I just read a comment on a site about music. The content of the post was about how much the author hates the stereotypical “Christian guy with a guitar at a party”. It was an okay post, but the real gem was a comment in the ensuing discussion. It hit home and made me, a lifelong bass player, laugh out loud. I *so* relate.

I started playing bass in high school so I could play with the youth group worship band.

It’s the only instrument that you can suck at and still be allowed to play with real musicians.

In trying to furnish the kids rooms, we have been looking for some shelves to put on the wall. We found the perfect shelves at Home Depot and bought a pair. A few days later we decided to go buy more, because we will put two or three in each kids room.

They no longer carry them. We bought the last ones.

Sigh.

But wait! What’s that on the horizon? A bird? A plane? No! It’s WOODWORKER MAN!

Working from the ones we bought, I whipped up a pattern and then LittlePage3 and I knocked out another dozen or so shelves. LittlePage2 assisted with rounding edges and voila. The ones in the front are from the store, the pile in the back are the ones we made.

See dear? All that money, time and floor space in the basement isn’t for nothing!

We just dropped A LOT of money on a program called Rosetta Stone to help teach french to the kids. We bought the Homeschool Edition, with Levels 1,2 and 3 French, and the Audio Companion CDs in a bundle. (And it was a bundle, let me tell you.)

I looked around on their website, and there is a tonne of information on how to use the Homeschool Edition on a network with “SMS”, their management program. It allows you to track users and lesson progress, and allows users to log on on and use the software from any machine on the network. The explanations and instructions are very clear, and are updated as of a few weeks ago. Yay! We have a home network and a number of machines around the place, this will be great!

Rosetta Stone French comes in the mail. I open the box. I take the CDs downstairs to install on the server. I look in the box again because there is no SMS disk.

I call tech support. I wait 10 minutes. They tell me that it’s all built in now, I don’t need a separate SMS install.

I try again. I beat my head on the desk. All of this beautiful documentation and none of it seems to match what’s on my screen or in the box.

I contact tech support via email. Their submit form is VERY broken, so it won’t allow “return” characters in the explanation of your question. I have URLs and references and multiple questions, and it takes me literally 10 minutes to figure out why this form won’t take my request. The error message I get cunningly neglects to mention that CR’s aren’t allowed. Grrr.

The response I get is this:

Hi [MrPages],

Rosetta Stone Version 3 Homeschool edition is not network-able. I apologize for the inconvenience. You may install the software on two computers.

Let us know if you have further questions.

Um. Hang on a sec.

I reply with a list of articles that seems to contradict this directly.

Hi [MrPages],

Those articles are for the Version 2 product. You have the Version 3, the newest Homeschool product. Version 2 is no longer available for the language you are studying as a homeschool version. The Version 3 Homeschool product is not compatible with home networks. I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you would like to return your product, please contact Customer Care.

I reply again, pointing to documentation that specifically mentions version 3, pointing to the fact that none of the documentation is labelled as version specific, and indicating my displeasure at the removal of functionality without any documentation of such, and in fact, with documentation out there that contradicts the removal.

Then I get this wonderfully concise summary of the issue:

There are two versions of the SMS, Version 2 and Version 3. There are two versions of homeschool products, Version 2 and Version 3. The Version 2 homeschool product works with both versions of the SMS. The SMS and Version 3 do NOT work together. The Version 3 product is an entirely different setup, and is not capable of networking.

So. You’ve used the same version numbers for two separate products that used to be bundled. Now they aren’t bundled, the old version of one works with the new version of the other, but the new version of the same one won’t work with the new version of the other.

Thanks. That’s brilliantly clear. Wonderful marketing, guys.

And, like suckers, we kept the program because it’s still the best way to learn a language. It’s so frustrating to be stuck in a position like this, trapped by incompetent documentation and marketingspeak into accepting less that we ordered. And just smiling and taking it.

Rosetta Stone, you have a good product, but you suck at customer service.

A mother in Ontario has written a book to instruction her college age kids on the basics of life after one of them got scurvy while away at college.

We’re talking about “how to boil water”, “how to wipe your bum”, “how to vacuum (yes, you have to change the bag)” level stuff. 500+ pages of it.

Now, here’s the great part: She sees the fact that her children have absolutely no life-skills as a good thing.

You see, they were so busy doing important stuff that they never had time for plebian pursuits like learning how to live on your own.

It’s also about priorities. She’s more interested in letting her kids get their homework done so they can get into university than making them clean toilets.

“We’re trucking them around, trying to enrich their lives and feeding them in the McDonald’s drive thru. It takes time to teach them how to cook. It takes time to teach them how to properly clean the bedroom. None of us really have that time.”

Yeah. It’s all about priorities.

Sigh.

I normally don’t particularly care for American politics. I realize that as a Canadian, they affect me, but I also realize that the press and the hype machine around most things political is more about the ad-revenue than about the welfare of the nation.

This, however.

This is important.

We’ve seen every episode of Battlestar Galactica, so I’m always on the lookout for signs of enemy invasions, but I never dreamed it would be so fast and so high-level!

John McCain is a cylon!

How can you argue with proof like this?