Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.
Slashdot runs an excellent discussion on the topic of “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“. If you want to learn more about what people on the Web had changed their minds in 2007, try this Google search – plenty more there.
What did I change my mind about in 2007? Short answer: Google. Continue reading for the long version.
Continue reading What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?
2007 is almost over, so it’s a good time to take a moment and review how it passed.
First, let’s see how my 2007 expectations turned out to be:
Secondly, let’s take a look at the highlights of the year (most of these overlap with this recent post):
Thirdly, here are my impressions of the year:
Here is 2007 in one line: it was a great and long year, but I hope it will never happen to me again.
Now, let’s go for the bright side of things – which expectations do I have for the year 2008? I have plenty:
Let’s see how it will turn out…
Happy New Year!
Google Reader has been recently integrated with Google Talk. Somewhat. If you use Google Reader and Google Talk, and you have some buddies in your Google Talk contact list, who also use Google Reader, then from now on you will be able to see each other’s shared items. Through the “Settings“, you can control who you want and don’t want to see in the “Friends’ shared items“.
This is a really nice piece of functionality. First of all, it saves you all the effort of finding and subscribing to “Shared items” RSS feeds of all your friends one by one.  Secondly, it helps to highlight interesting stuff from your buddies, even those that you might accidentally omitted from your subscriptions.
So, what am I missing there? Two things.
First, the option to rename buddies. I am blessed with contacts who choose all sorts of nicknames and avatars. I prefer real names. And I attach real face pictures to all my contacts whenever I can. And I’ve done it in my Gmail contacts. That information should be used for the Google Reader friends list.
Secondly, I need an option to enter a discussion with my friends regarding an item in my Google Reader. That can be something I have shared, or that can be something my friends shared. I want a “discuss in chat” and “discuss in email” buttons. “Discuss in email” should be, in this case, different from “Email this item”. We both (me, and the friend with who I’m entering a discussion) have read the item. We just need a reference, like a subject, and URL to the item (original article?), just in case we need to run through it again or quote something.
While the second point is harder to implement (requires user studies, interface cluttering, etc), I’m really surprised that the first one wasn’t done.
While reading dooce‘s reasons for why she stopped reading music reviews, I had a thought along the same lines, but for the movies.
A music reviewer runs into a problem that plagues most writers: coming up with new ways to say the same thing.
Why is that most of my movie review reading consists of checking the first half of the IMDB page for the movie? (The part with title, genre, user rating, producer, and top of the cast). Well, because that’s all I need to know about most of the movies that I get a chance to see (TV, rentals, and cinema).
Yes, most of these movies are either total crap or half crap. They don’t amaze. They don’t make me think. They don’t bring back the memories, and neither do they stimulate my imagination. Most of these movies have a pretty straightforward story, shallow characters with long time coined phrases. You know the ones I’m talking about.
It’s a tough job being a critique for such movies. You’ll indeed run out of words to describe them, and that will happen pretty fast. I know, because I tried a movie blog ones. It’s dead for a long time now, and I don’t have much will to revive it.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. One thing that scares me a little bit is this move towards shorter time frames. I’m guilty in participating, of course, but that makes it even scarier.
What I am talking about is this general move towards smaller pieces of information and entertainment. We used to have printed books. Those took a few days to read each. Gradually, the majority of the population moved from books to movies. Movies are much easier to consume, and then only take a couple of hours. With the raise of the Web, the time frames got even shorter. YouTube is one of the most popular entertainment resources on the Web, and it has a limitation of a 10 minute clip. You just can’t upload anything which is significantly bigger than that (give or take a few seconds).  Now with mobile devices coming up strong, and popularity of short message services, such as Twitter and Jaiku, something tells me that we’ll go much under those 10 minutes of YouTube. Of course it won’t happen in a day or two – I’m talking a general trend here.
