Thanks to readers who emailed! It’s very helpful to get feedback.
To save programmer time, updates for our payroll software will change this year. We’ll make new withholding tables only if they will be used, or if they are easy. We just uploaded the 7 US states with no income tax, plus user requests so far. Users from other states will need to contact us to get 2024 tables. Ditto for Canada. Click here for more info.
Turn-around time won’t be long for custom tables: it takes 20 to 30 minutes to fetch data, enter new numbers, double-check, and update the website. Even quicker if nothing changed this year.
Full-size annual updates for our payroll software are a real chore, and there are three reasons for it. One is just simple math: multiply that prep time by 50 US states + DC + 10 Canada provinces + 3 territories.
Secondly, every year one or two states make big changes that take hours to figure out. Maybe longer. Some tax departments invent amazingly bad ways to calculate withholding. Utah is so weird, it takes a special spreadsheet to convert their numbers. Connecticut added so many tables that we had to skip some of them.
Finally, many states are precise when they should just aim to be accurate.
An example of too much precision: California withholds exactly $115,488.06 per year for a single person making $1 million. Round it to $115,500, and nobody will even notice on their pay stub. Withholding is just an estimate of next year’s payment, anyhow. Our staff must type in and double-check hundreds of numbers each year. Futzing with pennies per million makes it harder. More chance of error by us, tax agencies and users.
Flat taxes are often pushed as a simpler tax system, and every year another state or two switch to them. They are precise and easy: same tax rate for everyone. Problem is, they increase inequality. It’s mostly because of marginal utility. Take 10% of income from a poor person, and they need to give up food, clothing, shelter or health care. Take 10% from a rich person and they can only buy 9 Picassos instead of 10.
Some people who make tax policy and tax tables don’t seem to understand math very well. Seems like a good topic for a future post.
In the previous post I blamed some big rocks for slow progress on our new accounting software. But I think the problem is deeper.
Programming requires intense focus. In fact, it works best with more than that. Every new product we’ve made took a spell of total obsession. TurtleSoft’s history has a few of those, interspersed with low-focus coasting.
The first batch of software obsession was a couple months in Winter 1986. It built spreadsheets and macros for estimating and accounting. The second was five years, 1988 to 1993, as TurtleSoft grew exponentially. Then another five, 1997 to 2002, to finish and polish Goldenseal.
More recently, it took a year of obsession circa 2015 to update to 64 bit and rewrite the database engine. Only shorter spurts since then. Most creative binges were interrupted by something: noisy neighbors, Covid, moving, need for other work to pay bills. A few years of effort were wasted on platforms that didn’t work out.
In between the creative bursts, small stuff still gets done. But most energy goes to other interests. One can only stay focused on one thing for so long. Obsession is draining, and not healthy. Sitting for many hours at a computer add 2 or 3 pounds of body fat per month.
Software is not the only thing that requires obsession. It applies to anything big and new. I just watched The Wind Rises, a Studio Ghibli film about aircraft design. In it, Count Caproni says you only get ten years in the sun, for that level of creativity. Hayao Miyazaki may speak from his own experience.
The new accounting app is close to completion, but it’s hard to find motivation to work on it. My ten years are up. Work is getting done, but it’s moving very slowly. The rocks, yard and house are too enticing.
I don’t know how many people still use the current Goldenseal. Most of our users started in the 1980s to 00s, and probably retired by now. Construction has similar creative burn-out issues (plus Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and back pain).
There’s a bit of a turning point for TurtleSoft, right now. It’s almost time to make payroll tax tables for 51 US states/DC, plus 13 provinces and territories in Canada. Skipping it this year is an effective way to count the surviving Goldenseal user base (at least for the payroll software). If nobody squeaks, a tedious week will be avoided. Something else can get accomplished instead.
I don’t know how many people read this blog. Usually that doesn’t matter, since I enjoy writing it. It’s a good way to gain clarity. Maybe Google likes it, and sends searches our way. However, hearing from readers who still want the new accounting/estimating software will be useful. An aid to motivation. Send a hello to support@turtlesoft.com.
Since 2015, the project has been a long, long slog with zero financial reward. It will finish just out of sheer inertia and guilt, but completion will be quicker if there’s a better reason in sight.
Progress on our new accounting software is still going slowly. It’s mostly because of large rocks.
