Sun, 20 Feb 2005
NyQuil > Robitussin
I've been sick with a head cold for almost a week. Following the sore throat, fever, and mucus flood, my cough set in a few days ago. Denisa bought me some Robitussin Honey Cough Syrup. It's supposed to work for 6-8 hours per dose, but I was lucky to get an hour of suppressed coughing out of it. Coughing all night does not make for a happy patient nor wife.
So last night I bought some NyQuil. Actually, I bought the Wal-Mart generic version. That stuff is fabulous. It stopped my cough, and I slept straight through the night.
If your stuck with the lesser cough medicine, you might want to chase it with a Tylenol, Sudafed, and a shot of whisky which should make up for the extra ingredients in NyQuil. (Note: I am not a doctor)
Fri, 18 Feb 2005
Where Google Sucks
I was trying to think of Suze Orman's name while composing an email today. I could picture her face, and I know she's a popular speaker and author on personal finance. So I tried searching for different combinations of "female", "financial advice", "speaker", "author", "personal finance", etc. That didn't get me anywhere, so I tried searching on Google Images and threw "blond" in there. No luck.
Eventually, I gave up and went to Amazon to look for personal finance books. None of her books were in the Most Popular list, but a picture of one of her books happened to show up in the Listmania! section on the right.
I'm sure all of those social network companies maintain the kind of metadata on individuals that would be necessary for this type of search to work, but it needs to be web-accessible, and I'm not sure who would maintain such data on third-parties who aren't part of the network.
As an aside, Google also needs to update their advanced search so that date searches can be more granular than the current past 3/6/12 months options. Remarkably, Bloglines doesn't even support date ranges. Luckily, Straw, my aggregator, does. That allowed me to quickly find a post I had read this morning about yet another new social networking company.
Sun, 06 Feb 2005
Excessive Gratitude or the Return of Written Correspondence?
Yesterday, I received a thank-you note from my friend, Mike. He hasn't recently gotten married, had a child, or had a birthday (at least, not that I know of). In fact, I hadn't bought Mike a gift for anything. He sent my wife and me a note thanking us for having him and his girlfriend, Lisa, over for dinner. It was a very nice note, but it seems completely unnecessary.
My mother always told me how important it is to send thank-you notes after receiving gifts, but I'd never heard of sending them after being invited to somebody's home. I would assume that Mike is just extremely polite, but his note was the second such note we've received in the past couple of months. After a little party we had, my friend, Meagan, sent us a similar note.
Did I miss a lesson by Miss Manners? Is American society becoming gracious? Or do people just want to take advantage of the fewer and fewer opportunities to actually use hand-written correspondence?
Thu, 27 Jan 2005
Humans Replacing Computers
My auto insurance company, 21st Century Insurance, has had a nice web site for quite a while which would allow customers to update their policies online. Last year, for example, I removed my wife's comprehensive and collision insurance since her car isn't worth much compared to the premium.
Today, I got my renewal notification email. The 6-month premium for our two cars is about $900. I only drive my car about one day per week now, and since we live two blocks from my wife's school, she drives less frequently than that. Therefore, it wouldn't be a catastrophe if one of our cars were totalled and we only had one car. So I'm thinking of dropping comprehensive and collision on my car which is costing me about $700 per year.
The 21st Century website has a nice interface
where you can add and remove coverage, change deductibles, etc. and it will
show you how much your premium would change. After you save your changes, they
send you and updated policy and bill you or refund the difference.
Today, I clicked on the Change Coverage button and got the following javascript pop-up.
So I had to start up the Live Chat applet to ask Patrick about my policy change
and register my displeasure with the recent changes to his company's web site.
Mises University 2006
I've been awared a scholarship by the Mises Institute to attend Mises University this summer. Mises U is a one week program in Austrian Economics. It should be very educational. I can't wait.
