Where pegs grow legs: hanging ideas on words

I thought forced upgrades died at the turn of the century, but apparently Quicken wants them to live on. I was updating my finances in Quicken the other day with my banks’ current transactions, as I have done faithfully for the last three years, with no problems, but I received a funny (non descriptive) error that day, and after a little investigating found out why:

Attention Quicken Windows 2005 Users!
As of April 30, 2008, Intuit will no longer support Online Services and live technical support for Quicken Windows 2005. To continue using these services and maintain access to live technical support from an Intuit representative, you will need to upgrade to Quicken Windows 2008.

Say what? You mean I have to upgrade now just to use my software that I dutifully (over)paid for in the first place? Funny thing is, I actually tried to upgrade in 2006, but then downgraded because I wasn’t going to pay for “great new features” when you didn’t even fix the existing bugs from the previous version.  So thanks for forcing me to pay you money which you obviously don’t deserve.  Try fixing the existing problems before you add “great new features” that just compound them. But don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me. And that’s why I’m moving to Moneydance.

P.S. I called my bank today with a question and chatted with a representative who said they got lots of Quicken service calls over the last couple of months because Quicken didn’t know how to handle the leap year this year – it deleted CC transactions that had a valid date of 2/29/08. Funny, I thought most OO programming languages had date classes to take care of all that stuff. Stupid me.

I was reading one of the posts in my blog roll today and stumbled on a nugget that I found really interesting and wanted to share. It shows how irrational we really can be! The post was talking about a new book entitled Sway, and how social psychology can help explain irrational financial behavior. From his blog:

Why D.C. subway passengers walked past Joshua Bell’s free violin concert, when he normally charges over $1,000/minute to play. In a beautiful example of social psychology, the Washington Post asked famous violinst Joshua Bell to bring his $3.5+ million Stradivarius to L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. and play like a normal panhandler. We like to think we can recognize quality when we see it, but we’re more influenced by external factors than by how we think we’d behave. Take a look at the video to change your mind (hint: People didn’t just walk by because they were late to work.)