VSP is managing the state of Wisconsin's vision insurance. As a potential member, I must say that my experience with them has already been terrible, making me less likely to use them.

Apparently somewhere on their site is a web page to sign up for the state plan. Our department benefits manager sent along a link to it. It doesn't work. Instead I'm told to call member services. I'm guessing the site is using some sort of session state that makes it difficult to share links. Not a promising start.

I was directed to check out "Find a VSP Doctor" to see if the doctor I wanted to use was covered. Bonk! No help for you. Okay, I'll try the "doctor" link. Bonk! I can't log in because I'm not a member, I'm considering becoming a member. Okay, I'll try "Not a member" Bonk again! I get a warning that they can't reliably tell me which doctors are on my list unless I'm already a member. How can I make an intelligent decision about choosing VSP if I can't find out who the doctors covered are? But I'll try to "Continue as a Non Member" anyway. In we go. So, where do I download a full directory? Oh, I don't. All I can do is search. Worse, I need to fill out a CAPTCHA to search. Why do I need to fill out a CAPTCHA? "This helps us prevent unauthorized use of our doctor information." How do you use a list of doctors in an unauthorized way? My health insurance offers a PDF download and a searchable form, neither of which are hidden behind a CAPTCHA. Oops I got the first two wrong, so it wipes out my address, forcing me to retype it.

I'm a borderline case. I probably don't need vision coverage beyond what my health insurance normally covers, but I am interested in it. So I came to VSP's site to learn more. They had an opportunity to show me how great they are. Instead they set up a series of roadblocks. This doesn't bode well for the service I'd receive as a member. So I'll pass. Congratulations on shooting yourself in the food, VSP.

I take back almost everything nice I said about Wisconsin's eFiling system. They moved to Adobe Acrobat forms, a proprietary format. They required the most recent version, interrupting my working on taxes to download an update. (I pity people trying to use a library's computer where upgrades may be locked out.) The forms don't let me include dashes in numbers that have them; then mocks me By adding them. Worse, the form clearly warns me "NO COMMAS," then proceeds to add them itself. One of my W2s clearly has letters in the "Employer's FED ID field." I'm not allowed to enter them into the form. I hope that's okay! The form refused the address for one of my employers. That employer with the malformed address? The State of Wisconsin. And yet again I'm asked to remember what school district I live in (not having kids, I really don't care), look it up in a separate PDF, and copy four numbers back into the form. To add insult to injury, after entering the number, it tells me what school district it is! And while the form includes a number of checks for errors, it doesn't check most of them until you submit, at which point it stops after detecting a single problem.

This is a steaming pile of crap. I guess at least it's free, but for the amount of nuisance I'm sorely tempted to go back to filing paper.

One of the benefits provided by a Weight Watchers Online membership is access to their Palm tracking software, On-the-Go. The idea is really good, it lets you track what you eat in your Palm. It includes the Weight Watcher's database of foods, so you can look things up on the fly. It will synchronize with the Weight Watcher's web site.

This is a perfect match for me. I carry around my Palm all the time anyway, so this saves me carrying around a paper tracker and pen. Before using the software I simply used a memo on my Palm, but it didn't sum things up and generally was a bit of a mess. Easy access to the database is useful so I don't need to plan my meals out ahead of time.

So why did I even bother with using a memo on Palm instead of jumping straight into the On-the-Go software? This is problem one: You can't install the software if you don't have a Microsoft Windows computer that you synchronize your Palm to. Ours is not a Windows household. I went about six months without a working Windows computer in the apartment. Mac only house? Too bad.

A case could be made that you need the Windows computer because they need to provide what is called a "conduit" to connect the On-the-Go software to the web site. Supporting conduits does cost money, so they picked the largest platform and ignored the rest. It's a reasonable theory, except that the conduit has not once worked on my computer. Every time I synchronize, I get errors from their software.

Given this, how do I use the software? Turns out that if your Palm has internet access, the On-the-Go software is willing to synchronize using that. And that works just fine. If your Palm has internet access, then you don't need their conduit and there is no reason to only support Windows. They could simply ship a ZIP file and Mac and Linux users could happily use their software.

