I’m trying to get a better handle on my “spending cash” which is managed through my personal account and credit cards. Most “needs” type expenses are covered through our joint finances, so the personal account is mostly discretionary. The problem is I want to reduce my personal credit card debt, and these days the personal account doesn’t get much money to play with, which means I need to be smart and aware with my discretionary income.
About a decade ago I tried managing my spending by writing the date on a series of $20 bills. If I was breaking a bill with today’s date on it, things were going alright. If I was breaking yesterday’s date, I was doing well, and if I was spending a bill with a future date on it . . . well, time to cut back, eh?
This time around I’m thinking to allow myself $10/day. ATMs don’t give out tens, and these days I make some small purchases with the credit card, so I’ll try a different solution: a Google Spreadsheet!
I thought it might be neat to share the progress here, in case other folks are curious to see how this experiment works. You should be able to see the results tally up over the course of the month on the right.
This is by no means a comprehensive thing: I’m not tracking automatic withdrawals (charity, web hosting) or interest on the cards: I’m merely trying to keep my personal spending (the “burn rate”) in check by maintaining an awareness of what’s up. This is pretty much lunch money, small gifts, and entertaining the sweetheart. My rule is going to be that any personal spending I have to initiate I will track. So, I’ll count the $50 mobile phone bill, for the sake of a healthy challenge.
Technical note: I don’t know for spreadsheets, but the formula for setting up the balance column was to start at cell D3 with this formula:
=IF(A3="",,SUM(D2+C3))
This basically means that if the date (A3) on this row is filled in, add the amount (C3) to the previous total (D2). I was then able to “copy” that cell, multi-select all the cells below, and “paste” and the formula got updated each row, as my Excel Guru colleague expected.
Another gem from the Atherton Police Blotter . . .
2:26 p.m. — Caller says two high school girls are walking along, waving at passing cars, and she’s afraid someone unsavory will approach them, Middlefield and Encinal.
Something tells me that high school girls are just as likely to be approached by someone unsavory without waving at passing cars. But my perspective is biased, as I am one of those creepy guys who likes to smile at strangers.
I have been concerned that as Yahoo decays, that Flickr may at some point no longer remain a good place to host my photos. I do wish someone would create a competing service which supported the API. Some kid made Zooomr a few years ago, which was to sport a feature-complete Flickr API, but as best I can tell the kid moved to Japan and lost interest in Zoomr, which remains an abandoned stepchild.
Picasa? The desktop client is kind of neat but I don’t much like the web interface. It feels like another one of those one-offs Google bought but then had no idea what to do with it. Anyway, it’s just not my thing.
So, I took a look at SmugMug, who have been trying to lure Flickr refugees, but the consensus seems to be that if you like Flickr, SmugMug can not approximate Flickr. (The biggest concern for me is the loss of the “title” attribute. I’ve got 7,500 images online acquired over a decade . . .)
This is disappointing, because I like SmugMug’s promise of customization, and I have never been afraid to roll my arms up to hack on templates, HTML, and CSS to achieve my desires. Perhaps in the next few years SmugMug will become a little more flexible such that it can easily achieve what I want:
Individual pages for my photos
Support for a “title” attribute
An ability to browse title/descriptions (Flickr “detail” view)
Every so often I have this idea that the WordPress Gallery feature should take some steroids and create a friendly, Flickr-API-compatible hosting environment, which you could then customize just as much as you can customize a self-hosted WordPress blog . . . but that is very far beyond my code abilities and free time.
Yesterday, at the cash register of my local supermarket, I was asked by the cashier if I would purchase only one of the two packs of noodles I had intended to purchase. The unspoken implication was, in that way, someone else could have noodles too. Now, from the point-of-view of the supermarket’s profit, it makes no difference whether those two packs were sold to me as an individual, or sold separately. Yen is yen. But as an example of a society sharing its burden (even in this small way), it spoke volumes. I had my hand gently slapped, and was humbled.
I recall a story I heard on the radio, from I think it was Denmark, where a lady needed a medical procedure and was informed that there would be a two-month wait for the service. She explained this to her son, a Doctor, who offered to pull some strings to get her in sooner, and she shamed him because the right thing to do is follow the rules like everyone else: fairness before favoritism.
This sort of thinking in anathema in much of the world, but it is a way of thinking that I really like. I guess its because as a child I was indoctrinated with Socialist ideology at the water fountain, where we were taught to queue and each take an equal share.
Transportation Enthusiasts and Experts discuss one of many issues at Transportation Camp West, an un-conference held this weekend in San Francisco.
I waffled over whether to trek up to San Francisco this weekend to attend Transportation Camp so I signed up late and was wait-listed. They had room on Sunday so I dragged myself out of a cozy warm bed in to the cold and rain, for a two hour trek North via Caltrain and BART.
I’m glad I went. I had a lot of fun talking and learning and meeting new people. I even signed up to present the San Francisco transit map that I made a couple years ago. I got a handsome amount of helpful feedback and food-for-thought on that, and I’m thinking to actually dive in and revise / improve that puppy, despite the fact that I lost interest after moving away from San Francisco.
