Daily Bloggery 2009-03-27: What part of "She's Gorgeous and SHE's ALL MINE!" don't you understand?

Health: SGLs all below 110. Where's that annoying army you need defeated? It should be no problem.
Dressing change today, early to bed tonight.

Gwenny apparently has a cable access show over there in Fremont. Last night was a taping, so we did not play WoW together. Since she's the Supreme Leader and High Priestess of BOYD, she gets pulled in more directions than the victim of a drawing and quartering. We decided to bypass WoW this time and she invited me into a Skype (video chat client) session. In doing so, I saw her, in real time for the first time.

/drool

Executive summary: Her still shot does her justice, but on the cam she's beautiful.

That's a key worry in an online relationship: that the person behind the profile you responded to simply does not correspond to the picture or profile. Unless Gwenny has hired a body double on top of everything else . . . transcdental rightness, again.

Two short work days and one long night stand between Gwenny and me now.

More drivel . . .

Firefox has been crashing on most of the sites I'm visiting tonight. This is more like Safari 3.x behavior. OK, basic browser troubleshooting 101: I have the most recent update. OS X is likewise up to date. FF Add-ons (like Foxytunes) are turned off, killed cache and cookies; basically went nuclear on the browser user data -- nada. New user account -- same shit, different time stamp. Pulled Firefox, from /Applications, reinstalled the app, the full monty . . . same fscking thing. I am NOT reinstalling OS X. Restore from Time Machine? -- Maybe once I get home from the movie.

10 min later: Found the issue. My troubles began when I visited a site to download a neat little song. In order to log into the site, I had to switch something called the "User Agent" to convince the site that I was using IE7+ on Windows instead of Firefox on Mac OS X. Damned site assumes that everyone has the evil that is Microsoft ActiveX enabled. Fsckers. Anyway, their workaround for the Mac community is Firefox User Agent Switcher. Anyway, swapping user agent back fixxored Firefox. Turning the add-on off left the browser in IE7 user agent mode. Damned pref list files are in strange places.

OK, off to get a bite before the show.

Softwarez for teh Mac (and teh Winderz)

1. OpenOffice.org 3.0 -- First of all, let me be perfectly clear: I hate Microsoft Orifice, I mean Office. I cannot stand the app, in any of its incarnations, for either Winblows or Mac OS X. MS Office is only slightly less intuitive than a lecture on postmodernism, as intrusive as "spam," as ubituious as Starbucks and as bloated as the federal budget deficit. OpenOffice.org is an open source alternative to Orifice. Previous incarnations for the Mac suffered because the previous ports were designed to run in the Unix / X.11 side of OS X and not as a native "Aqua" interface app. In other words, Not Something Steve Jobs Would Do. OO.o 3.o is Mac OS X native -- no more X.11 OpenOffice 3.0 launches FAST in OS X -- by comparison, MS Office: Mac 2008 starts so slowly I wonder if the splash screen is my new desktop graphic. OO.o is smooth and easy on the brain, something MS Office is not. I give OO.o 3.0 a 4 star rating

2. Bento 2 -- As I wrote earlier this year, Bento is almost indispensable for the Mac user. This week, Filemaker released Bento 2. I downloaded the 30-day trial version to see if it is really any better.
Honestly, I'm disappointed. The improvements are cosmetic and few, and worse, FM wants another $49, without offering a lower upgrade price. For what I do with Bento -- maintaining RPG-related databases of people. places and things -- the full price is not worth it. Two stars.

3. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King. Okay, this one is not out quite yet, and I've written extensively about it. The beta test is over, in a week it will be out. No. I'm not going to be in line at GameStop at midnight next week to buy it. I have some real concerns over how well the realms/servers are going to stand up to the new release; in beta the term "realm stability" was an oxymoron, and the beta realms were not all that high in population. My current realm is very high population, which is a bit of a worry.

Software Review: MoneyWell

Last post I mentioned this very nice piece of software I found for managing personal finances on a Mac. Macs are starting to challenge the stereotype that PCs are only for number-crunching and gamers while Macs are only for artsy-fartsy creatives like musicians, photographers, graphic artists and the like. Apple's Numbers spreadsheet, part of iWork'08, is a great start in that direction and FileMaker's Bento database app puts Access to shame for the personal user. Sadly, there have been no decent personal finance apps. Microsoft Money -- my daughter's favorite piece of personal finance software which is among the most user friendly of Microsoft apps -- is Windows only. Since for a variety of reasons I'm not going to Boot Camp my system anytime soon or resort to a virtualization solution like Parallels or VMWare Fusion, and I detest Sicken, er, Quicken -- the other most common Mac app for financial management (I'm just not Intuit . . .) because it is crippleware next to the Winblows version. As for web-based apps, please spare me. Ick on a fscking stick.

One day while checking out VirginTracker, er, Versiontracker one day on break, I found MoneyWell. Impressive piece of software. The idea behind MoneyWell is this: If iTunes and a financial app got stinking drunk one night at the office Yule party and did the nasty in a broom closet, MoneyWell could be the result born 9 months later. Your Chart of Accounts becomes a group of playlists, your bank account is like an iTunes library, etc. Budgeting is a matter of allocating money to "buckets," add in income and the proggy fills the buckets with money. Add in the graphing and analysis tools, and you have a killer financial app. In a sense, this tool turns budgeting into a RPG point allocation system, something I have a easy time understanding. As someone who designed a custom small business financial accounting system about three jobs ago with spreadsheets and QBASIC macros (don't try this at home....) for MS-DOS 5.x / Netware 2.2.x, I know how beastly these things can get. MoneyWell's learning curve is not steep, and the built in help is as good as anything I've seen in Leopard; the online tutorials are excellent, as good as those for iPods.

Unlike many such apps form VirginTracker, this one's polished and professional. No Thirst Software did a wonderful job. It reminded me a lot of Bento, another great Leopard app I make a lot of use of in my gaming. At $39.99 USD for a license -- the shareware version is limited to 200 transactions -- it beats the hell out of Quicken.

Color me impressed by this app. If you have a Mac and you have budgeting issues, get this proggy. Try it, you'll buy it.

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Listening to: The O'Jays - For The Love Of Money
via FoxyTunes