December 2006 archive

Page 123 (doing the meme thing)

Book the 1st:

He is a great waver of his arms over his head as he makes pronouncements like “There is nothing certain but taxes”—conspicuously excluding death.
–Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution

Google Blog Search tells me this has been going on for a while, but I just saw it for the first time at Peter Saint-Andre’s blog. Since it gave me an excuse to post, I’m playing the game:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.
Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Radical Evolution was the nearest book at hand on my desk. I had started reading it a while …

Microsoft Money to GnuCash

Update, 10 January 2008: I ended up going with KMyMoney. See “Moving from MS Money to KMyMoney”. I had to give up classifications as described below, but still, KMyMoney is an excellent replacement for Money.

One of my bigger challenges with moving to GNU/Linux from Windows will be to migrate eleven years worth of MS Money data to GnuCash. (Apparently, GnuCash is the financial application to use, but please let me know if there are good alternatives to evaluate.)

With .QIF exports and imports, it may not be too excruciating to move the data, but I think getting the reports I want will be a challenge. I haven’t fully explored GnuCash reports yet, but so far I don’t see what I want.

I’m …

Friday Photopost: More Minnesota Aspens in Fall

Taken with my two-megapixel Olympus camera. Linked to a 1600×1200 version suitable for framing or wallpaper.

Please feel free to copy, rip, mix, burn, and make use of this picture under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Culture and (published) digital information should be free!

Related:

Autumn in Northern Minnesota
Minnesota Aspens in Summer

Laying Claim to the Public Domain

We recently bought The Real Mother Goose book for our daughter, who is home from the hospital now and doing fine. I was reading some rhymes from it this evening and happened to turn to the copyright page in the front.

One thing interesting about this page is that there isn’t actually a copyright notice. It says, “This book was originally published in 1916,” which would place it in the public domain in the United States, but then there is also this:

No part of this work may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

…

How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 28 November 2006. This one picked up some diggs and I thought would make it to the front page with resulting praise, adulation, and scathing condemnation, but then it was cruelly buried. I suppose my provocative, attention-getting headline may have been frowned on. I paid the price and only got 0.15 seconds of fame instead of 15 minutes.

Question: How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?

Answer: As dumb as necessary.

Let’s rephrase: How technically sophisticated should GNU/Linux users have to be? How knowledgeable should any computer user have to be? The answer to that, of course, ranges from “very” to “not very.” We need to get past the name-calling of clueless newbie …

Still Here

Hi, Everyone. I’m still here. I seem to have a few regular readers, and I appreciate your continued interest. I’ve mentioned before that my goal at a minimum here is to post once a week. I’ve tried doing more than that because I crave attention and the statistics that say people are visiting. But I’m aware that’s not a great way to look for validation.

And there are priorities to consider. I kidded recently about how my daughter interferes with my ambitions, but it really was a joke. She and my wife are way first on my list, and then comes my day job which sustains us.

I was feeling some stress earlier this week, trying to find time for all the things I want to do, and I decided …