So, I'm a Greedy Consumer

So, I got a call today from a credit card processing company (to remain nameless...).

They said they had a "representative" in the area who could come by and talk to me about accepting credit cards.

As it turns out, I am in need of such services... On my sites, and those of my clients. Truth be told, I'm already considering some one who has a stellar offering but I was willing to consider some one else. However, coming from a cold call situation, I didn't want "Lamar" coming by my office and blowing an hour or two of my time on a completely quantitative decision.

So, I ask them for a sales sheet.

Pretty simple, right? Wrong. The young lady who had me on the phone, said Lamar had all of those materials although he'd be happy to come by.

Nope. Send them to me. They couldn't.

They didn't want to feed the "Greedy Consumer".

The "Greedy Consumer" is easy to satiate with a good interactive program. Despite the ease, most companies refuse to quell the beast. The rules are simple. The "Greedy Consumer" says, "Give me what I want, how I want it and when I want it.

In later posts, I'll talk about how this is very easy to do.

Dumb programmers

Okay, it's time for a really geeky post, and a bit of a rant to boot.

So, for those of you who don't know me, I'm an Outlook contact list whore. I have over 1,000 contacts in my contact list, the vast majority of whom are not just people I threw in there.

For example, you could pick just about any name in there and there's about a 90% certainty that I could tell you who the person is, where they worked and what their specialty is. With about 40 - 50% certainty I could tell you I've touched base with them in the last 6 - 10 months.

Needless to say, I live and die by my contact list. Therefore, by proxy, I live and die by the mobile version of that on my Blackberry Pearl.

Well, today, I apparently hit a stupid-programmer limit. I exceeded 1024 contacts in my contact list and the Blackberry Device Desktop Software blew chunks.

WHAT????

Some one actually coded in a memory limit in a modern version of a software package? They did this on a business-related platform where people might have thousands of contacts, tasks or appointments that they want to store?

I want that person's head on a platter! I mean, what were they thinking? Memory and processor time is soooo cheap that it's costs is approaching zero yet some one codes in a artificial barrier like that?

Anyway, I was on version 4.2.0.14 of the Blackberry desktop. I just downloaded version 4.3 which was release the end of last year. I got that package from here (for those of you who might be heading down a similar path): https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/browseSoftware.do. The current one is a sizable download (~ 80MB) and does not include a media manager which is fine by me -- my battery life on my phone is far too important to waste it streaming MP3's from my phone. And, besides, that's why I bought my coolest new toy, the Sansa View... Love it!

I'll get to installing this new package and let you know if it solved the problem in case you encounter it, too.

- Ray

Update: This upgrade did fix the problem.