Of course, why even synchronize at all? Even a low end modern Palm should be able to hold several weeks of history without a problem. Unfortunately, On-the-Go is only willing to store one week's worth of history. If you want more, you're expected to go to the web site. I suspect this is intended to keep you locked into their web site and paying for their Online product. For now that lock in isn't a big deal; Weight Watcher's Online is included in the monthly fee I pay. However, when I reach my healthy weight, I get a free lifetime membership. But lifetime membership doesn't include Weight Watchers Online. Given that I really don't use the online service, I'm sure as hell not paying $17 a month just to use their Palm software.

Even if you're willing to live with only one week's worth of history, you can't escape the need to synchronize. You need to synchronize at least once, because the database of foods isn't built in; you need to synchronize to load it onto your Palm. I feel bad for people using a Treo who pay per byte for their data plan. I appreciate this means that the database is up to date, but they could at least provide a starting point to speed up the process. Again, this is designed to keep you reliant on their web site. Using the normal Palm tools their food database doesn't back up, so if you replace your Palm or need to reset it, you're forced to synchronize to get the database again. (If you're using superior synchronization software, like that on Linux, you can back up their database.)

On the subject of lock in, the On-the-Go software doesn't support entering your weight or how many points you get each day. You need to update the web site, then synchronize. I barely use the web site, so why make me log on?

Fine, so you've accepted their selfish lock in, how's the software itself? The good news is that it works. It tracks your intake, exercise, and healthy eating guidelines (excepting, oddly enough, the healthy oils guidelines). There is a large database of foods for looking things up, and a calculator for handling other foods. A good solid baseline. They support tall and wide Palm screens for devices that support it, a really nice touch that too many developers miss. The tall screen support is handy for scrolling through long lists of foods in the database. It's more than serviceable, and better than carrying around a paper tracker or just using a memo on the Palm.

Unfortunately the software (which they think is worth $17 a month), has many, many rough edges. It could have been great, and instead coasts along at just good enough.

The first problem is obvious before you even start the software up. I go to the Applications list in my Palm, and "WeightWatchers" is the first item. That's odd; my Palm sorts things alphabetically, and I'm pretty sure "WeightWatchers" should come after "Artelope V," "BigClock," "Contacts," and almost everything else. Except if you closely, perhaps by using the Info menu, you can see that the program isn't called "WeightWatchers". It's called " WeightWatchers". It's subtle, but there is a leading space there. Why is this? I see three possibilities, none of which are good. One is that it's a simple typo, and no one noticed that their product's name was wrong. That would be amazingly sloppy and doesn't bode well for the quality of their software. Another option is that it's a programmer's trick to make testing their software easier so that it's always easy to find. Again, that the trick would make it out to customers is amazingly sloppy. Finally there is the most evil option: that Weight Watchers is so arrogant that they assume they are the most important piece of software on my Palm. I can only hope that's not the case.

So now you're actually using the program and the more subtle problems start to pop up. You can search the database of food, but the search functionality has strange failure cases. The database contains an entry for "spicy tuna roll (2-in diameter, 1-in thick)", and it shows up if you search for "sushi", but not if you search for "tuna" or "roll". Similarly for the entry "inari sushi", which shows up for "sushi", but not "inari." For something more mainstream, why does "mocha" fail to turn up "Starbucks Coffee Caffe Mocha, Made With Non-Fat Milk, Without Whipped Cream"? (And Why the Title Case Capitalizations On a Simple List ?) The database has "Clam chowder", but not if you search for "chowder".

The search functionality itself is fundamentally limited. You can only search for eight letters, so I'm looking for chocolate chip cookies, I can search for "chocolat" and dig through 464 results or search for "cookie" and dig through 836 results. ("chip" returns nothing relevant.) There is no way to "chocolate cookie" and get that subset of about 100 items. I can limit my search using the categories, but in a world of Google I expect to type what I want and get a result.