Our new office has a triple-size lot at the urban edge of suburbia. It’s on a slope which was bulldozed into flat sections, with steeper bits in between. Those were covered with black plastic and small stones, held by rock walls at the bottom. 25 years of frost expansion and gravity caused the stones to slide down, collapsing the walls. In places, the soil itself shifted. The steepest bank is 7 feet vertical and only 7 feet horizontal. That’s challenging, even in glacial till.
Repairs must be done before spring, to get it ready for plantings that will hold the slopes better. So, until there’s snow or frozen ground, this is the most urgent project.
I’ve done plenty of stone work over the years, but never with such big rocks. Some wiggle an inch at a time, with leverage from a long pry bar. One moved faster thanks to a come-along tied to an upslope tree. Too bad there aren’t more of those.
I’m sure the stones were originally set with heavy equipment, but this project is too small to be worth the rental/delivery/pickup cost. Anyhow it’s a good way to lose weight.
The damaged walls are about 80% done. Weather will get worse soon enough, so there will be more reason to sit at the computer and build software.
Everything is now moved into our new location. Desks and file cabinets are in their long-term homes. It’ll take a few more days to unpack boxes, then TurtleSoft will be back in business. Progress reports on our new accounting software will be coming soon.
I personally work at two desks, and often swivel between them. On top are four monitors and about 10 desktop machines: two Windows and the rest Mac Minis. Some of it is because of old software that needs older machines. It’s the only way to run Adobe apps on the desktop. Some is so we can test the new software in any recent OS. The setup also makes it easy to do something else during downloads, compiles or other lengthy operations.
When it came time to start restocking desk drawers, I realized something. At least 90% of the stuff sat there untouched since the last move. It’s currently in boxes with labels linked to a spreadsheet, and they might as well stay there. Maybe all the clutter on top of the desks can go into the empty slots, now. That makes room for new and improved clutter!
This blog started nine years ago. First there was a Kickstarter campaign, then progress reports on the 64-bit update for Goldenseal accounting software.
It’s embarrassing to read posts from the early days. I was so clueless. Back then, the best guess was six months to whip out an upgrade. That’s how long previous updates took for OSX and two chip changes (680×0 to PPC to Intel). Macs still had another 5 years of support for 32-bit apps, so it seemed like plenty of time to spare.
This banner sums up what really happened:
Updating the basic 32-bit code wasn’t bad: it only took a few months. Then our staff spent a year rewriting the basic database engine. Meanwhile, several subcontractors worked on the human interface. All gave up. Moving from an older GUI library (PowerPlant) to a 64-bit framework was just too hard.
Our staff took over, and wasted 3 years trying to build a GUI with Apple’s Cocoa framework. That also failed. The next plan was to go Windows-only. Sadly, Microsoft’s frameworks were even worse than Apple’s. At least we realized it sooner, and only wasted a year.
After a year of Covid obsession, our staff finally tried Qt. It was more successful. After 9 years of struggle, it’s looking good for a software release this winter.
Right now, the biggest snag is real estate.
To run software on current desktops, we need to register the app with Apple and Microsoft, and jump through some hoops. Ditto for a Qt license and trademark. All those things will work better with a new LLC.
Problem is, TurtleSoft has been in temporary quarters since May. When the office vacated and the house sold, there was an extreme drought of home listings. Excellent for sellers, not so good for buyers. The dream of having sale and purchase closings on the same day evaporated. Instead, we scrambled up a month-to-month rental.
Since then, much time has been spent on Zillow and Realtor.com. We visited many fixer-uppers in both New York and Pennsylvania. Hard to incorporate without knowing the final state. Hence the snag for software progress.
Fortunately, more housing has gradually come onto the market. There are fewer snap sales and bidding wars. We compromised a bit, and made an offer on a house near Binghamton NY. It was accepted yesterday.
Closing is in September. We probably can focus more on programming until then. No more hourly checks on Zillow. There will be spells of moving chaos, but those should subside by October. Then it’s time to pick a name, build a beta version, and let folks try it.
Last week our staff started on the first training video for our new accounting software. After clicking Record, there was an oops moment. We can’t explain how to use something if it doesn’t have a name.
A while back I mentioned the naming issues for the new app. Using Goldenseal in any form will be confusing. Anything with TurtleSoft also won’t fly. It needs to be a singular noun that can text-replace on existing website pages without sounding weird. Besides that, the name should be short and snappy. Easy to say and easy to spell. Sounds kinda like what the app does.
Also, the app name needs to survive filing with the US Patent & Trademark Office. Trademark is legal protection for names, logos and even colors. Registration takes at least a year. They publish a list of new names, then wait to hear from others who might already use something similar. What counts is first use, not first registration. It makes for some interesting lawsuits.
