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 of North Face boots that are light and much better for walking. Just in time for all the snowy/slushy road conditions this year.

Progress on the move

Aside from some tedious computer-related tasks (sorting pictures and email, for example), I had some time to further the move to free software.

I've (mostly) ported my investments spreadsheet from MS Excel to OO.o Calc. Learned enough about OpenOffice.org Basic to make things go. I wasn't thrilled about rewriting things since I already had a working program, but my old spreadsheet was a mess of glommed-on code as I figured out how I wanted things to work. Now I was able to design the new version and write my macros in Calc taking advantage of all I had previously learned. ("Plan to throw away your prototype...")

I'd happily share the spreadsheet along with OO.o Basic code here, but I'm afraid it's probably narrowly targeted to my needs. Also I'd like to share some of what I learned in the conversion. There are a lot of helpful pages out there but it can be hard to find some things. I don't expect to be doing a lot with macros in Calc in the near future though, so probably won't have that much motivation to write on the topic.

What remains of my Windows dependence?

I have notes in my old custom "Notable" PIM. Shouldn't be that much work to move them over to Tomboy, except I haven't found a way to mass import flat text files so it might become a drudgerous cutting and pasting job. (Update, 23 February 2008. Found a way: Tomboy: Bulk import files with the D-Bus interface and Python.)

Then there's still the big one: twelve years worth of data in MS Money. Well, I think I'm going to let that go. I'll export the old data in to a spreadsheet or two, summarized in a few ways, and then move on. It's just money stuff -- I don't need to have uninterrupted historical data for my whole life. The accumulated weight of that information was a burden that I feel sweet relief to be rid of.

And what will replace MS Money? Almost certainly KMyMoney. I've been setting things up in there today and I think it will do the job just fine. (But why couldn't they have simply named it "KMoney?") I'll very likely have more to say about this later.

So: I'm getting close. It won't be much longer and I'll be free of Windows for personal use. Since I have a licensed copy of Windows XP, I'll keep that around to run in VirtualBox. One use I can see for it is to test my Java code to see how portable it is.

I won't be free of all proprietary software quite so soon, though. I have non-free drivers and audio and video codecs. I'll keep working at it. I'm happy with progress so far, and I think it's fair to celebrate that I've come a long way in the past year and half since starting this blog. (With much help from you readers -- thanks for all your advice!)

Ni!

Lastly and not leastly, I've started working through Learning Python, by Mark Lutz. I like what I'm seeing. Good book, and great language. I've looked at Perl from time to time, and think it's great and have always thought it would be cool to learn and use, but Python just seems to fit better for me. More on this later, I hope.

And that's what I did on my winter vacation.