The database itself has a number of obvious sloppy mistakes and strange decisions. First there are a number of cases where a restaurant has two different categories for two different spellings of the restaurant's name. Auntie Anne's is listed under both "Auntie Anne's Hand-Rolled Soft P..." vs "Auntie Anne's® Hand-Rolled Soft...". To see all of the options for "Eat 'n Park", you'll need to check "Eat'n Park" and "Eat'nPark". Other duplications includes "Jamba Juice"/"Jamba Juice®" "SONIC®, America's Drive-In"/"SONIC®, America's Drive-In®". "Pollo Tropical®" is simply duplicated; perhaps there are spaces at the end of one of them. You also have strange capitalization for some of the name. My best guess is that this is how the company wants their name spelled, but Weight Watchers should serve me, not them, and give normal spelling. Highlights include "ARBY'S", "BLIMPIE", "BRUEGGER'S", "BURGER KING", and "Papa Murphy's(R) TAKE 'N' BAKE P...".

It's easy to see these by using the software's useful ability to limit the list of foods by restaurant. Unfortunately the software's support for tall screens fails here as you're forced to scroll through about 140 restaurants 8 at a time.

The data itself is pretty good, although it has weird omissions. Starbucks isn't hiding their nutritional information, so why does "Starbucks Coffee Caffe Mocha, Made With Non-Fat Milk, Without Whipped Cream" only offer me the "Grande" size? If the entire point is to control my portions, knowing the tradeoffs between different sizes would be helpful. To be fair, usually the system is pretty good about offering multiple sizes, but sometimes easily available information is missing and it's frustrating.

The software shares many of the sloppy user interface decisions from the web site. Options for measuring foods are usually "cup," "tsp," "Tbsp," "pound," "oz," and "gm." First, what's a gm? Anyone who got through grade school should know that the symbol for grams is simply "g", not "gm." Furthermore, what's an "oz"? Is it a liquid ounce, or a weight ounce? The two are not interchangeable for anything that is not exactly as dense as water. Like the web site, you can't learn the actual nutritional information for the foods, so it's no good for cutting down on fat or identifying higher fiber foods.

The software is missing a reverse calculator where you can enter a food's nutritional information, tell the software how many points you'd like, and then be told how much you can have. This is endlessly frustrating, but it's pretty clear from the web site and meeting tools that no one has thought about this.

(By the way, the reverse calculation equation is this:

After all that, we get to the outright bugs. I've had the program on several occasions simply miscount a day's points. To correct this I have to delete every food for the day and reenter it. This is deeply frustrating.

Even more frustrating is when the software simply trashes one or more days of data. This is bullshit. The problem happens after synchronizing to the Weight Watcher's Online web site. When I asked customer service about it, they told me to be careful synchronize my Palm every time before using their web site. Right, so make a little mistake and your data is deleted. That is completely unacceptable in a modern user interface. Asking users to never make mistakes is not a reasonable guideline. The problem would seem to be that if the web site and the Palm disagree, the web site replaces the Palm's data. This is insanely stupid. Palm has been shipping calender software that can handle the PC and the Palm disagreeing for over a decade! Why can't Weight Watcher's get this right. Even if it is hard problem, I can guarantee you that replacing a day's worth of data on my Palm with absolutely nothing is always the wrong answer. There is no way to recover from the problem, you just have to remember the lost data as best you can and re-enter it. I've had the system destroy as much as five days of data in one shot. Since I couldn't exactly remember what I had, I lost an accurate count of not only each day's data, but of my weekly point allotment.

All in all, the software is better than nothing, but not by much. I've got a long, long list of "software I need to write, since the other options are crap", and "On-the-Go replacement" has been added to the list.

2007-09-12: I've since discovered the software sucks even more than I previously thought.

Dear Giant in the Playground Forums: If your forum software sucks so hard that you need to restrict searches to only one every five minutes, you might as well save me the trouble of trying your worthless search functionality and link the "Search" button to Google. Making a mistake in my search and getting no results, then trying to fix my mistake and being told "try again in 300 seconds" is really, really insulting.

This also applies to the piles of other forums that restrict searching to registered users. If you can't handle it, save visitors the waste of time and just link to Google.

The Weight Watchers web site provides a "Recipe Builder" to help you determine the points in your recipes. It also stores the ingredients and optionally the directions so you have a handy reference. Unfortunately it's only okay, missing a few obvious changes that would could make it great.

The program begins by asking for a recipe name and number of servings. Be sure to get these right, because you won't be asked again. Also, the number of servings has to be an integer between 1 and 99. If your recipe makes 3.5, you're out of luck. (It sounds weird but I have a smoothie recipe that makes 3.5 glasses of smoothie.)