Sat, 15 Jan 2005
Learning Accounting
I've decided it's time for me to learn something about accounting. I've been
using GnuCash for a while to generate
invoices, but without understanding the underlying accounting. GnuCash has the
tendency to break either when it or one of it's many dependencies is upgraded,
crashing while spitting out errors like undefined symbol:
gnc_option_db_lookup_taxtable_option. It also has a long-standing bug
which causes invoices not be be printed
correctly when linked against GtkHTML 1.0 as it is in the Debian packages.
So I'm also looking for another accounting package to replace it.
Software
The first one I tried was Lazy8 Ledger, a java program. It's built as a plugin to jEdit making the interface kind of bizarre with text editing widgets where they don't seem to belong. In general, the interface just feels awkward, though with time, it might make more sense.
The next program I tried was FibuSQL. This program seems to be pretty immature and lacking much documentation. It claims to have been tested against MySQL and PostgreSQL, but the table creation script fails when using InnoDB tables.
Next up was SQL-Ledger. This looks very promising with lots of features and a clean interface. It has almost no (free) documentation though. The author sells the manual for $190. It looks like it generates nice-looking invoices and reports which is a plus. SQL-Ledger will certainly be a contender.
Next up is Quasar. It has lots of documentation and seems to be feature-rich. It's compiling now. (Tip for compiling on Debian: Install the libqt3-mt-dev package and set QTDIR=/usr when running configure.)
I also have a demo of Linux General Ledger, a proprietary ncurses-based application, to try out. It seems to be mature and well-documented. If it does what I need (I'm not sure exactly what that is yet), I'd be happy to use a mouseless program. Those Function keys are kind of far away for me, though. I'd prefer VI key-bindings. It's on sale for $29.95.
Accounting
Of course, to use any of these programs, I need to know something about accounting. The Lazy8 website directed to this great tutorial by Bean Counter Accounting. I finally understand debits and credits. I also picked up a book called Accounting the Easy Way which, 20 pages in, is good and reinforces what I've learned so far from the Bean Counter.
business » accounting | Permanent Link
Fri, 07 Jan 2005
Blacklisting Fax Machines
Fax machines hate me. I used to receive a few calls a week from fax machines on my land-line. Eventually, I Googled my number and found that it was listed as a fax machine for USC. I emailed the webmaster and got the number removed, but it didn't really end the persistent fax machines.
I moved a few months ago and was able to ditch the land-line. (My previous landlord had DirectTV dishes installed and cut the cable to the building making DSL the only affordable option for high-speed Internet access.)
Now, I've got a fax machine calling my cell phone and it won't give. It's
calling me every 60 seconds and leaving me voice mail. Damn you, 818-783-7049!
Why isn't there a button on my cell phone to block all calls from a number?
Tue, 21 Dec 2004
Yahoo Money Manager No More
Yahoo is shutting down their Money Manager.
We regret to notify you that we are closing Yahoo! Money Manager, effective February 1, 2005, and your account will be automatically cancelled at this time. This closure means that we will no longer offer the following tools: Expense Manager, Net Worth, Finance Planner, and Account Access for banking, credit card, investment, and loan accounts.
It sounds like they're basically gutting Yahoo Finance if they're removing the ability to access investment accounts. I guess most banks offer similar services now, but Yahoo has always been good at keep a nice, simple interface.
I wonder if Google is working on something in this area.
Blockbuster Could Use Better Developers
How many stars does Napoleon Dynamite get?
Hmm, the Enhanced Widescreen Letterbox DVD version must be much better.
Update (Fri, 24 Dec 2004): I received Napoleon Dynamite from
Blockbuster. The sleeve that DVD came said that it was disc "1 of null".
Thu, 09 Dec 2004
Ending Social Security
Hans F. Sennholz has an interesting proposal for ending Social Security. The basic ideas are:
- Tell recipients how much of their contributions, including interest, they have already withdrawn with each check.
- Once they've withdrawn benefits equal to their contributions, they must apply for welfare. This would eliminate payments to those who don't need it.
- Let people opt out of contributing. Private insurance can replace Social Security for people who want to use such a system.
- Charities can take over caring for the disabled.
The holiday season is a good time to think about the 15.3% of your income that the government has taken from you to gift to others.
