It's all good so far

I started typing this entry on my iPhone as I sat in my in-laws new room waiting on them to arrive to their new home. Not being the best thumb typist, I noticed that I had misspelled the title. I wrote “it’s all God so far.”

Realizing that is right. I had gotten this far by his grace. I have been blessed to have become part of this family twenty five years ago. We have done so much together and have so much more to do.

It’s all God so far, and I hope that he will let it continue so well, well into the future.

I was headed to camp last week and realized that I was missing a piece of camping gear. It was one of those essentials that has accompanied me on many trips. It was my laptop.

I have been working with a laptop for the last 10 plus years at my job and surrendered the machine at the layoff. I have purchase three at the house. The first one was a casualty of teenaged emotion and took a dive off the daughter ‘s desk. There were tears and great remorse.

The second was the net book. I used it for a while, it was displaced by my IPad and the work laptop, so I loaned it to the daughter’s fiancé. The campus is not very progressive about laptop use in class, so it gathers dust in the dorm.

The third also belongs to the daughter, and I now have found that it had died, suffering death by curious cat. Said feline becoming entangled in the cords and pulling the laptop to its death. And of course, the warranty had expired. Fortunately, she has the data backed up on Dropbox (I hope).

So this weekend we will shop for a replacement. It won’t be the Mac air book that I want, rather, it will be something cheap, and hopefully heavy enough to terminally fix the feline.

We were on the morning dog constitutional when the wife remarked that she had not heard my father’s ringtone this morning. No sooner than she had completed the statement, the opening notes to “Man of La Mancha” wafted out of my jacket pocket. It is my Dad with a tech support issue.

I am now back at the computer – listening to that intuit blues playlist while waiting on customer support. It turns out that the company file that I uploaded at his request to replace the one that I uploaded was incomplete. When his computer started giving problems, he moved to his ancient laptop and started entering data into a much older file. Of course there is a fairly significant data gap on this old file but it does have his last 45 days of current transactions. This morning he has asked what happened to the data between 2011 and mid January of this year.

I await the intuit dragon. The last time I checked, Intuit was not able to an incremental import of data into a company. You could only over-write the existing company. I don’t believe this. I think you could export and then import, otherwise you should not be able to download bank transactions into the account.

No, evidently you can’t.

There must have been a team design meeting when the code monkeys were gathered in the clearing grooming each other when the chief marketing baboon stood up and said that allowing data portability would be a bad thing. The code monkeys hoot in agreement, and what should have been a simple database file became proprietary.

So, I have to upload the old books through the back door (win 7 – 32 bit mode w explorer 8), then I must get online access from the bank, download the most recent transactions, and then edit them to credit or debit the proper accounts.

How many more missions do I have to fly?

I had a good post started over the weekend but did not get it completed so it will languish is that good intentions folder. Yesterday was a lot of tech support and move preparation. And after what turns out to be a premature celebration of success. I got the call prior to the dog walk that something is not right and that we have a new set of issues this morning.

I had uploaded data yesterday from My father’s new PC after digging through his files and finding what I thought was the right file. I then called him to explain what we have done only to find that he has been working on the ancient laptop and that we need to replace what I just uploaded.

We also found this morning that the quickbooks folks have decided not to use the account name we asked for and we also discover that the second data file that I uploaded from the ancient laptop has been added as a new company instead of replacing the previous upload.

These are changes that I can not make on line without their tech support to complete. I called in as soon as they opened and got to listen to the blues while on hold. They probably don’t see the irony in their music selection.

I do want of report post dog walk success. With the assistance of a good tech support person, we managed to rename the company as desired, deleted the old company, and even got the printer working.