I’ve been dying lately without having access to MS Money. Microsoft has conceded the personal finance software market to Intuit and decided to stop supporting MS Money. I was pretty heart broken since MS Money helped me turn my finances around. I went down to Office Max yesterday and finally bought a copy of Quicken 2007 for the iMac. Intuit is releasing Quicken 2010 for Mac in February but I couldn’t wait. I haven’t been feeling so hot without knowing my bottom line for the last few weeks. I tried to use the old checkbook register but I still like to see forecasts and play with the charts and graphs. I’m still getting used to my gigantic California mortgage and use the forecasts as a crutch to see what the consequences of my spending are. I know you can do this in Excel or Numbers but I didn’t want to spend the hours to get a temporary system up and running.
Like our printer, it looks like Quicken 2007 doesn’t work out of the box with Snow Leopard. It wasn’t immediately obvious either since everything installed correctly. I was getting frustrated when I couldn’t get a single one of my accounts to load. I would follow the recommended instructions and let Quicken try and set them up over the web and would constantly get an OL-249 error. I thought I was doing everything right too and was about to start calling Chase, ING, and Charles Schwab for the, “key” it kept asking for.
I searched a few Apple forums, did some Googling and it looks like I’m not the only one perturbed by the incompatibility with Snow Leopard. I felt like I threw $70.00 out the window and was getting really mad. I was about to go 0 for 2 on the new iMac!! First the printer was incompatible, now my personal finance software doesn’t work. So much for, “it just works”. After scrounging around on Intuit’s Quicken page, I found two patches: R2 and R3. They fix the OL-249 error. I downloaded them both, installed them and now I can now incorporate most of my accounts into Quicken. At first glance it seems as if MS Money supports/supported more financial institutions then Quicken does. I don’t see Banana Republic, GE Money Bank, or my 401k provider in the list. I guess I have to play with it some more. For those of you looking for the Snow Leopard patches for Quicken 2007 for Mac, go here:
http://quicken.intuit.com/support/articles/using-quicken/patches-and-updates/4366.html
These aren’t easy to find on Intuit’s page either. Let me know if this works for you since it did for me. What I’m really not liking about the iMac is that I have to research the software I want to buy before I buy it to make sure it’s compatible with Snow Leopard. Just because the box says, “compatible with OS v10.3.9 or later” doesn’t necessarily mean 10.6.2.
It’s the first of January and Tommaso’s due date is right around the corner. It’s about time that I finished prepping his room. I spent the last few days trying to seal the doorway between his room and ours. The previous owner of our house tried to close off a doorway that connected our room to what we’re going to use for Tommaso’s room. They finished sealing the wall in our bedroom but didn’t finish the other side. They left it as a giant hole with exposed plaster board which looked ugly. They didn’t really use that room for anything other than storage for junk so I guess they didn’t really care about how it looked.
My friend Will helped a lot with the trowel work and sheetrock compound to fill in most of the hole. My dad then did a second coat a few days later. I’m not exactly handy, so I tried to get help from anyone who knows more than I do, which is just about everyone. My job though, is to finish it up and paint. After some trial and error I figured out how to use some of the left over sheetrock compound, spackling compound, and a putty knife to get it smooth. My walls are plaster and lathe, so it took a little experimenting to get everything to blend in right. It actually looks pretty good. It looks a lot better than the job the painters did we hired a few month ago. Their patch didn’t hold and I had to tear it all down and start over. It wasn’t a total loss though. Their other patches held and the primer they shot on the walls really cleaned up the room.
At least one thing I’ve learned from this, is that I’m never going to use painter’s tape again to cut-in on our walls. The walls in my house aren’t exactly smooth or straight, (plaster and lathe) so it’s hard to get clean lines. The lines from the painter’s tape in our living room are horrendous. I’ve found I have a pretty steady left and right hand and can get a nice clean line using a 2” angle brush. It’s actually faster too since I don’t have to move around the room two additional times to put the tape up and tear it down.
The first coat of paint is almost done. I need to finish the last wall and to do that I need to move everything over to the other side of the room. The room is pretty small so I can’t just put everything in the middle of the room and I don’t want to put everything in the kitchen again. The crib and dresser are also too heavy to move far by myself. We were getting tired of living out of boxes so we unpacked all the baby stuff even though his room isn’t done. I should be done with the first coat tomorrow morning and at least half way through the second tomorrow. My mom may come to visit on Sunday and help finish decorating if she doesn’t go to Lake Tahoe with my dad. My sister raided the local Pottery Barn Kids and bought all the Peter Rabbit stuff she could find. It was a very nice present.
It’s almost done and it should look good when I’m finished.
