Zibblog

I was having a conversation this evening with Leslie about software to manage your finances. She, like I’m sure many other people, enjoys the power of custom excel documents for managing her money. However, she’s gotten pretty tired of entering receipts and such into the spreadsheets. I showed her how easy it is to download data in Quicken and she asked the question I’m going to forward on to whoever is reading: “What program would you recommend for financial management on the PC?” I’ve heard mixed reviews of Quicken on the PC (I love it on the Mac), and I figured I’d see if anyone had an opinion. Thanks.

For anyone that hasn’t yet seen my condo, you can take a look at some of the photos here. I mention the pictures mostly to draw your attention to the photo of my oven unit. If you were just glancing at it (as I’ll admit that I did when I first started the process of buying the place), you might be tricked into thinking that the thing above the oven is a microwave. It is in fact another small oven (it’s really too big to be considered a toaster oven). At first, I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to live without a microwave. However, soon, I came to appreciate some of the things it does really well like heat up hot pockets (what can I say, I’ve got a thing for hot pockets). After a while, I realized the main thing that it doesn’t do well is cook microwave popcorn. There is really nothing better than combining microwave popcorn and NCIS late on a Tuesday night. Like Joni Mitchell always said, “you don’t know what you got til it’s gone.”

Now that I have my own place, I decided to take advantage of it and put holes in the walls. :-) The first project involves getting a home theater audio system, wiring the speakers through the walls, and mounting my plasma tv on the wall. The results of the day (after some cleanup), are in the photo seen here.

To prepare, I got an entry level Yamaha system, speaker cable, and other bits and pieces from Best Buy along with a tv wall mount from Fry’s. JB was kind enough to offer to help out with the project so we got started around 1:30 on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t long before we discovered that there were screws for the walls that were no longer in the box. I had seen another wall mount at Target that was a little cheaper (I know that you’re thinking, cheaper is all well and good until my plasma falls off the wall), so we took the wall mount back to Fry’s and got the other wall mount from Target. At Target, we saw a man wearing an umbrella hat (before you ask, yes, it was a grown man wearing a hat that looked just like the one in the link). After we got back and opened up the new wall mount, we found that it was missing some washers that we needed, so we just bought some replacements at a nearby TrueValue.

At this point, we put up the plasma and started wiring the walls. It went fairly smoothly. Some of the high points included discovering that the wall we were cutting into had 2 half inch sheets of sheetrock on it, crawling around coughing on fiberglass insulation, JB fishing wires out of the walls with wire coat hangers, and finding out that my neighbor’s bedroom shares a wall with my living room when I got a knock on my door at 11pm. From this experience, I learned a few things: JB is a good person to have helping you fish wires through walls, picture hanging wire is pretty handy to have for a project like this, insulation in walls sucks sometimes, fiberglass poles are pretty nice for pushing wires through insulation, and a fiber optic viewer would really come in handy when you’ve got no idea where inside your wall that a wire is.

If you were doing something else today (like working), you might not be aware that CES is currently going on. Most everything good is probably covered by Engadget or Gizmodo. Personally, my favorite two items for the day are the new Sony Reader and TiVo 3.

The Sony Reader uses eInk and the gizmodo article says that it should be around $300 – $400. Personally, my price point on something like that is more like $200, but everyone who had to carry a box of books in my move probably wishes I had something like that.

On PVRblog, there is a story detailing some of the features of the forthcoming TiVo 3 (with forthcoming translating to mid to late 2006). Some of the most interesting features include cablecard support for digital cable, mpeg4 support for downloaded content, HD support, and an external SATA connector for drive expansion. Hopefully, by the time this comes out, I’ll be able to afford one. If you’re feeling generous, you can also help the cause by using Awaken.com to rip your CDs. :-)

Well, I’ve now entered the second calendar year for my blog, and I wanted to start off by saying thanks for reading. It’s nice to know that people find my odd little blog interesting.

If you haven’t seen it already, the short “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island on SNL (available for free on iTunes) is well worth a watch. The graphic about how Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = crazy delicious is now available on Blue Collar Distro.