experience

The city of Amsterdam

Most of the people who I told that I was going to Amsterdam for a conference responded with some combination of one or more of “Oh, the drug capital of the world“, “Oh, the city of red lights and legalized prostitution“, and “Oh, this is the best place to get high and get laid“. Quite a few people that I know have already visited Amsterdam before, and less than a handful of them could name a point of interest not related to either sex or drugs.

That felt a bit to narrow minded for me, but there was not much I could express in return. Reading Wikipedia articles and tourist guides is all fine, but it doesn’t beat the experience of a visit.

I am glad to report that there is a lot more to the city of Amsterdam than just coffeshops with legalized pot and red lights district. So much in fact, that I didn’t manage to visit those high profile places in my almost four days there. So, what’s up there?

Streets. Lots of streets with some nice architecture. A complex system of canals is laid through out the city, and that makes for some amazing scenery. Canal waters, industrial skyline, lots of parks, lawns, and trees, and developed infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclist make it all a pleasure to explore the city. I wish the weather was any better, but even as such (+3..+7 C with a bit of wind and rain) it wasn’t a big problem.

One of the things that I kept pointing out for myself was how well-organized and clean the city was despite all the industrial works in the area. Canals are pretty busy with ships of all shapes and sizes bringing stuff in and taking stuff out. Railways are going throughout the city. Trucks can be easily spotted around. Also there are quite a few sites which look like factories and plants. But, somehow, it is very easy to imagine that all of that industrial infrastructure is just not there. Because it doesn’t affect the city life very much. The air is clean and easy to breath, the water is fine, and the streets are nice and clean too. Coming from a very industrial city myself, it kept surprising me over and over again.

One aspect of this infrastructure was particularly catching my attention – the railways. Railways are going through the city inside out. Plenty of passenger and non-passenger trains are passing by. But, the railways are clean and trains are very silent. Many buildings by the railways have tables and chairs on the balconies, arranged in such a way that there is no doubt some people are using them to enjoy the view and to rest a bit during their free time. In fact, the hotel in which I was staying was only about five minutes away from Amsterdam Central, and I never even heard or felt any train passing, although I could see many of them out of the window.

Of course, when talking about Amsterdam, it is impossible not to mention bicycles. They are everywhere. They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, much like those people riding them. Bikes are used both as a form of transportation and as means of exercise. And while many people have cars, it looks like absolutely everyone has a bicycle, and what’s more, everyone seem to prefer a bicycle to a car no matter what is the goal of the trip, the distance to the destination, or the weather outside. Amazing really.

Amsterdam, they say, is well known for its cultural life. Museum and exhibitions in particular. I saw a few proofs of that, in the form of museum signs and all sorts of passes and batch tickets, but I didn’t manage to enjoy any of that. A few people from the conference did sneak out to museums and said that they were indeed pretty good, but I can’t trust that until I’ll see it with my own eyes. Yes, that means that I want to go back and spend some more time in Amsterdam…

He hates me, but it’s OK

Today I was at my bank. I had to cash a check, as well as do a couple of other small things. While at that, I decided to open a credit card. I have some cards already, but not one in Euro. So, they send me upstairs to see this guy there. He is responsible for credit cards, overdrafts, loans, and things like that. I’ve seen him before a few times.

This guy hates me. It’s OK though, because I think he hates everybody. Probably, he is very good at his job, since he is paid to hate everyone. People who will max out their overdrafts, overdue payments, etc – he is the one who filters them out. And it surely helps to hate them all.

Every time I enter his office he looks at me like he is trying to decide who is more worthless a Cypriot woman or a foreign man. He tries to remember anything good about Cypriot women. His wife and mother-in-law come to mind. That disgusts the heck out of him. Then he looks at me, measures me from top to bottom and back to top, makes a face like he just ate a huge cockroach, and decides that his mother-in-law is a little bit better than I am. Then he says: “Good morning”. These two words express more than some people will manage to express in their whole life. These two words have the whole world inside them, the world where I am at the bottom of the food chain, and this guy is floating above the top… or something like that.

Usually, the visit to his office kind of offsets my day. He doesn’t freak me out or depress me or anything. But there is this sour feeling for the rest of the day, after I see him. But not today. Today he had no way of saying “no” to me. As much as he wanted to decline my request, send me as far as possible, and forget about me as fast as possible, he couldn’t do anything. He had to say “yes”.

That “yes” was as expressive as the “Good morning”. It made my day. Maybe even a week. Maybe even more. Any time that I will ever feel down and depressed, I will be coming back to read this post. It’s a booster.

P.S.: obviously, I am not going to mention the bank, the branch, or the guy’s name, but some of you can guess it as easily anyway.

On years of experience

Caught this excellent quote in gaping void post:

A lot of people in business say they have twenty years experience, when in fact all the really have is one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.

Well said, indeed. I’m working with computers for 15 years or so.Â I’d say I have only about five years of experience with these damn things.

Web-based personal finance managers

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:

I never was on a financial edge for more than a month or so.
I don’t enjoy accounting all that much and I never had a tool that made it anymore pleasurable.

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:

All data is on a single computer. I need to back it up myself. I can’t access it if my laptop is not with me.
My mostly used tool is Firefox browser, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it for my accounting too.
Web-based services can offer additional goodies such as SMS/IM integration, email reminders, social aspects, and so on.

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.Â 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?Â Did I miss anything?

So, it is possible …

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive. One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress). This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive. And I am not much sad about it. It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience. But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works. And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business. These are some good news for me – failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.