:NYTimes article on Even the Insured Feel the Strain of Health Costs

–MetaFilter user Pastabagel

You will find the links to the EyePassword paper, the EyePoint video, the soon-to-be-published Gaze-based Scrolling Techniques paper and lots of other work in the publications section of the site.

I came home and installedit. First, Quickbooks Pro 2007 requires about 730 MB of disk space — kinds of excessive for an accounting package! Anyway, the installation proceeded smoothly. Then I proceeded to launch the program from the icon on the desktop. “Loading Quickbooks…” — a good sign. Then up came the splash screen, immediately followed by “This program has stopped responding” and then it shut down. And so it started…

So I searched the web for solutions to the problem. The posts on the Quickbooks forum by “Community_Guru_Brian” seemed to suggest that you have to uninstall and then do a clean install after removing all the Intuit folders. Did that. No luck.

Some other posts suggested that it was a permissions issue and that I should try running as Administrator. Did that. No go. Another post suggested rubbing “reboot.bat” to fix permissions. Did that. No go. Unfortunately, I was doing this on a Friday evening and so when I called Intuit support, of course, the support call was answered by someone with a distinct Indian accent, but with an americanized name. The support person insisted that in order to get support I would first have to “register” my version of Quickbooks and start the free 30-day support. I indicated that I did not want to start the free 30 day support clock by registering yet and all I want to do is get the product installed to at least be able to try it out first. Well, she said that in that case I would not be eligible for any help from Intuit. I asked for a supervisor, was put on hold and ultimately hung up after no one came back on the line.

Over the weekend, I continued to troll through the Intuit forums to try and find the solution to the problem. Tried everything, but no result. Must have spent a good 6-7 hours on this over the weekend, not counting the time spent on Friday (another 2-3 hours).

On Monday, I finally bit the bullet, called back in, “registered” for the free 30 day support and spoke to Jyoti in the Intuit call center in New Delhi. I indicated to her that I had alrady tried several things, but she insisted that I try them again. So we went through the same process all over again. ANything she would look up and suggest, I had already tried before. After over an hour and a half on the phone she finally gave up and said that this will need to be “escalated” and that she would need to get permission first etc etc. Anyhow, she said she would call me back the following day. We set a time for 1:00 PM Pacific — which I explained to her was 1:30 AM in New Delhi, but she agreed.

The following day, I didn’t get a call back at 1:00 PM. Finally I got a voicemail at 5:30 PM saying that the matter had been escalated and scheduled for a call back.

The next day I got a call back from David from Donovan from Intuit support. He suggested that I try downloading the FULL release (330 MB) off the web and then reinstalled. He said he would call back in 1/2 hour after I was done downloading.

About 2 hours later, I get a call from James in Tucson, AZ. By this point, I had uninstalled, cleaned folders and started to re-install. BTW, even the “full release” on Intuit’s website is not quite right. It is supposed to be R7, but is actually R6. And so even after installing a fresh download, you have to download an additional web patch (95 MB) and installed that to supposedly get up to the latest version which is R7 as of this writing.

Another couple of hours on the phone with James (1 hour and 37 minutes is what I counted) which included booting in Safe-Mode, turning of all startup applications and services, then re-installing. Removing and re-installing .NET 1.1. etc etc.

NOTHING worked. The symptoms are all the same — QuickBooks would still crash before launching.

James was stumped and said he would discuss this in their team meeting and call me back the following day. Scheduled a call back for 9:30 AM. Of course, the next day, no one called at 9:30 AM or anytime close. Someone finally called and left a message in the afternoon, when I happened to be out of the office.

The next morning, it is now June 22nd and 9:15 AM — I called back in to figure out when I should expect a call back. The person I spoke to “Abby” who sounded quite clueless, said that they would have to “re-escalate” in order to schedule a callback! When I finally explained the whole thing yet again, she schedule a call back for the same day. As of noon, there has been no call from Intuit. Even when they do call, I wonder what resolution they will have to offer.

At a meta level, the quality of customer support and even more so the quality of the product from a company as large as Intuit is really quite astonishingly poor. There is no concept of true troubleshooting. Their agents work of scripts and knowledgebases (like most companies these days) which turns there more into non-thinking automatons than into human beings who can think and analyze a problem.

I’m very close to calling their bluff on their 60-day money-back guarantee and at least recouping the cost of the retail box, though I doubt that will do anything to recover the countless hours I have spent with a poor product and even poorer customer support and will still leave me without a solution for what I was trying to do in the first place — setup the accounting for a new company!

Over the weekend

Dynamic Speedometer website is on the Stanford HCI Group page.

Here is a video clip which shows the dynamic speedometer in action.

In addition, here is a podcast which featured the Dynamic Speedometer research.

Most major conferences now have multiple parallel tracks. CHI has 9 parallel tracks running concurrently with 5 different courses. So all in all, you can chose to be in one of 14 different places. The opportunity cost of missing some talks is high but unfortunately, since one doesn’t know which ones are the ones worth listening to, it’s ultimately an educated guess (some wouls call it more like a crap shoot, but it’s not really all that bad).

By the time a paper is presented at a conference there is nothing a person in the audience can really say or do in order to change that in any way. Regardless of how critical the comments may be, the paper/poster has already been published and is hence been condemned to be around forever. Since the paper has already gone through a peer-review process, I am willing to trust the judgement (though some would question that, but bear with me for a minute) of the reviewers who accepted the paper to have verified the methodology and the details presented in the paper. Therefore, there is no reaosn for me to have to sit through a half hour (20 minutes presentation and 10 minute Q&A) on a paper. Instead all I really care about is what is the motivation/topic for the paper, what was built/tested/evaluated and what teh results were. 5 minutes at the most. The 5 minute presentation is sufficient to present a summary of the work. Anyone who is interested in the work, can read the paper and/or then meet with the presenter during his/her designated “discussion time” (no paper presentations should be on at the same time).

Back to the question of whether or not to trust the reviewers’ judgements — once the paper has already been accepted there is very little accountability in a public forum for the quality of the paper or the presentation. Therefore, rather than spend the time to listen to all the details, I prefer getting the executive summary and then having the opportunity to interact with the presenter in a special public Q&A session.

To that effect, I would also like to see some kind of accountability on the quality of the paper or presentation after the conference. Under the current system, while members of the audience can ask insightful questions, that interaction is not captured other than in the memories of others who were present and happened to be listening. It would be interesting to have members of the community post their critiques or questions in a public forum — similar to comment son a blog entry. Along the same lines I would also be in favor of having the paper reviewers comments and the authors rebuttal available since the real value in research is not just what actually gets published, but in the back-and-forth that happens between the community.

So here is what I would propose:
1) No paper presentation to exceed 5 minutes, maybe even 3 minutes.
2) Single (or at least fewer) track paper presentations so that one can at least get a comprehensive overview of all the papers in the conference.
3) The paper, abstract, reviews and rebuttals posted on a website, which allows others to view them and comment on them.
4) A designated “discussion session” for the paper, which is more interactive. Those who wish to question the methods or results can read the paper and then come and participate in the discussion. Those who wish to just listen and absorb are welcome as well. A scribe should be present to capture the interaction of the discussion so that it too can be archived along with the paper.

These are of course thoughts in progress, but I’d be happy to discuss them with anyone who is interested.