Next you add ingredients. One. At. A. Time. That's painful, especially given that weightwatchers.com is frequently reeaaally sllooow. The first obvious improvement is to somehow parallelize the interface so I can enter everything at once. Another problem is that items are limited to 25 characters. I may want to enter a specific brand name for something I know the exact nutritional information for, but "Tommyknocker Strawberry Cream Soda" is truncated to "Tommyknocker Strawberry C." And once an ingredient is entered, the only way to rename it is to remove and re-add it.

So, you're entering ingredients. It should would be nice to know the points value per ingredient so I can consider substitutions at this point, but no such luck. I'm certainly not getting information like calories, fat, or fiber so I can make wise substitutions. Indeed, this information will never appear; all you get is the total point value when you're done with your recipe. You get no clues as to which parts of the recipe contribute the most points.

All in all, a deeply frustrating experience. I've given up on the recipe builder and now do the calculations myself.

(2007-05-18: Spelling fix.)

American Players Theatre is a great theatrical group with a cool outdoor theatre. Unfortunately their web site is an embarassment. Sure, superficially is looks nice, but behind the scenes it's a wall of WTF.

First, disable cookies and visit. You're greeted with two popups that helpfully say "Contact us" on every page. Why? No idea. Now, with cookies still disabled, try a few of the links. None of the work. Apparently the designer of their web site doesn't understand the idea that a URL should be plenty to identify a page. I'm not trying (yet) to buy tickets; I just want some informatin.

Okay, turn on cookies, and turn off Javascript. Now none of the links work at all. Apparently unfamiliar with 1990's perfectly functional technology, <a href> they instead implemented everything with Javascript.

Right, so turn everything back on and try again. Notice that the links don't show the "clickable" cursor (usually a hand) when you point to them. Just sloppy.

At least everything is working now, right? Unless, of course, you want to open multiple windows at once. Try clicking a link and look for the "Open in new window" option. It's not there. Too much Javascript magic (I'm guessing forms instead of links). It doesn't work. So if you want to open a bunch of tabs, one for each play, say, it won't work.

So, what's the result of this patently insane design? It means that search engines can't find content on the site. Of the dozens of pages, Google only finds two. As a result, searching for things like driving directions is doomed to failure.

I'm completely baffled as how someone could have the technical skills to implement a system this complex, yet simultaneously be so deeply clueless about the web to implement a system this poorly thought out. For the overwhelming majority of the web site simple links would have worked fine, in the process working better, being less error prone, and allowing Google to index your site.

2007-07-29: Swapped on/off for third paragraph; got it backward. Fixed phrasing. Also...

A few days ago I got around to buying some tickets. The pain that is their website doesn't end. Because they have forms instead of plain links, you can't easily open up potential tickets for multiple performances at once so you can see which performances have the best seats available. They have a flash seating chart (Nice, but overkill. Javascript would have worked just fine), but you can only see one section at a time in a weird flattened display. To see the full chart to help you understand the layout, you'll need to start from the front page in a new window (since you can't right click and "Open link in new window/tab"), and navigate in.

A shame that such a great theatre would have such a deeply sucky web site.

It's tax time again, and time for me to be angry at government incompetance.

Mind you, I like paying taxes. I feel I pay a very reasonable tax rate. My problem is that there is no reason that paying taxes should be hard for 99% of Americans.

The Feds continue to lead the pack in sucking. The most excellent Telefile is still gone, and the replacement is still "try one of these free private online companies." Bullshit. This is my income information; very private information. I am not handing that information over to a private company. The IRS may really want people to use online filing, but I really want them to provide their own system. The IRS is in an especially good position to offer these services, since they already have the information provided by banks and employers. I could log on and they could pre-fill almost all of the forms. That the IRS wants me to use a private company is shameful. Until the situation is fixed, they're getting paper forms from me.

That said, 1040EZ isn't too bad, although the associated documentation could use some aggresive streamlining.

Wisconsin continues to rule for offering FreeFile, an online service. It looks a bit better this year, but it's still pretty simple. They make some stupid mistakes, like demanding my SSN without spaces or dashes. This is just as stupid as online stores asking for my credit card number without space or dashes.