Now imagine the reviewers going in step with the progress. Writing a book review was simpler ( I guess). Movies got tougher, because there are so many of them and because they are so much alike. YouTube clip reviews turned into tiny user comments and star ratings. You just can’t talk about a few minutes of video for hours I guess (again). What will happen with a reviews of Twitter messages and tiny mobile video clips? They’ll disappear. It’ll be easier and faster to watch the original rather than spend time on the review.
Of course, it won’t all turn out that bad. It’s just I’m having one of those pessimistic days…
Over the last few years I’ve made several attempts at improving my personal finance management. With the exception of the last six month, I never tracked my spendings for more than a month or so. Two main reasons for that were:
Each of my finance tracking periods has been guided by a different tool. I tried a few approaches from plain text and spreadsheet files, through custom written scripts, to widely used applications. None of those worked for me, except for the last one I tried – GnuCash.
I use GnuCash for about six month now. It’s a really nice application, which implemented a few ideas right. But for me two things made it – documentation (especially 3 pages of Accounting 101 shipped with the software) and the wizard which asked a few simple questions and created some accounts for me to use. I started with the simple things, and somehow they worked. Then I tried a few more advanced ones (multi-currency, transaction splits, etc), and I still loved it.
I still love GnuCash. But I am starting to feel the need for a web-based tool. As good as GnuCash is, it has a number of pitfalls for me:
So, today I started looking for a replacement. My quest began at the LifeHacker post titled “Is Mint Realy For Your Money?” The article reviewed Mint.com service, while comments suggested a few alternative solutions.
Here are the services that I tried. Note – I haven’t spent much time with any one of them. Mostly those were brief sessions of register – create an account – create a few transactions – check the settings – logout.
Yodlee MoneyCenter – looks like something feature complete, but the interfaces are overly complicated and there is a certain degree of paranoia with logging in and out. While it looked like Yodlee was doing everything I needed all at once, the complexity of the interfaces and the general speed of the site made me go away without spending much time there.
Wesabe – got me impressed. Twice. Just a few minutes after I registered, I got an email from one of the co-founders – Marc Hedlund, welcoming me to the community. Marc caught my twit, followed to this blog, read a few recent entries (especially those about privacy concerns and Firefox extensions). His welcoming message provided a few extra pointers in the areas that I appeared to be interested in. Wow! I’ve seen a lot of services with personalized, fast responding support teams, but Wesabe guys (there is a blog and forum too) are a couple of levels above anything that I can remember.
The second impression on me was by Wesabe’s tagging system. Again, being a web addict I’ve seen plenty of sites and applications that use tagging. Wesabe did something really cool – they kept the simplicity of the concept while greatly extending the functionality. You can do anything with tags there. It’s very similar to the way Flickr uses tags for some internal stuff, but here tags are given to the user.
Regarding the functionality, Wesabe takes a more social approach to finance tracking and accounting. Most of the boring stuff is simplified and automated. Things which are used most often are implemented in the very straightforward way. And there is just enough of functionality to make it useful without cluttering the service interfaces and users minds.
There are a couple of limitations that prevent me from using this service right now though. None of the Cyprus banks support a straightforward export of data in any format that can be used to input accounts into Wesabe. So, I’m left with only cash-type accounts. And currently those cash-type accounts in Wesabe cannot track the account balance (no opening balance, reconciliation, etc). Marc mentioned that account balances will be added to cash accounts shortly, since many people requested them. Once this done, I’ll jump back to Wesabe with my bank statements. Really, really neat service.
ClearCheckBook.com – looked like I can work only with one currency at a time. That’s not acceptable. I use three at the moment – CYP, USD, and EUR. CYP with gradually disappear over the next few month, but I’m stuck with USD and EUR for some time to come.
Then I finally got to the service which started my quest today – Mint.com . Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all able to try it out, because it supports only United States banks and financial institutions. There was no way for me to avoid account import from one of those places where I don’t have an account.
So, as you can see from the above paragraphs, Wesabe is the one closest to my needs. And compared to the other ones it is so much nicer that I’d rather wait for those features that I need rather than settle for something that I don’t enjoy half as much.
What other services are there? Did I miss anything?