Second Initial

Weekend Update

Wow, it’s been a week since I’ve posted anything about my goings on. Yes, there are two entries sitting there from the past week, but one is just quoting another blog, and the second is my normal monthly notice that the new ATPM was published. Seems like they hardly count.

So, a couple of items, and I’ll start with the bit of a startle I had tonight. Let me just say having a surround sound system is nice, but not when a doorbell rings on a TV show that sounds exactly like your own, and your own doorbell is located behind you! Yeah, you get the idea. I paused the show to see who was ringing my doorbell at 10:30 in the evening and saw no one through my peephole. I peeked out several windows looking for pranksters for a good 10 minutes before going back to my program and realized the doorbell was in the show.

On a less stressful note—or rather, a note that should translate into less stress in the future—is that the raise to go along with my recent promotion kicked in. Never mind that my February paycheck contained the retroactive increase for both January and February (yes, I’m paid monthly), but the single-month increase is considerably higher than I was led to believe. What this will mean in the short term is that I hopefully can wipe out a credit card which is carrying a balance created by moving expenses and other droll in maybe seven or eight months instead of the year or two I thought it was going to take. It also means I can start saving sooner to buy a MacBook Pro to replace my Titanium PowerBook—something I’m extremely anxious to do. I even finally opened a simple interest-earning slush fund and put a bit of cash in there to marinate at 4.5%.

What else? At last, I bit the bullet and bumped up to Quicken 2007. I’d still been using the 2003 version and manually entering transactions (still better than writing them into a paper register) even after that version fell outside of Bank of America’s supported list for WEB Connect downloads. I just didn’t see any big reason to spend the money on the upgrade when the newer versions really offered me nothing in features that I’d use other than regaining WEB Connect support. Being able to just click and auto-fill transactions is something I’ve missed.

Dummy me, though. I didn’t realize Intuit has upgrade pricing. I should’ve checked and it may be too late now. But I’ll ask—can’t hurt. They’d have to 1) help me prove I own an older license since I’ve long since misplaced any documentation, and 2) be willing to refund my full purchase and charge the upgrade price, or simply refund the difference. I’m not holding my breath, especially since just tonight I remembered that the last version I legitimately owned was actually the 1999 edition! I truly have no recollection how I managed to pick up version 2003, so I’m certainly happy about being legit now. But, I guess a 3) to the above list would be that the 1999 version is eligible for the upgrade price all the way to the 2007 version. Maybe I should just let it rest and pretend the full price I paid covers an upgrade to 2003 and a second upgrade to 2007.

Finally, I’ll share something I’ve been doing a lot lately, and you can, too, if you’re running Mac OS X. Oh sure, you PeeCee Weenies can probably do it too, but I doubt with a single keystroke. The feat I’m talking about is simply inversing the colors on my screen. On a Mac, this is accomplished by holding Control-Option-Command and pressing the number 8. No, it’s not practical for most tasks, but for simply dealing with text that’s more than a sentence or two, reading light letters on a black background is so much easier for me than black text on white background. Try it.

And resist the urge next month to play practical jokes on your coworkers. Or not!

» Posted by ALBj at 10:49 PM (ET)
Category: Journal

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