Sign up to receive SMS alerts containing information in the event of a local disaster.
Earthquake and other emergency preparation is more on our minds these days. Residents of Santa Clara County can sign up to receive disaster-related information on their mobile devices at http://www.alertscc.com/.
Last week I looked in on a project I completed a few years ago, to integrate the Cisco corporate logo with the IronPort corporate logo. Some bricks had gone out-of-order over time and when I attempted to put them back in place I realized that since everything fit just so I couldn’t get it figured out without the blueprints . . . which are stored on my old laptop at Cisco’s main campus in San Jose. So, I took the thing apart and down to San Jose for reassembly. I figure I’ll keep it on display at Cisco for a while, so I removed one row of white bricks to make a 4-brick-deep base.
Today, all eyes are on Egypt. This morning it sounded as if Mubarak would be removed from power, and I felt a euphoria at all the times in my life when I have pumped my fist in the air and chanted with the crowd that “The People–United–Will Never Be Defeated!”
At lunch, we watched the captions on the TV as Mubarak spoke, and said he wasn’t resigning. I have work to do but I have Al Jazeera on in my headphones.
It felt like today could be one of those days when the people triumphed. Not today, but soon.
So, one of my peeves is companies that charge new customers a lower rate, and then raise the rate after you have had them for a while. I think it is really weird that loyal customers are charged more than new customers. For example, I signed up for basic cable service with Comcast at $60/mo, but paid the introductory rate of $30/mo, which is about the most I’m inclined to pay for monthly television. (And I’m only willing to pay that much because I prefer to live with someone who likes TV.)
Anyway, my rate recently went up to, as best I can tell: $45/mo for the next six months, after which it will go up to $60/mo. “Homie don’t play dat.” So I called them and explained that I was only going to pay them $30/mo, either through them or DirecTV, which both offer new customers $30/mo. They transferred me to some other lady that said that it was $45/mo or bust unless I wanted the cheaper $30/mo package but no more Bravo. I said I’d check with my sweetheart and the lady on the phone said “okay, $30 package for you.”
Not sure if we have Bravo or not, I looked online. Aside from pirating shows, which is inconvenient for the non-techy sweetheart and the old analog television, Amazon.com offers “Top Chef” and “Project Runway” which is what we watch on Bravo, for $2/episode. If both shows are running then we’d pay $16 in a month, otherwise . . . ah and yes, Amazon on-demand service pipes straight through the TiVo: no technical expertise or computer connections required!
So, I think I’m paying Comcast $30/mo now, and if I don’t have Bravo then I’m purchasing shows a la carte. Vivé consumer empowerment!
Update: Comcast got in touch with me due to this post, and switched me back to the six-month $30 rate that includes Bravo. Thanks, Comcast! I guess I’ll have to blog about this again in August.
Admittedly, not much of a photo. But here’s a shot from this morning’s local free paper. I always like to see what sort of petty crimes have made the Atherton Police Blotter. (Atherton is where we keep our rich people, sealed off in walled compounds.)
My first experience of “Idaho” was hitching a ride to the Rainbow Family campground in Wyoming in a car with Idaho plates driven by a lady who took sips from the bottle of beer she kept pressed between her legs. At which point I concluded that Idaho must be Awesome.
Mind you I haven’t been fooled in to actually going to Idaho.
Some fantasies are best left untainted by reality.
The G2 is fast as heck. It has all the cool new Android apps, and T-Mobile let’s you do tethering out of the box. We moved our apartment last month and setting up a wireless access point on my phone was braindead easy and plenty fast while we waited for the DSL installation. Everything works faster, and the battery life is better to boot.
The keyboards has a generally nice feel to it. But . . .
The biggest drawback is the lack of a number row on the keyboard. Really irritating to have to press ALT to type numbers. Entering “special” characters is a bitch-and-a-half. For example, to type a < you have to type ALT-ALT-long-press-j. WTF? Also, I miss the scroll wheel. There is a button on the phone that sometimes-but-not-always works as a directional pad to surf through a text field but I have learned to stab my thumb at the screen until I manage to land the cursor where I want it. (What I really miss is the Sidekick 2 direction pad.)
It is a very very nice phone with a short list of dumb shortcomings.
The market has been doing well lately, but even I am surprised.
Back in March 2009 when things were looking their bleakest, I scratched together less-than-my-usual-amount of cash and bought shares in a market index. On that occasion, QQQQ (Nasdaq 100) at $28.17/share. Today I noticed that, at $57, that stock has more than doubled in value since I bought it.
Three things come to mind.
1) Yay me! (Though, I have seen plenty of my money evaporate in stocks, so I won’t get too smug.)
2) Warren Buffet’s advice, to “be greedy when others are scared, and scared when others are greedy.” Since people are getting greedy, I shouldn’t feel too bad selling stock at this height to cover wedding expenses.
3) My perpetual ambivalence about the stock market as a gambling parlor that doesn’t reflect true economic value, but is really a bunch of rascals trying to trick each other. The real value in our economy is in the workers and the planet, and the stock market on a good day is an ethically blind attempt to influence the direction in which the workers will direct their work.
