Category: Life

A catch in my referer log

One advantage of having a low-volume blog is that I check out my referer log fairly often. To be more accurate, I use the digested version provided by SiteMeter, which makes it easy for me to find out information about my hits, including search terms.

This morning, I noticed that someone had read more than one page on the blog and that they’d found it by doing a UK Google search for “parking lower slaughter”. Since I was curious, I re-ran the search and found that the top hit was on a site with the intriguing name of BeenThere-DoneThat. I clicked through, and liked what I saw (“the Unofficial Guide to Great Britain”), so I’m blogging it here so I have a chance of remembering it. I’ll also dogear it, but that’s only helpful when I have a connection behind the IBM firewall, something I try to avoid when on vacation.

Trying to keep my string going

After having been inactive for so long, I feel that it’s a good idea to post something every day — that way inertia will work for me, rather than against me.

The problem with this, of course, is that there are days like today when I have nothing in particular to say, and did nothing worth noting.

That’s not in the Lincoln sense of “the world will little note, nor long remember” — it’s more that today was a rather quiet Shabbat.

We started the day with Torah Study and services; then we had lunch at Pasand, which I seem to remember as having been better a few years ago (there wasn’t anything wrong with what we ate, but there wasn’t anything outstandingly wonderful, either). After that, it was home for a bit of a rest, then a walk to Starbucks in the biting cold (57 degrees, 16 mph wind, which means that the windchill was undefined), then some more resting, then dinner at Armadillo Willy’s, then home to fight Quicken, and finally Jeff and I watched the 10th episode of Rome. As I said, nothing really worth writing about.

Now, if I were feeling curmudgeonly, I might rant about Quicken. As far as I’m concerned, the UI has gotten worse every time I’ve been forced to upgrade since about 1998, but yesterday’s rant about Fry’s was sufficient for one weekend. But I must admit that I’m getting intrigued about trying GNUCash next year — it would be convenient if it ran under Windows, but now I have a Mac Mini, so the OS X implementation should be OK. I’m actually irritated enough by Quicken that I might even try Microsoft Money — and the idea of voluntarily trusting Microsoft with my financial data is scary.

But Intuit is no better. I’m not happy with the way they’ve lobbied both the California Legislature and Congress to prevent the FTB and IRS from offering free e-filing services — and I notice that for the 2005 tax year, there’s no longer an e-file rebate. Or, as Intuit puts it, “Because of customer feedback, Intuit made the business decision to discontinue several TurboTax rebates after October 13, 2005.” Yeah, I really wanted to pay an extra $15.

Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting.