vCard files into a single CSV file. One person put up a demo script that does one file at a time. Why on earth would I want to convert files one by one? Why on earth would a Nokia phone only work with Lotus or Microsoft? Kickbacks? Am I the only person on the planet who sees this as a problem? Apparently. Nevermind that I think vCards are a poorly designed system - it exists simply so that people get paid to write software to convert things that didn't really need conversion in the first place. Silly. So I have two options - rewrite Nokia code or code a patch to do what I want to do. If Nokia had a clue, they would fix it for everyone using their phones so that they could coordinate with Mozilla, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, and whatever else.

Sad, poor little Nokia needs people to support their products so that they work with whatever software people are using - not just the ones that they want people to use. They'll put out a Linux handheld - read about it here, but they force people to synchronize with proprietary products. Another problem I didn't create, that I bought (through TSTT, I might add, where the selection is limited because of the limits of their service), and... this. Another problem I didn't create that someone wants me to solve at my cost.

OK, it's not Nokia's fault for clinging to some silly standard which doesn't interoperate sensibly with everything but a few choice applications that you have to purchase. So the cost of a Nokia 6620 really includes a copy of Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office if you do it the way they allow you to.

And don't get me started that you can't shut down the connection software from the taskbar (something all taskbar applications are supposed to have) and sits there sucking about 6.7 megabytes of RAM until you connect your phone, and after you connect your phone. You have to actually kill the process (Launchpad.exe) to make it go away. How crappy is that?

Grr.

So, I get back home, and the laptop's running slow. I check - fragmented hard drive; a problem that Microsoft Windows has but no other operating system on the market seems to have. So it's still defragmenting.

I get a hold of Vlade. He couldn't get the part, which means I have to get a Biostar motherboard to tide me over (not something I like in this case, though they are good motherboards), and maybe I'll get it tomorrow to do a job that I didn't have to do before a phone call this morning because I didn't have all the facts.

So, I cleaned my desk. I bought some more fruit for myself and the birds. I got some new music to listen to while working. I got another book to read. At the end of the day, you just do what you can - but wouldn't it be nice if other entities did what they could? :-)