All posts by Julie

Tech Support to our families

Just Rambling

You *all* know what this is about. Having to answer any computer related question no matter how far it is from what we really do for a living. “My computer is slowing down, should I reformat the hard drive?”, “popups popups everywhere!”, “I just deleted *all* of the pictures from your sister’s wedding. What do I do?”

One solution I had thought of was to partner with another geek and trade family tech support – so when your father calls and he’s mad at his computer, you won’t take it personally.

Leon Bambrick (SecretGeek) and Scott Hanselman have a much better, pro-active idea. Which is to take ownership of your families backup, virus protection etc. plans – really by just reminding them periodically. Sounds easy enough. Check it out.

Quickbooks rant

Tools

I have used quickbooks since it’s 1.0 DOS version. I have also used Quicken for eons. Each has a method to import records from online resources. I use that in Quicken to import my personal American Express acount and in QuickBooks to import my corporat Amex account. The similarites end there. Quicken puts everything right into the register. Then you just need to go through and add categories, change some memos etc. QuickBooks on the other hand, is a huge pain in the butt. It puts everything into a “holding place” and then you have to go through an extreeeeeeemely tedious process for each and every entry to get it into the register. I dread having to do this and put it off month after month. Then I have to spend hours doing it. Even if I did one month at a time, it takes a good 45 minutes. I upgraded recently to the latest version of Quickbooks and they STILL haven’t done anything about this. Ugggh.

Blog entries as tech support knowledgebase

Blogging

I have two posts that make me very happy. One is a post on a Crystal Reports problem that I had a hard time figuring out and did not find help online for. I frequently see referrers coming in to that post where people are googling the same error message that I had received. Hopefully my post has answered their problem.

Another one was a debugging problem that made me nuts until I found a nugget in one of John Robbins books. I have gotten two comments on that post from people saying “THANK YOU!” as they were going through the same horrible pain.

This makes it all worth while!

In Newfoundland, Canada early September?

Community Cheerleading

Even in a place far far away and probably more beautiful than you could imagine you can attend a .NET user group meeting. Not only that but Microsoft’s Atlantic Canada User Group Tour is making a pitstop there – in St. John’s, Newfoundland at WeDevelop.Net, the user group run by blogger, .Net programmer and XBox babe, Amanda Murphy.

There is a special place in my heart for Newfoundland since I have had many Newfoundland dogs and my parents breed them. I hope someday to go there and maybe I’ll even get to speak at Amanda’s group!