Testing my mobile blog app to see if it works.

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.

So the wife and I broke down and bought an iMac and a new printer for Christmas. We decided that it would be our present to ourselves, which worked out nicely since we’ve both been lusting for one ever since we saw them at Best Buy. Out of the box my first impressions were pretty good. It’s sleek, compact, and has a killer screen. The wireless keyboard and mouse are super slick. My only nit with the keyboard is that it doesn’t have a ten key. My wife lives and dies by the ten key so I may have to change that out. I saw Apple sells one but it doesn’t appear to be wireless. I guess another nit would be that I can’t find the IBM version of the “delete” key. The Apple keyboard has a key called “delete” but works like the IBM “backspace”. There’s probably a way to erase the next character using the Apple keyboard, but I just don’t know it.

The iMac takes up significantly less space than the Dell and it frees us from Windows Vista. We bought the middle grade version since Best Buy ran out of the entry level iMacs. Our computer desk and office are pretty small so the larger 27” screen would have been too big.

For the printer, we bought a Canon MX860 and its setup has been a nightmare. We bought the Canon MX860 since it had was a scanner, printer, had a fax capability, and was wireless. I can’t remember the last time I needed a fax but I do know when I needed it, I really needed it. We are also trying to keep a clean office for once so the idea was to put the printer somewhere that was out of the way. I figured with Apple advertising that, “everything just works” it would be pretty simple. Just plug it in and go. Well... not really.

Our iMac was shipped with OS X 10.6.2. I didn’t know this, but that means “Snow Leopard”. It sounds cool at least. The background picture is cute and Snow Leopard sounds less menacing than Tiger or Panther. For Canon though, Snow Leopard meant not compatible with 10.6.2, at least out of the box... sort of. The drivers that come with Snow Leopard support USB capability, but not wireless. Since the entire point of buying the Canon was to use wireless, this ticked me off. After some fiddling around, reading lots of help message boards, and re-reading the manual a few times it is now working. For those of you in the same boat I was in, here is what I did:

1. Put the CD Canon gives you away. It’s worthless.

2. Go to Canon’s website and find the page associated with the PIXMA MX860.

3. Go to “Drivers and Downloads”.

4. Select the right OS, “OS X” and scroll down to “Software”. Skip the “Drivers” section altogether. I played in this section for a while and didn’t get anywhere. Your mileage may vary since I don’t know what I’m doing.

5. Download and install all the English applications approved for 10.6. I downloaded Easy-Photo-Print EX, MP Navigator EX, Canon PIXMA Wireless Setup Assistant, Solutions Menu, and IJ Network Tool. The Wireless Assistant doesn’t do much other than show you what your settings are which you should probably know since you’re trying to setup your printer on your network.

6. Some of the applications may ask you to restart the computer. I said ok and everything worked.

7. After you install the IJ Network Tool you’ll be asked to input your network settings. Follow the instructions and select your network. If you really don’t know what your setup is, run the Wireless Assistant. It will tell you.

8. Once you complete the, “is-the-printer-too-far-away” step and you add the printer to your network and your printer list, WAIT for the second Canon MX860 to show up in your printer list. It takes a few seconds. I screwed this up a couple times. I didn’t wait for the second printer to show up and was only set up to print via USB. This was confusing since I did the wireless setup several times. Everything was talking, the printer was nice and close, but I couldn’t print. The only reason I caught this was because my wife was talking to me the last time and when I turned to look, there was a second printer with an associated MAC address. Aha!

9. Print a test page using the wireless. Put the printer where you want it to live and print another test page.

This may have been the round about way to do this, but it worked for me. Let me know if this works for you! Good luck.

I recently joined the 21st century and bought a BlackBerry. It’s the new BlackBerry Storm too. My old phone finally died after a few years of solid abuse. I ended up buying the Storm at Best Buy on the release date since the local Verizon store was sold out. I’d like to thank Gordon in the Mountain View/Palo Alto area for not getting to Best Buy in time. I bought yours. In all honesty, I wanted an iPhone but I can’t stand AT&T. I’ve also been a Verizon customer since GTE Mobile. After playing with it for a few weeks here are some of my thoughts.

