Legal stuff

Want to see a high-powered, high-priced lawyer get his ass handed to him om a plate? Like, maybe the lawyers for the RIAA, the outfit that likes to sue such miscreants as dead people, technophobic grannies and 8-year-olds millions of dollars apiece for illegally downloading a couple of songs on computers they don't have access to? (Well, maybe the dead people do have access to computers. When you're dead, you're dead a LONG time and you have to do something to allay the boredom...)

Enjoy.

By the way, the letter, which cost a princely US$6,880.25, was money well spent. The RIAA backed off post-haste and dismissed the case.

Allparadox, a retired lawyer over at Groklaw and Investor Village's SCOX message board, drew my attention to it. As he puts it, "Mr. Ledford is the kind of lawyer who will tear your leg off and beat you to death with it. This over-prepared document is merely his idea of a letter. Imagine how he will be in court: meticulous preparation and rock-solid procedure will be the standard."

Work update

It was a long slog, what with having to duplicate everything we've done x8 because we've got 8 stupid frickin' databases (I'd like to take whoever had THAT bright idea and beat them with a cluestick right now), but tomorrow we go live. Halleluja.

The interface looks miles better than the old one. Now to overcome the doubting Thomases who litter the shop: there are those in every workplace who want the upgrade to fail because they prefer to do things "the old way". It works, they don't want to change.

The reason why I was doing this now, in such a hurry: there's a new cheque formatting from the organization that handles the clearing and settlement of all payments in Canada, the Canadian Payments Association. (When you deposit a cheque into your bank account, the bank sends the cheque to this organization. It doesn't matter if you bank at a Schedule 1 bank, a trust company, or a credit union/caisse populaire. It's the Federal Government's big idea.) It's supposed to become effective July 1, 2007.

And today I learn this:

However, to help their business customers make a smooth transition, financial institutions will continue to process “old format” business cheques until implementation of the new clearing process begins in the latter part of 2008. This extended transition period, or “grace period”, will allow businesses that are still working on the changes to use up their existing supply of cheques and implement any required updates to software.

I could happily render someone into kitty kibble right about now.

Still, it's done, and done well, and we have a nice modern accounting system. I still dislike Yardi because it lacks many features I have gotten used to thinking of as essential (and the more I use it, the more convinced I am that they should be features of this program, dammit) just do not exist. But it's miles ahead of where we used to be.