[2003 updates in brackets]

Speaking of Star Trek, I have just discovered the suckiest program
in all creation. Forget sucking golf balls through soda straws.
Forget sucking asteroids through pipettes. Hell, even sucking
blue-giant stars through millipore filters is nothing compared to
the suckiness of Solomon IV and its Time Card module.

This program could suck the entire space-time continuum through one
of Brin's "tuned strings". You need a cavitron and ten extra
dimensions of space time to describe its appalling suckiness.

This program requires you enter fields in a very specific order...
NOT the order laid out on the window, and if you mess up you have
to exit it and start over.

It chews up nearly 100M of VM.

It takes many minutes to exit and start up again if you made a
mistake.

It's easy to make a mistake... every field has its own non-standard
method of entering data... for example instead of a pulldown you
hit F3 and it brings up a dialog box.

The dialog box has scroll bars that don't move, you click above or
below them to scroll the window they're attached to... but they
don't actually move. If you drag them they don't actually do anything.

Another field, a date, has a yellow background for some reason.

This one you enter by clicking on it and typing the new value. It
doesn't provide much feedback... if you got the value right it
changes into something similar to what you typed when it's checked
it. [Otherwise, it changes it to something completely wrong and you
have to start over.]

If you double-click in another field it changes the thing from a
table to a single entry for one time code.

You can't switch back, that I can tell.  Note that in Windows
double-clicking a field is a very common way of bringing up a dialog
box. [I did eventually find out how to change back]

After you enter any other fields, you can no longer change the date
field.

The date field is always set to today, but you always need to set
it to the last day of the previous week.

If you don't set it to anything, it will set itself to the last day
of the next week.

To save your changes, you go to another window and select save.
This other window has a toolbar on it that includes "forward" and
"back" icons... but they don't do anything either.

This sounds like something Simon Travaglia would come up with to
abuse lusers, but apparently this really is what they think a good
user interface is like.