The accelerometer tends to get stuck and fails to recognize whether the phone is in the vertical or horizontal orientation. This makes answering the phone very difficult. To answer the phone you have to select the “answer” button that appears on the screen while it’s ringing. I kept losing calls waiting for the phone to recognize its orientation so I could press the button. Research in Motion released a patch last week which fortunately fixed the accelerometer issue. The phone is usable now. I was pretty disappointed for a while.

VZ Navigator is way cool. I don’t know how I survived before without it. I was on travel last week to King’s Bay, Georgia and used it for directions to and from the hotel. The phone was able to find a steak house and a Starbucks within a few miles of the hotel. I had never been to the area before so the GPS capability was very helpful. I also used it again to find a friend’s house in Fremont.

E-mail and web are working just fine. I have access to my non-work e-mail and the web browser actually looks like a web browser. I dig the keypad for typing. The full QWERTY keyboard works nicely. I’d never used a BlackBerry before so I can’t compare it to the button style devices but I can definately say I like it better than the iPhone. I’m always missing buttons on an iPhone. I’m told with practice I’d get used to it. I didn't need practice with the Storm. I was typing quickly on day one.

I haven’t really played with the camera so I can’t comment on it. iTunes is synched using the BlackBerry Digital Synch tool and I was able to copy a DVD onto the phone which looks great. Fortunately the phone uses standard phone jacks so I don’t have to use the weird ones my Krazer used. All in all I like the phone and can definitely see why they call it a crack berry. It was $199.99 with a two year contract. My contract had been up for a while and I just renewed it. I have no idea what my monthly bill will be since I was signing up with everything. I’ll find out in a few weeks.

Good grief it’s Christmas already. We don’t even have a tree yet. I don’t know about any of you out there but I’ve been having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Work is killing me and we’re not even allowed to take the holiday break this year due to schedule constraints. I hope this isn’t what we have to look forward to in the years to come. I miss Christmas the way it was when I was a kid. Maybe our newest addition will help out with that. He should be here around August next year and ready for his first Christmas. We may even be in our first house.

As far as Christmas shopping, we have done 0 shopping so far. Since I’ve been on this financial kick, I’m not too thrilled about spending a bunch of money on gifts to feed retailers. Online shopping isn’t fun either since the instant gratification factor is removed. The economy sucks and I’m turning into scrooge. I hate it.

Holy cow I’m going to be a father! The wife just took a pregnancy test, a few actually, and confirmed that we are pregnant. The next step we think is to go to the doctor and confirm the pregnancy then schedule a real appointment for an ultrasound and other prenatal activities. We haven’t told our friends and family yet; we were going to tell them at Christmas using some form of gag gift. There were a bunch of ideas posted the web which looked like fun. Since no one reads this blog anyways we figured it would be safe to post on the web.

We have a lot of decisions to make in the next few months. The plan was originally to buy a house in the area and continue on as a dual-income-no-kids family. With this change, we’re entertaining the possibility of the wife quitting her teaching job when the baby is born and moving to another state. I make enough in my current job that with a transfer she could easily be a housewife if we lived somewhere else. She doesn’t have tenure with her current school and we’re afraid that she may not get asked back for tenure since the due date is right around the start of the next school year. She’s in the first year of a two year probationary period. The last thing we want is to have a large Silicon Valley mortgage, a newborn, and one income. It may actually be beneficial to rent a house when our apartment lease is up. Rents have come down a lot in the area and we could easily handle terminating a lease if push came to shove; can’t say the same about a mortgage. It’s all a little surreal right now. Articles on the web say it won’t sink in until the second or third month.

Our emergency cash reserve isn’t quite full and we’re just starting to approximate how much a child actually costs. Wow, are they expensive. After some basic number crunching it looks like we could have six months worth of expenses covered by the time the child is born and a little extra padding to account for any unpaid maternity leave. I’m going to check with HR to see if I qualify for paternity leave so I can help out. Stay tuned for updates for those of you read my blog!