I’m writing this on my treadmill! We bought a SurfShelf Treadmill Desk for those times when we want to work out but need to work or have something else to do on the computer. Pretty sweet.

As I’ve blogged on several occasions (here, here, and here), my trusty Dell finally got beaten into immobility during law school. This prompted me to run out and buy the cheapest thing I thought I could live with for a year or two. As the above links indicate, that was a mistake. My Sony has [...]

You know times are bad when large corporations start accepting advertising money to do product placement in their web chat tech support sessions. For example: “Thank you, I’ve found your account information.  While I’m looking up your account info, be sure to check out _____, where you can meet friends, play games, etc.” That just [...]

A few days ago I lamented (here and here) the difficulty of doing certain at-a-glance budgeting in Quicken.  I think I have found many of the features I was missing through the excellent free service Mint.com. The main thing I have been missing is at-a-glance budgeting.  That is, I’d really like to be able to [...]

We upgraded last night to Quicken Premier 2009, which partially resolves the Quicken 2007 issues surrounding budgets, which I mentioned in my last post, through the Savings Plan feature. Unfortunately, this feature has its own limitations – you have to define a plan each month, cannot define plans for past months, can only define a [...]

Does anyone know how to get Quicken to budget properly for a loan account? That is, if you actually set up an amortized loan, how do you get Quicken to budget for the interest and principal as a single payment? I’m using Quicken Premier 2007, and it seems like there is no way to track [...]

I have not been posting much on here, lately, ironically because I am not super-busy, despite having a lot of opportunities for professional development and a lot of fun experiences. Life has remained at a good, non-frantic pace since the last entry, and we have been relishing the free time. That said, I plan to [...]

For the first time in several months, we’ve both been able to leave the office at pretty normal hours, without taking work home, more than once in a week. Finally, our respective cases have calmed down enough that we’re running near a normal work week again. It’s nice. Also, big congratulations to my buddies Phil [...]

Last weekend’s big project was for me to set up our patio furniture. Newly arrived – we ordered it online – it sat on the back porch for only about 12 hours; I really wanted to get to it. So, I went outside, cut open the table box with a utility knife, started removing the [...]

I received a mass-mailed (via U.S. Mail) invitation to purchase window blinds – lots of them – today. The recipient on the label was: Cottrell Edward Michael Etal Cottrell Edward Michael Etal FAIL.