TurtleSoft had a bad experience with trademark. In 1992, we built a new estimating app, then paid a specialty lawyer for a trademark search. BidWorks was unused, so we launched with that, and filed to register the name. USPTO denied the application a year later. Another company registered BidWork slightly before ours, and it was too similar.
We redid all the manuals and marketing with BidMagic instead. The new name was wider than the old one, which threw printed pages out of whack. Not fun, but we couldn’t find anything skinnier. At least it survived registration.
Turtlesoft abandoned the BidMagic trademark in 2002. Another company registered it in 2006 and still uses it for their proposal/project management software. BidWork/BidWorks is also abandoned, and currently vacant.
Trademark registration is online these days, so it doesn’t require an IP lawyer any more. This week we searched the USPTO database for potential business software names. Almost everything we tried was available: either unused or abandoned. I think it’s because there are fewer medium-sized software companies these days. Less business software than in the heady days of the 1990s. Mobile devices have plenty of apps from small developers, but they have little reason to register trademarks.
Thanks to Covid, USPTO is 10 months behind on their paperwork. Anything filed now won’t finish until well into 2025. However, I think we can pick something decent that will survive the process. After brainstorming several hundred possible names, a few dozen seem good.
Should we get a new web address that matches the app name? That narrows the options down considerably. URL registration is cheap, which means many potential names have squatters that hope to sell for a few $K and up. Still, there are a half dozen names so far with open .com sites that we’d be happy to use.
This is probably the right time for us to rebrand completely. The new app won’t have much competition, especially on Mac. TurtleSoft will soon have growth potential, and we might as well prepare for that.
The biggest part of our move is almost done. TurtleSoft will be in Sayre PA for a while, while looking for a more permanent home.
We just deposited proceeds from sale of the Ithaca house, bought in 1994. I tried to enter a real estate sale into Goldenseal, and couldn’t find any specific way to do it. Sales probably need to get Equipment and Real Estate as options in the Conditions popup, with code to link to the account. For now it will just be a bank deposit with comments.
Goldenseal does have code for buying equipment and real estate, added in 2004. Either a user bought real estate then and called in with the question, or TurtleSoft bought some large equipment. Now it’s on the to-do list to handle the other end also.
Internet won’t be connected at temporary quarters until June 6. Programming will rev back up before that, with no distractions. It will be great to be back in the saddle again.
More properties have been coming onto the market lately, so we are hopeful about finding something soon. Now that there’s cash in the bank, it will be easier to make attractive offers.
Once it happens, the second half of the move will be easier. Part one was schlepping boxes and furniture down 3 flights of windy stairs, on a downtown street with scarce parking. Getting the sturdy old Steelcase desks past the winders was especially challenging. Part two will be large U-Hauls, ramps and hand trucks. Easy loading and unloading is a priority for the long-term home. No desire to repeat the past few months.
During the pandemic year I stayed home a lot, and fixed up my house: new roof, paint outside and in, floor sanding, minor repairs. Power tools have improved greatly since my last big construction projects in the 1980s and 90s. It made the work very satisfying. Lithium ion rocks!
I thought seriously about moving on to another fixer-upper. So I listed the house as a FSBO (for sale by owner), with plans to use a regular real estate agent if that didn’t work out. Besides the potential to save on commissions, doing it all was educational. Also, easier to coordinate buying, selling, final construction work and clutter removal.
The house went onto Craigslist March 31. That listing was a dud: two agents called, plus one possible buyer who never followed through. In past years I’ve listed raw land a couple of times, and those were much more successful. Not sure why the difference.
Houzeo promises MLS listings for about $400. I signed up, but soon canceled and got a refund. For this area they use a state-wide agency based in New York City. Their contact number on the listings never reached a human. There was no way to reach the owner, or get information about the properties. The phone system seemed mostly designed to sell cheap listing services to other FSBOs. Maybe Houzeo is a viable option in some areas, but definitely not here.
Zillow is probably the most popular website for buying houses, so I put a FSBO listing there on April 15. The process was free, and very easy: just upload text and pictures. It even allowed a website link to the house description website.
Zillow was much more successful. The initial traffic report looked like this:
In comparision, MLS listings around here usually get 1500 hits on the first day, and 3000 after a week. It’s necessary to click through to see the FSBOs, and apparently 80% of people never do that.
One buyer stopped the day after it was listed, but decided no after viewing the outside. Eleven others booked visits. 3 came with buyer’s agents, 6 were solo, 2 no-showed. All were pre-qualified with cash or a bank letter. None submitted offers.
