Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-07-03
Those of you who know me, know how much I suck at accounting. Those of you who don’t know me, can’t even imagine. I am the worst accounting person on this planet. Probably, I am the second worst in human history, but the jury on that one is still out there.
My problem with accounting grows roots from two separate issues. First, I suck at math. And that includes all the math, from arithmetics through calculus to linear algebra. You name the math area, and I suck at it. Second, I suck at managing money. Give a dollar, lock me in the empty room, and I will still be able to spend it on something, without getting anything in return. That’s me.
Obviously, with such a good start, my accounting skills weren’t just free falling down. They were boosted and rocket-pushed. Need an example? Here’s one: I’ve heard those two base termins – credit and debit – and I’ve heard them a billion times, and I had them explained to me a few million times, but I still confuse which one of them is minus and which one is a plus. I’ve heard that credit and debit should always come down to zero, but I don’t know if that’s true and if it is, how to make that happen. You get the picture.
My accounting needs were either too simple to confuse (even for me), or were handled by my wife (who is way too good at it). Unfortunately, the dynamics of our home economics have increased recently, and I have to participate to the best of my skills.
Being a technology person, I went for a quest to find that one perfect software piece that will do all the job for me with a few easy clicks here and there. Before I did so, I tried a simple text file with line-by-line entries. It didn’t work very well, because I kept confusing things and naming them differently all the time.
After that I tried about a dozen different applications, ranging from Excel-style tables to full featured financial applications. Nothing worked very good for me, so I settled for something very simple that could run on my Sony Ericsson smartphone. The bonus was that the software was always with me and I could update it on the spot. But it didn’t have enough features for my needs (multiple accounts, statistics, reports) and I couldn’t easily export the data.
Finally, it looks like my search is over. I came across an excellent piece of software called HomeBank. It used to run only on Amiga, but recent version 3.2 was rewritten with GTK+ 2.0 for Linux operating system.
It works like a charm.
It does everything I want, and not only that, but it does so in the way I can understand and work with. I can have multiple accounts of different types, transfer money between them, do this and that, and have reports and stats for anything I wish to investigate.
I’ve been using it for only about a week now, but I am sure this is exactly what I needed. If you’re still thinking wheather or not you should give it a try, look at the screenshots.
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-07-02
Once in a while I go to Technorait to check my profile. Most of my blogs are at the bottom of the rating lists. And that’s understandable – I haven’t devoted that much to them recently.
The only blog that stands out is this one. People read it and link to it, and it’s score is much higher in return.
And was almost happy, clicking around to check the incoming and outgoing lists, this and that. And then I noticed that Technorati thinks that my blog was last updated 100 days ago. I am puzzled. My blog is definetely much fresher. My longest blogging interval was by far shorter than a week. Way shorter than 100 days.
It looks like Technorati is lagging behind. I wonder if I am the only one here. I also wonder how this lag affects the ratings and data about inbound links. Those things I am interested in, and I’d very much like to have them accurate.
With all Flickr‘s flexibility and easy of use, there’s one thing that really bothers me. In short it can be summed up as “Where are all these people coming from?”. Case in point: this picture of Lev burried in sand on the beach has been viewed (according to Flickr) almost 3500 times, since it was posted on March 16, 2006. To give you an idea, the next most viewed image has been seen less than 800 times. So, there is almost 4 times difference. And what bugs me the most is that I don’t know where are all these people coming from.
Has this image been linked from somewhere? Did someone wrote a post about it in blog or forum? I want to know. I don’t want to have full access to all the logs, but something to give me an idea would have been so much appreciated. Something along the lines of “This picture is mostly visited from forum XYZ, website ABC, and blog KLM”. That would have been enough.
I’ve tried Googling for the link to this image, but because Flickr has a few different URL structures, I didn’t find anything. Maybe you guys can help me out with this.
P.S.: It doesn’t bother me that someone is using this picture, even if they do so for commercial purposes. I’m fine with that. What annoys me is that I know for sure that this picture is used somewhere and I don’t have any freaking idea where.