Ben Galbraith’s Blog

Cha-Ching seems to be exactly the money management software package I’ve been seeking. After playing around with it, I’ve some observations:

1. It actually looks like an OS X application and doesn’t require installing X11 unlike so many alternatives I’ve seen.
2. It is tag-based (instead of category-based), has a very responsive and easy-to-understand interface, and is fun (!) to use.
3. It lacks some basic features (splitting transactions, for one) and is really buggy.
4. The development team has no published road-map and seems to lack any real experience being an ISV. This is not the app to which to trust your money.
5. $40? Seriously?

Ugh. Maybe in a year it’ll be viable…

Dion: “Yeah, Ben has a ten-year-old picture of himself on his blog.”

I hadn’t realized that I looked any different. Ouch.

I get a badge so I can enter a client’s secure facility. As an employee walks me over to test it, we notice the main door is propped open with a dead-bolt. He closes the dead-bolt and shuts the door so we can test my new badge. After the door successfully opens and we walk in, he opens the dead-bolt so the door stays partially open. “Better let whoever left it like that back in.”

I’ve just recently come back home after a month on the road. Consequently, I’m running behind on a few things, such as my email. Ah yes. My email. I hate email.

I find my emotional state is governed too often by my email. Or more specifically, the vertical scrollbar in the email application. What I long to see is:

Sadly, what I see lately is:

Whenever I am that far behind, my general mood becomes quite anxious. My apologies to those who feel slighted or ignored. I have some good friends languishing somewhere in the scrollbar gutter. I’ll get to you, soon, I hope.

At some point in the email-whacking exercise, I always get distracted by how much every email application sucks. They all do. With Gmail, I get great searching in exchange for an awful user interface. With OS X Mail, I get a pretty interface with amazing UI latency and a search that seems to actually be more an exercise in generating some form of grinding noise from the hard drive than actually finding what I’m looking for on a timely basis. And the spam! Oh, that horrible spam.

There was a time in my life I thought I’d make time to write a really cool email client. But I never got the time. Can someone please get around to it?

In any event, if you’ve tried to reach me and haven’t heard back, shoot me another email. FIFO is out, the squeaky wheels are in. Sorry.

(Three tracks into the new Björk album and I’m very disappointed; hope it gets better.)

I recently watched the excellent “Judgment at Nuremberg” and so was interested to see that the lead translator during the trials in Nuremberg, Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, has written a book detailing his experiences and is giving a lecture in New Jersey next week. A summary of his experiences in a local newspaper reveals some fascinating insight into the war criminals of the era.

Said Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, in reply to an accusation that he’d killed 3.5 million people: “Oh, no, it was only 2.5 million.” Rudolf added that the rest died of “other causes.”

Hoess also said, in reply to being accused of taking gold teeth from his victims’ corpses: “What kind of man do you think I am?”

The degree to which the human mind is capable of warping to permit the worst of evil whilst still maintaining self-esteem is shocking.

Some months ago, one of my oft-used keyboard shortcuts in an OS X application broke: Command-/ in IntelliJ IDEA, which is used to comment out lines of code. I am constantly installing new applications on OS X and had recently upgraded IDEA, so tracking down the offender was no small task.

I started out by reviewing the OS X Keyboard Preferences Pane, but there was no keyboard shortcut registered for Command-/. IDEA didn’t show any conflicting mappings either. So I lived without Command-/. It was a bit painful but I couldn’t justify taking any more time tracking it down.

But today, I finally got around to it. I starting pressing Command-/ all over the place, trying to see what would happen. Hitting it in IDEA just causes a beep. Hitting it in Firefox also causes a beep. But finally, I hit it in Finder, and it launched… DEVONthink. I installed DEVONthink when I bought some OS X application bundle a few months ago. I’ve never used it. So I Googled DEVONthink and keyboard shortcuts, but didn’t find anything on Command-/.

And then I discovered Service Scrubber. And sure enough, that naughty little DEVONthink had installed a presumptuous keyboard shortcut for Command-/ associated with one of their OS X Services. I disabled it with Service Scrubber, restarted OS X, and finally, I can use Command-/ in IDEA again.

I’ve had my head down consulting on-site for two weeks now, so I haven’t had a chance to keep up with the news. I heard about a press conference Google held to discuss this big “iGoogle” announcement. And, sure enough, I went to Google, and saw a new “iGoogle” link in the upper right-hand corner. Sweet! “What new from the Googles?”, I wondered, a bit excitedly. I clicked on it, and… got the standard personalized homepage.

I tried Google’s personalized homepage for a few weeks and eventually dumped it because it took too long to render and stole focus once it finished rendering (nice, thanks). It looks the same. No new features are obviously visible. No “This-is-why-its-now-called-iGoogle” message anywhere, no “About-iGoogle” link, etc.

So I Googled around a bit to find out what I’m missing about iGoogle, why its introduction required a press conference, etc. And, after reading a few random articles, yep, it looks like its all about renaming whatever they called the personalized homepage before to… iGoogle. Am I missing something? Back to work.

I spent a few minutes organizing my email by moving some messages in Apple Mail to an IMAP server running on my local system. I dragged the email (3000 pieces) to the IMAP server, it seemed to work just fine, and then I noticed about 10 emails from today just gone. No undo. No evidence as to why they vanished. Spotlight finds no evidence of them anywhere. They’re gone.

I rely on my email for sooooo much. Fortunately, I have a backup of nearly everything on Gmail. Ugh.

Seen on a random night on a random street in mid-town: Two Bentleys, one of which was left parked over-night on the side of a busy street sandwiched between a Hyundai and a Honda.

In a parking garage on the same street on the same night: another Bentley and an Aston Martin DB9.

Mercedes Benz S-series sedans are to mid-town what Subaru Outback’s are to Boulder: a dime a dozen.