Partial Solar Eclipse

Dappled sunlight through the tree becomes overlapping images of the remaining crescent of the sun.

How do you spell "piss poor"?

Quicken and Bank of America Software User Friendliness

We use BofA for checking, and Quicken to keep track of the account. It's usually pretty convenient - a few key presses to download all recent transactions and balance the account. Quicken keeps track of which transactions it's already seen, and only adds new ones.

For some reason, BofA just decided to change how they identify transactions to Quicken. They've been warning that "there will be changes to your account" for about a month, so we'd have time to prepare, even though there was actually nothing to be done to prepare, so the warnings were kind of pointless. But that does mean that this wasn't an accident and they had lots of time to check that everything would work properly.

Today was D-Day for the conversion. I went to update the account, following the instructions carefully. The account re-connected successfully.... and imported 173 duplicate transactions. No problem, you say: just delete them. Easier said than done! Quicken, in its infinite software-engineering-wisdom, has made it impossible to delete multiple transactions. You have to go through them one by one. Not only that, but you have to use menus and mouse actions. You can't delete downloaded transactions with keystrokes. So I get to spend 30 minutes moving the mouse, pressing buttons, finding the menu target for "Delete" and then confirming.

Nice work, BofA and Quicken! (Thanks to MD for the title of this post.)