AUSTIN, November 30, 2005 — I used to make software and I'm sure that software made users say to themselves "what were they thinking?" Software is complex. Users often want something of it that the designers weren't thinking of. And they have to crawl through features that baffle them. A couple of days ago I had designed a card for my sister's birthday and wanted to print it on that card stock that is 8.5 by 11 and scored down the middle. You'd think that would be easy enough. But really, it's not. I don't have software designed specifically for this. You would think, though, once you design the graphics for inside and out that Word would let you simply print

a page landscape with a margin to make the design appear on the right half. You would think. But they make it really, really hard. I have made it behave before, but this time I actually opened a copy of Word Perfect that came with this box. It wasn't easy but it was easier than Word. So sad. This time of year I also tangle with merging my addresses from Access to Word onto labels. It went better this year than some years but it was still hand-to-hand combat. Today I was going to do these family calendars that my aunts and my dad love. I think my sister likes it, too. The other family members could probably care less. It's just a simple twelve-month printed landscape calendar with birthdays and anniversaries and genealogical (births and deaths of dead relatives) info. I was thinking that if I could make it HTML I could send it to my tech-savvy cousins who don't care about the thing anyway without all that printing. I accepted that I might have to re-enter or pain-stakingly copy all the data to a new program. (The data was locked into an old version of Calendar Creator.) I downloaded two different trials of software. One didn't seem to allow you to enter dates to repeat (which is all I need to do...don't want to enter the stuff again next year) and the other seemed to allow it but I couldn't make it accept my entries. This might have been because the software was an emasculated trial version. Which would have been fine, I might have paid and then tried it, but the list of things the version would not do didn't include that so for all I knew it was a bug. I uninstalled both of these. I looked in the closet and found a newer version of Calendar Creator that I'd never installed. It claimed on the box to let you save in HTML. I bit the bullet and installed it. It was the same software I was using, only newer but so much newer that they wouldn't read the data from the old version. I fooled with the HTML output. It did it all right but it created an image for each month with all the dates and so if I wanted extra links I'd have to make an image map or something. But still it seemed better than the old version and I painstakingly put in the data today and started proofreading it. Of course, I had to figure out how to do things that the new version does completely differently than the old. And some of the quirks were just puzzling until I figured them out. I finally thought I had a way from here to there with some tests. Maybe it will work.

Why is software so hard? Oh, I like some programs. The one I'm typing this into is Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. I use it and Fireworks 4 all the time. They frustrate me sometimes but they get the job done without me hand-coding HTML. And yet they let me see the resulting code. Of course, this software has been updated a couple of times since I purchased it and I think the company has been bought out. So when I need a new version, perhaps because this one becomes unsupported by the operating system, I'll be in for more pain.

So, yeah, I spent thirty-two years torturing other people with software. But there are bunches of young, iPod-wearing, wonks torturing me in my retirement.

The day started with the "it's too cold for water aerobics" conversation with my dad. Which relieved me of the need to go to the club until I wanted to do it. It was noon or later when I got there. I did fifty minutes on the bike and some arm and chest exercises. Not enough, but pretty good.

When I got home, I tackled the calendar project again. Finishing it and sending money to the folks in Colorado will wind up my holiday 'duties' except for planning a Christmas for the parental units (food, presents). I have personal financial stuff to look at and plan before the end of the year and need to get on that. It's amazing that I always have these things I must do. Besides go to the gym and play tennis and watch stupid TV, I mean.

I conquered some things about the program for the calendar. But before I could finish it I had to shower and go to a club for the meeting.

I sat through a disorganized meeting with the people who should have conducted it coming late or not at all and one woman (who always acts like I don't know what I'm talking about) getting her opinions voiced and then leaving because she had something else to do. We are talking about long range planning. Ha. Anyway, I think they are ready to not ask my opinion again and take it to a board committee. I mostly kept my mouth shut and ate too many potato chips, drank a Shiner Bock, ate a salad with seared tuna. I did learn one possibility for making the plan better at the end, after the meeting was essentially over and only three of us remained, and tried to insist that the architects get the info that that would be better. Of course, most of this won't see the light of day for years. Because we have a plan for a pro shop and it will be built over the next couple of years and then we will attack other things. I like the club like it is right now pretty well. The good news is that the lack of money will keep things from changing too much.

When I got home I worked on the calendar for a while and then watched part of a musical program on PBS and then crime shows while reading the paper. I keep saying I'm not going to watch any more crime shows but then I do it. Worse, I record ones that are playing against each other and watch both of them. Stop it! I went to sleep too late, too, which will make me more groggy and useless in the morning than usual.