I read Nick’s post, “When Fruit Spoils” a couple of days ago, and I laughed, then I cried.  I felt bad for his experience but good knowing that the almighty Apple is not exempt from problems.

Unfortunately my fruit spoiled today.

Here’s my story, up to now, with updating my iPhone to the 2.0 software.

1. Plug in iPhone for Sync
2. Click “Check for Updates.”  iTunes tells me that an update is available for the iPhone but I must first update iTunes to version 7.7.
3. I run Apple Update to get the current iTunes.  All seems to go well, and Apple Update tells me to reboot.
4. I reboot.  Uh-oh, iTunes wasn’t updated.  So, I did it again.  Apple Update tells me to reboot.
5. I reboot again.  This time iTunes shows that it’s updated.  Hooray!
6. I go to sync my iPhone again, and now all of my data (music, etc) is listed as “Other Data.” and cannot be accessed through the iPhone or iTunes.  Also, when I click “Check for Updates” now, there is no longer an update available for the 2.0 software, 1.1.4 is the current release.
7. I forget about it for a while, because I need to work on Photoshop.  Oh, guess what - the iTunes update broke Photoshop too.  It hangs on “TWAIN Device - Apple iPhone.”  Grrr.
8. So, I do the only thing I know to do, an iPhone restore.  Everything seems normal, but…
9. When I go back into iTunes to finish the restore, it times out (every time) when trying to access the iTunes Store - even though I can get to the normal music store just fine.
10. So, now my iPhone can only make emergency calls.

Thanks Apple, for my revolutionary communication device!

UPDATE: After a bunch of tinkering (1.5 hours), it’s not a brick anymore.  Still no 2.0.  Still having problems with Photoshop, but the phone works.

Is it just me or is everyone having problems with Firefox 3 crashing often?  Don’t get me wrong, I love it… but, it keeps crashing… on many different machines.

Actually, several of my staff users have reverted back to IE.  Yuck.  I’m still hanging in there Firefox.  I won’t give up on you.  I’m just a bit disheartened by clicking “Send Report” so often.

Caleb is one of our servers (and just for added clarification - server in this instance means a computer, not a waiter).  Sometimes I love Caleb.  He works hard and fast.  He typically does everything that I ask of him.  He’s a super-server in so many situations.  But, like any toddler, sometimes he throws temper tantrums.  This week he started routing users’ e-mails into never never land, and if you put your ear up to his hard drive, you could almost hear him laughing.

I have to choose my punishments wisely for Caleb, since punishing him also punishes all my users.  I typically don’t put him in time-out, though I’d like to.  I do, however, verbally threaten him.  I’ll say things to him like, “You better act right mister, or I’m installing Linux on you,” or “I’m going to block your favorite sites.”  These threats usually don’t work too well for him.

In this last string of issues with Caleb, namely the development of bad sectors on his drive, I’ve found the need to clone his disk and move on.  Apparently he’s rather attached to this drive and doesn’t want a new one because every time I try to clone it, the process fails.  So, I’ve used every tool that I know of to fix the bad sectors to let the cloning commence, and I’m at a dead end right now.  I’ve used chkdsk, Seagate tools, and today I even purchased Spin Rite for the job.  All to no avail.

So, if anyone has good punishment ideas for Caleb, please let me know.  Or, if you know how to get drives with bad sectors cloned, that’d be good to know too.

For those of you who subscribe to me via a feed reader, I’m sorry that you had ten of my posts re-posted.

I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 today, and it caused some problems with my FeedBurner feed.  Before you upgrade to 2.5.1, make sure that the URL that FeedBurner has for you is the same permalink structure that you are using.

I had http://www.matthewirvine.com/wp-rss2.php set up with FeedBurner, but as of 2.5.1, that page results in a null feed.  So, I had to update my feed to be http://www.matthewirvine.com/feed/rss2 to meet my permalink structure.

Keep that in mind as you too upgrade to 2.5.1.

Up to now, my posts about ACS have been focusing on the areas of the software that we love. This is not an effort to please the people of ACS; it’s an honest feeling that we are completely happy with most aspects of the software. Well last week, we found the first thing that I HATE about ACS. I know it’s a strong word, but it fits in this situation.

Last week, we finally got around to sending out our first quarter contribution statements. We had never performed this task through ACS. We didn’t anticipate any problems, but that is exactly what we found.

Our needs with contribution statements are pretty simple:

1. E-mail the statements to those who request it by e-mail
2. Do a bulk sort of the statements not sent via e-mail and mail via presorted standard bulk mail
3. Only include deductible gifts on the statements we send via either method

To us, those are simple needs and requests, but to the software you would think we were asking for the impossible. The problems that we ran into were:

• One report allows you to do a bulk sort but it includes non-deductible gifts a person makes, reflecting inaccurate giving for IRS purposes
• The other report allows you to eliminate non-deductible gifts but does not allow you to do a bulk sort, so mailing the statements costs an extra $100-$150 per quarter.
• The report that will allow for a bulk sort requires pre-printed stationary that ACS happily supplies.  This quarter, if we went with that option, the supplies would have eaten $80 of our $115 savings from doing a bulk mailout.
• E-mailed reports can only go to those people who have been uploaded to AccessACS.  There is no way to attach a PDF to an e-mail and send those statments out.

I will be elaborating on all of these items and why they ticked me off.  Mainly, I think it’s a combination of oversight and shady business.  Forcing people to buy forms when it could easily be printed in house through the reporting process is shady.  When I spoke to one ACS rep on the phone, she said “We have to make money some way.”  Excuse me?  I thought I was paying $300 per month for preferred support?  I thought I paid ten grand for the software in the first place.  Forgive me if that didn’t set right.