The system doesn't like the space in my last name, which is annoying but I can live with it. More annoying is that when I enter my last name "incorrectly", it flags the SSN field as being wrong.

The system asks me to enter my city twice on the same page. No reason, just because.

Wisconsin still wants to know my School District number for reasons I never really understood. As someone with no kids, I've never know what District I'm in. I'd expect the site to be able to calculate my district using my address and zip code.

FreeFile has a time limit of 30 minutes per page, which sounds generous, but isn't necessarily. I've been waiting about five minutes for the School District information page to load. The page took so long to load I got logged out.

Upon trying again, I finally got the school distrct list. I'm asked to look up my school district, unhelpfully presented in ALL CAPS and copy the number from one page to another. The obvious solution: a drop list with all of the school districts, isn't done. It's pretty obvious which district I'm in (the only one with "MIDDLETON" in the name), but I'm curious what people without children in small towns not on the list do. Furthermore the list is presented as a three column table. The spacing is tight, so it's easy to erroneously conclude you want the number to the left of your district, not the one to the right. Given that this is a web page, a single long table would have been just as good. I had to scroll down anyway.

On to the next page, where I'm asked to pick which forms I need to file. Again, couldn't be computer answer this question better than I. Options include adding a short questionaire that I fill in and the system decides what I need. Another option is to ask about everything, then pick the form based on my answers.

Filling in my W2, again I'm warned to not enter dashes in a field that specifically has dashed on the W2. Stupid. Check boxes on the W2 aren't hooked via <label> tags to their descriptive text, making a bit more annoying to click them. The fields for entering state taxes withheld are arranged two-states per box, so for the common case of a single state you need to double tab between fields.

Having filled in my W2, I move on. Now the form claims I have an income of 0. I think not. I go back to the W2 only to now be told that I've entered some fields incorrectly. It seems they want only whole numbers. Again, this is something easy they could have done on their end, but whatever. More annoying is that the system let me move forward with invalid data, causing later pages to display gibberish.

On the up side, they do provide a free, usable service. As a bonus, when done they let you download a PDF of your forms for filing, very handy.

So I just purchased some tickets for a show at the Overture Center. The Overture Center is using evenue.net for their online sales, and I must congratulate evenue for getting so many little details wrong:

• They demanded my credit card number as a sixteen digit number. Not only did they refuse to let me enter it in four groups of four, they actually limited the box to sixteen characters so I couldn't enter the number, double check it, and delete the digits. As I've mentioned before, if you can't handle technical details as trivial as deleting unnecessary spaces, how can I trust you to do more complex things like securely storing my credit card number?

• The radio buttons for credit card type wouldn't let me click on the credit card; I had to click on the radio button. The tag you're looking for, evenue, is <label>; learn it.

• The Overture Center has two stages; but at no point did they say which stage the show was on. When I asked for seating charts, I got images of both stages. So when I'm trying to determine where my tickets are, I have to guess.

• They use javascript to open popup windows. I'm not against that in and of itself; but they do it the incompetant way so that if I select "open in new tab" or "open in new window" for the link, I get an empty window. Sloppy and stupid.

• They suggest I print my online receipt in landscape mode. That's just weird.

(Update 2008-12-10: An earlier version of this post referred to "evenue.com" twice and "emusic" once. These were completely wrong and sloppy mistakes. My hostility is toward evenue.net. I've never interacted with evenue.com (or more properly eVenues), short of an email from their CEO pointing out my mistake. I've never, to my knowledge, interacted with any company known as "emusic." None of the above rant about implementing a web site is about evenue.com or emusic. My apologies to eVenues and any businesses known as "emusic" for the mistake.)

Ambiguous labels simultaneously amuse and annoy me. Just a few I've bumped into:

My clothes dryer has three settings for temperature. One is "Regular" and another is "Medium." Which is hotter? I think it's Medium, but I'm not entirely sure.

The Condor software has two common modes of use, "standard" and "vanilla." I know which is which, but I have the advantage of being a Condor developer.

Internally Condor has two objects that wrap TCP and UDP sockets. They're called "SafeSock" (for "Safe Socket") and "ReliSock" ("Reliable Socket"). I still have to check which is which before using one.