January 2008 archive

Citimortgage PDFs: Ugh

Update, 16 February 2008: Converting PDFs into Image Files (Citimortgage PDF Reprise)

I highly doubt I’ll get any satisfaction from Citimortgage on this, so I’ll just complain ineffectually here.

Up till now, I’ve been able to view and save my monthly and other related mortgage statements with the Evince viewer in Ubuntu 7.04. Today I logged on to find that the PDFs no longer display correctly. I get a blank form with no data. I tried on my Windows XP instance in VirtualBox and Adobe complains about a missing font, but still shows the data. I tried in Ubuntu 7.10 with the same problem as 7.04.

That really bites.

The other thing that has always sucked about Citimortgage PDFs is that they’re extremely bloated. Previously they’ve weighed in at 900KB, and now …

Review: Iron Maiden Biography by Mick Wall

Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised Biography, by Mick Wall

I’m not sure if I should mention this, since it could affect the willingness of people to loan me books, but I do a lot of my reading in the bathroom. Some books don’t grab me enough to carry out of the bathroom and it can take a while to get through them. This wasn’t one of those books.

(Oh, by the way, I’m giving you a review of a book that seems to be out of print. I don’t even see used copies at Amazon as I write this.)

I wouldn’t say the book is especially well written. (Much like this post and web site.) It’s a bit fannish in parts. It can …

Decriminalizing non-commercial file sharing

via QuestionCopyright.org:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

Will the Antipiracy Bureau be satisfied with this? Probably not, because

…

Moving from MS Money to KMyMoney

At last. I’m free of Microsoft Money, and therefore very close to being free of all my old proprietary applications. I’ve settled on KMyMoney as a capable free-as-in-freedom bookkeeping replacement. It doesn’t do everything that I was able to do in Money, but I can live with that while hoping some of my “wants” find their way in to later versions. And in the meantime I appreciate the more streamlined look and feel of KMyMoney. It does the necessary tasks for me and doesn’t feel as heavy as Money. And it’s free. Did I mention that?

One obstacle in moving away from Money is the amount of data I have squirreled away in there. Twelve years worth, going back to 1995. I didn’t look forward to migrating all of that …

This ain’t no holiday

Oh no this ain’t no vacation
(This is your chance to pay
The great casino foundation…)

Ain’t no vacation anymore, anyway.

Twelve glorious days off work and now it’s time to return to the grind.

So what have I been up to, besides miscellaneous family gatherings and activities?

Shoveling. We’re getting a decent Minnesota winter this year, with more snow earlier than we have in recent years. I usually make it a mission to keep the driveway clear to the blacktop, so that means obsessively pushing a shovel around.

And it has been a great year to get new boots. I’ve had a pair of Sorels for over 20 years that are still in great shape, but they were big and unwieldy for walking the dog around the neighborhood. I splurged on a pair …