Munday

Today was supposed to be a quiet, peaceful day, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way.

It started out yesterday evening, when my wife was adding an entry into Quicken. Our copy of Quicken is about 14 years old. We had looked into upgrading the version of Quicken about three years ago, but it didn't work out very well. I was grossed out by the relentless self advertising that the product did. So we've been continuing to use the 14-year-old copy, and it's been working just fine. Until last night, when we apparently went over a threshold for the number of entries the product could have. Now the only way we can add new entries, what fun, is to delete old ones. I did some web searching, and on the site where I found the VLC software that I mentioned earlier, I found a reference to a product called Moneydance, a $30 Quicken clone. Unfortunately it doesn't have some basic capabilities that I really want, such as the ability to print a report, or to have standard recurring transactions. And it turns out that in order to use it to read in Quicken records, you need to have records in the Quicken Interchange Format -- which we didn't have. I thought that perhaps that benighted copy of Quicken 2003 might have it, so I took it down. opened that little jewel case -- and the CD promptly snapped in half. I did find a backwards way of creating the interchange format file, so we can get records out (the export function broke a couple of years ago; we're not sure why) -- but I'm not sure where we go from here.

Both of us had to get up early today -- my wife earlier and longer than me. She was supporting a system refresh that started at two o'clock in the morning, and I was supporting a product test at 430 in the morning. My plan to watch a couple of movies on the CD player did work out, for which I'm grateful. For one thing, I got to see the beginning of the Sopranos. I understand now why people are fascinated by it -- but I was quite put off by the amoral character of Tony Soprano, and the casual violence space (in one scene, he is grinning and laughing as he chases a man with a car, then gets out and kicks the guy bloody) I stopped watching it. I also watched part of Prime Suspect, a British detective series with a very gritty feel. I like to -- especially the character played by Helen Mirren -- but for casual watching on a Sunday morning, it wasn't quite the thing. I had a third CD, U-571, but I want to watch, but by then the battery on the laptop was starting to die. (We do have a fairly strong secondary battery, but it goes in the slot where the CD player also goes. Choose one or the other...).

After the battery died, I went to lever myself out of bed to go plug the PC back in to charge, favoring my shoulder just a bit -- and slid off the bed to the floor with a soft thump. I rolled over, using only one hand to lift myself (can't put any weight on the bad arm yet)-- and promptly got a Charlie horse in the leg that the laptop had been sitting propped up on. After I got myself up, I thought that perhaps I'd do a couple of stretching exercises -- and went from stiff to aching without any noticeable relief of the tension in my shoulder.

Oh, and the thing that I got up to support didn't work. Not my problem, not my fault -- but I'm still up three hours early. At least my wife's supported project just ended for the day, about an hour early. Let's hope things get better. So far, this Sunday feels like Monday.