ListWithClever.com offers MLS listings for $3000, promising much better service than Houzeo. For this area, they use an agent in Syracuse (more than an hour drive from here). I didn’t discover them until late in the process, and decided not to go that route. Maybe in the future.
I talked to a few Ithaca agents. One seemed great, but she ghosted me for 2 weeks. The main selling season is short around here, and mid-May is already near the end. Waiting until 2022 seemed more and more attractive. So I canceled the Zillow listing and planted the vegetable garden.
The next day, that first buyer emailed to express renewed interest. They toured the insides twice, and really liked the chestnut trim. A week later they submitted an offer for $12K over my list price.
Meanwhile, on the buying end, there was nothing plausible in Ithaca. A few nearby villages and cities had interesting properties at lower prices. I looked at a few and made a contingent offer on one. However, when they turned on the water, the kitchen floor became a pond, and most of the fixtures didn’t work. No insulation, so plumbing probably froze regularly. The basement looked like the old Windows screen saver with random pipes everywhere.
After canceling that one, I looked at a few others. Unfortunately, it was late in the season and the good ones were all sold. It narrowed down to just one late entry, which had zoning problems.
So, it’s back to the pre-Covid routine at least until Spring 2022. Goldenseal Pro will be finished a few months faster.
Is a real estate FSBO worth doing? I’ve had two prior successes with less expensive properties, so it’s a definite maybe. However, selling a nice residence may work out better with an agent.
For one thing, the agent can honestly not mention flaws, because they don’t know about them. I removed almost all the old lead paint, and was proud to mention it during the tours. But I suspect that people just heard “blah blah blah LEAD blah blah” and were scared off. Better to have an agent who side-steps the issues.
There may also be boundary problems. The house may feel less used when you don’t meet the person who previously lived there. Or maybe it’s just that MLS is needed to bring in bigger crowds. Ultimately I had an 8% conversion rate, which may be reasonable for such an expensive transaction. There was a buyer, but having more viewers increases the chances of a bidding war and a better price.
I checked Zillow to see percentages of listings that are FSBO. Across the US it averages about 20%. The high is 40% around New York City, ranging down to 6% in Houston. There aren’t any obvious geographic trends. No easy way to find the success rates for each method.
As for real estate in general, here’s a Zillow map of houses listed at over $20 million:
My house is getting ready for sale. I’ve also started looking at places to buy. The goal is to make both happen at the same time, and not be homeless in between.
For buying, Zillow and Realtor.com are fantastic. Put in the right filters, and you can see a map with everything that matches. I wish it existed for the three other times I bought property. Real estate agents are still doing business as usual, but I think it’s an industry that soon will be disrupted by technology.
As a remodeler, I always talked directly with clients. We negotiated prices and talked out the details. It worked well. A few bigger jobs had an architect involved, but they were not much different than subcontractors: another expert handling their part of the project.
Real estate is very different. Around here, there is a listing agent working for a 3% commission. They are supposed to look out for the seller’s interest. Then a separate buyer’s agent getting their own 3%. It’s more like a lawsuit than a sale.
Usually I try to look at properties with the listing agent, since they know more about the property and the seller. However there’s a fixer-upper Victorian in Waverly NY that had to be done via buyer’s agent. Questions take about a week. I ask the buyer’s agent, who asks the listing agent, who asks the seller. Then it comes back the chain. Often so garbled that it’s not even useful. Three people eager to make a sale, who might be lying.
Aside from the communication issues, those 3% cuts are big chunks of money. They fall from the sky and land on agents almost randomly. That creates all sorts of perverse incentives. It turns some people into assholes.
Last weekend I booked to see a different Waverly Victorian at 2 PM Sunday. The listing agent planned to be out of town, so someone else was going to show it. An agent called me Saturday night. I incorrectly assumed he was the replacement, even though he mentioned the wrong address. Rather than clarify, he got the appointment details from me and said he’d show it. Then he called the listing agent and booked for 1 PM. Then texted me to say the time had changed. He also did some web stalking: looked up my house in the tax rolls, prepared a detailed sale analysis, and spent most of the visit trying to sell me on having him list it. The scam fell apart when I got a call at 2:15 from the original agent, wondering why I didn’t show. Yuch.
Having agents involved doesn’t seem to add 6% of value to real estate selling. So, I’m going to try a FSBO (for sale by owner). I’ll probably have to pay a buyer’s agent. Zillow is very aggressive about pushing them. But maybe I can talk directly with buyers and, you know, figure something out. I’ve sold 2 properties out of 3 that way, and the sales went much more smoothly than the one with an agent.
