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I’ve been drowning myself in Quicken trying to get our records up-to-date. (I looked at GnuCash a couple of years ago but there were some things it didn’t do for me to get me off of Quicken.) Everything up til now has been fine. I’m nearly done with entering and balancing stuff, with only a couple of accounts left. The first is on hold until the credit card company sends me statements that I never downloaded (and thus cannot reach, since they only let you get the last five). Oh well.

The second account is by far the most complex of all of them, and of course I let balancing slide for months on end. The result wouldn’t be that big of a deal, just some time, except for the “original statement value” number I’m supposed to see when I next reconcile the account. It says the previous statement balance was a number that has actually never existed on any statement. Hmm. Then I looked at one part of the account, and a number was way wrong—instead of something like 1,234, it was 0.007148393. A bit more than a year ago I moved from using Quicken under WinXP to using it under Linux with Wine. It’s been really strong and good, but somewhere in the move something (and perhaps it was be copying the wrong qdata.qdf file) got messed up. I can’t revert back to a previous version, since I’ve just finished entering and balancing all of the other accounts.

Now I’ve got to go back about 2-1/2 years in statements and find where the discrepancy starts.

Fuck.

FactCheck.org seems to be active again.

I emailed a question to someone about my car (getting a km/h odometer face to replace the mph one), and got a one-sentence reply from someone today. One sentence, their name, then this stuff stuck at the bottom. Kinda makes the old tradition of 4-line signatures burn in Hell:


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The information transmitted in this email is intended for the addressee
only and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. If you
are not an intended recipient or an authorized representative of an
intended recipient, you are prohibited from any review, retransmission,
dissemination, reliance upon or other use of, the information in this
e-mail or its attachments. If you have received this e-mail in error,
please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail and delete
all copies of this message and any attachments.

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Forgive me for making a Jock reference, but recent gridiron football happenings has put the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. It’s been since the early 80’s that any Philadelphia team has won any major sports title. If the Eagles loose it will be more of the same for Philadelphia.

Yesterday was the first time this season I had a chance to watch an entire Eagles game. After all of yesterday’s snow shovelling I plopped right down ot the couch and vegged.

Driven by seeing our friend David, a visitor from the US, use IMAP to do his work mail, I finally decided to follow through with an idea I had a while ago. Instead of syncing my mail directory between my desktop and my laptop, which meant I had to avoid using one without knowing I’d sync’d from the other (a strange sort of handshake), I can instead leave the folders on the desktop. I’ll use the Courier IMAP server.

My choice is driven by my use of kmail for the last few years, which has resulted in most of my mail folders being in maildir format. Which in theory should be made available by the Courier server, since it (and only it, from what I can tell) fully supports maildir folders. The catch, of course, is that kmail has its own idea about how to keep things in folders and sub-folders. I ended up having to finally write my own shell script to turn an existing kmail tree into one that Courier likes to use.

So I did the script, creating a new Maildir tree with the script that copies stuff properly out of ~/mail. And now I can not only make kmail use that, but also finally play with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client. Of course in setting it up, I discovered that I could also use Thunderbird as a Usenet news reader instead of pan, and also as an RSS feed aggregator instead of Liferea. I don’t yet know how well it’ll behave for these other services, but so far the common interface looks promising.

The only worry I have is my intent to ssh into my desktop system from outside, and use that tunnel for access to the IMAP server. (And, I guess, also our news server.) I still have to get a universal power supply for my desktop system so it’ll stay up if the power hiccups and we’re not home. But it’s seeming like it’d be cool to not worry about every single thing being on my laptop. 🙂

I had not logged into AIM in a long time. Over a year I think. I had no idea what my password was. I tried a few standards and nothing. So I jaunted over to aim.com and clicked on the Lost Password link. I actually had lost my username to, but Brendan remembered it. I entered it and it said that I had to wait 24 hours to request my password as I had login failures recently. The odd thing is a minuate later I got email with my password. No matter, just a bug I guess.

I called the heater company at about 07:00 EST, the lady on the phone says “somebody will be there between now and noon.” “Now,” thought I, I rushed to the window, but nobody was there. The lady on the phone continues, “remember that the roads are icy so it might take a little longer.” Nobody yet.

I was hopping to leave work a little early today to get to the market as the first snow storm is predicted to hit this area tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be a part of the Saturday morning mad rush. Last winter I went to the store once right when the snow started, the grocery market was empty, and the roads where still fine.

UPDATE: It must be getting cold in my house, the cat is cuddling with my laptop.

UPDATE 2: It’s just about noon and I have heat again!

P woke up in the middle of the night, crying. When I went in, he said “I’m going to miss you Mom,” over and over. I wonder what on earth he was dreaming.

On the cute side, a few days ago I asked him how I looked (I had dressed up a little cause the bookclub was at our house). He said something I didn’t hear, and when I asked him to repeat it, he said, “You look……very distinguished.” Hahahahaha

On the radio today, they had two different reports of someone having suffered “serious sexual assault.” Each reporter went out of their way to emphasize the word serious. So there are some examples of sexual assault not so serious? Just sorta “casual sexual assault” ? Harrumph.

I put Zoë in the car this morning, strapped her down to the car seat. There she sat with wisps of breath comming out of her due to the twenty degree Fahrenheit weather we are having. I had never seen her breath before. Not a complaint from her.