It’s Monday and it’s still my weekend! Woohoo! Michael had to go into work today though, it seems that people I know are split about 50/50 as to whether they have today AND tomorrow off.
Friday was a rough day at work, my eyes were ready to fall out of my head when I walked out of the office at 6:15, but one of the things I like about that job is that it was over at 6:15. I totally left work behind when I walked out the door.
Saturday I was feeling rather blue. We went to the gym in the early afternoon, I hoped physical activity would improve my mood but it didnt. On our way home we stopped at the pet store to pick up some cat food and were seduced by the fish department. Michael found some blue gouramis which are very nice looking fish and I fell in love with a GloFish. So we ended up leaving the store with a couple blue gouramis and a GloFish.
As you can tell, the GloFish doesn’t like to stay still for photos, it spends pretty much all it’s time swimming around the tank very quickly, crazy fish.
After the new fish were settled in Michael and I headed out to Victory to get some pizza and beer.
Sunday I was in a better mood, but that’s when the heat came. The daily high yesterday was in the 90s, and our tentative plans to clean out the tent (which has been drying in the room above the garage all week) and do some cleaning around the house were canceled. Instead we hid upstairs in the computer room all day.
But I got a lot done. Made some progress with the Ubuntu-Women group to get the wiki off the ground and I’m working closely with another woman in the project to get some edits done on the static parts of the website. It’d be nice to see that group really take off.
I worked on doing some organizing of all the bills and paperwork at my desk, finally got around to filing some of the stuff from past years. I also took a chunk of time out of my day to check out some financial software. Currently I’m just using a spreadsheet as a ledger to keep track of a budget and things. I’m good at keeping these things in my head so it’s not a bad system for me, but I always thought it would be nice to learn to use a more advanced program for personal finances. I tried out 3 programs:
gnucash – Turned out to be complex and clunky for something as simple as a personal account. I really gave it a chance and worked for about 45 minutes with it to see if I could get through the lack of user-friendliness and figure out how it works. Then it crashed. I gave up.
MyPhpMoney – There was a version of this in apt, so even with it needing apache to run I figured I’d give it a shot. Unfortunately the project seems to have been abandoned in 2003 and the scripts don’t work properly with the current version of MySQL. I still thought it might be worth running, so I spent some time tossing in fixes to the php scripts as I came across them in the program, but it got to be too much of a hassle.
KMyMoney – I wasn’t going to install this, I had to grab it from the unstable respository (there is an old stable version, no version for testing, and a recent version in unstable. Luckily the install went fine, didn’t need to install too much from unstable, and the program runs great. Plus, it looks nice, it is pretty easy to get running if you follow the first few steps in the documentation. It gives a variety of great reports and I’m quite pleased.
Unfortunately KMyMoney doesn’t really do much beyond “scheduled payments” in the form of budgeting. I’m not really sure what tools I would want for budgeting, but it does seem like my old spreadsheet will continue it’s life. I am considering using KMyMoney along-side it though, it’s just so nice (and depressing!) to see how much was spent in each area over the course of a month/year.
I also spent a bunch of time yesterday over at wikipedia – writing my first article!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sly_Fox_Brewery
An article on wikipedia about my favorite brewpub, to join the ever growing list of breweries indexed on wikipedia %)
I also *somehow* found myself over on the Egyptian Mau wikipedia page and decided that it needed a picture of a smoke-colored mau – Caligula has been wikipedia-ed!
And I dist-upgraded my computer. While upgrading there was an xorg warning about users having problems with the upgrade that made me groan. Of course x broke when I restarted it. I had to download the latest nvidia drivers and then run the module script like this:
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7182-pkg1.run --x-module-path=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/
so xorg would see the nvidia module and load it. Arg. It only took about 30 minutes of sorting out though, and I had the time to do it.
Oh and xfce4 got updated to 4.3.90 and ate all my settings x_X and I had to install xfdesktop4 to get my desktop and menu back.
Today I didn’t do much, there are a few more things on my todo list, but I’m not sure how far I’ll get with them.