This is kind of an experiment. I’ll handle the sale the way I think it should be done, and see what happens. There’s already a web page. House for sale in Ithaca NY. Pix, videos, lots of detail. For the next 2 or 3 weeks it will be a work in progress. The house is on Craigslist now. It will list on MLS and the realty sites when there are more photos and videos, probably via Houzeo.
There’s a little construction work still undone, but mostly what’s left is sorting and boxing 27 years of accumulation. Feels good to get everything into better order. There’s already a Home Depot bin full of assorted door and shelf hardware. Another with plumbing. Electrical will need two of them. One bin is nothing but hammers.
Meanwhile, I kinda won’t mind when technology disrupts the real estate biz.
Ithaca has five new-car dealerships scattered along the main drag. Years ago they were independent, but one of them started to buy up the others. Now they’ve gobbled all five, and are expanding into nearby towns and cities.
There’s a lot to be said for owning a monopoly. You can charge your customers more. You can pay less to your sales and repair staff. Where else are people gonna go? Even better, you can use the excess profit to expand and/or purchase the competition, and get even more monopoly. It’s a positive feedback loop. A chance for exponential growth. One reason why the rich get richer.
Doing business with a monopoly? Not so great. Fortunately, there still are independent repair shops in town. It’s also possible to drive an hour and get dealer services for 1/2 to 2/3 the local price. Both those options may dry up if the trend continues.
Sadly, more car monopoly is likely: dealerships are consolidating everywhere. The local group isn’t even in the top 150 for size. Their industry is following the same path as banks, auto parts stores, lumber yards. However, the difference is that auto dealers already have franchises: a local monopoly for one or a few brands. Merge them, and it’s like owning every bank in town. Hedge funds must be drooling.
Monopoly is a problem we face as a construction software company. TurtleSoft is a minnow swimming in a sea owned by trillion-dollar tech monopoly sharks.
The Apple/Microsoft desktop duopoly doesn’t mean higher prices for us. In fact, their development tools are free. The problem, I think, is a more general arrogance. It happens when wealth and power get concentrated. No competition, so no need to make their tools excellent. If it takes 4x as long to build for the platform, well, that’s just the cost of entry. Suck it up.
Plain old incompetence may also be part of the problem. Too many pointy-haired bosses in the decision chain. Or maybe there is something else at play. Minnows can’t easily understand sharks. All they see is skin, teeth and turbulence.
For whatever reason, we wasted more than 4 years with Cocoa/Xcode from Apple, and MFC/Visual Studio from Microsoft.
I did a post-mortem recently, looking back at all our past successes and failures. They very much correlate with monopoly.
TurtleSoft started with MacNail, estimating software based on Excel spreadsheets. It was back when Microsoft was the scrappy underdog struggling against Lotus 1-2-3. Later we released BidMagic, made with Apple’s HyperCard when they were the scrappy underdog competing against IBM, DOS and Windows. Next came Goldenseal, built using CodeWarrior from Metrowerks. They were the smallest, scrappiest underdog of them all. CodeWarrior was also the best tool our staff has ever worked with.
In all three cases, I think the scrappiness led to excellent programmer tools. They had to be amazing, or die. The end result for us was being able to create software in a reasonable amount of time. The tools were satisfying to use. Almost fun. Definitely productive.
Sadly, all three of those tools lost their greatness prematurely. Excel grew bloated after Version 3.0, with a bug that randomly zapped code in our macro sheets. HyperCard stagnated and soon disappeared. Metrowerks was absorbed by Motorola. After a few years they butchered CodeWarrior and sold its organs.
Scrappiness does not guarantee great software. Over the years we’ve tried at least a dozen development platforms that didn’t work out. Some came from big fish, but most were made by minnows that later died. It’s always a gamble.
Fortunately, Qt is proving to be like the 3 best development tools we’ve used. Every week it lets our staff make serious progress on Goldenseal Pro. Things are really cruising.
In the future, TurtleSoft will be less tolerant of BS from the trillion-dollar companies. They lost something important, getting to be so big.
Looking at the bigger picture, monopolies may have grown too powerful. There’s too much concentration of wealth and power these days. Too much arrogance and incompetence.
It may be time again for some Teddy Roosevelt-style monopoly busting. Clamping down probably won’t help car owners around here, but at least it can rein in the biggest of the sharks.
