Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 23 April 2002

# 9:30 PM

Bad precedent.

# 1:30 PM

Spent most of yesterday sorting through my finances. I was expecting this to be a drag, but keeping accurate records (using gnucash) turns out to be kind of fun. And it should prevent next year's taxes from being another exercise in digging through file folders to find old credit card bills to attempt to reconstruct how much I spent on what. Or, for that matter, an exercise in wondering what the hell "Yang's" is and why I spent fifty bucks there.

It is a bit sobering to discover that I'm $3K in the hole this year.

Gnucash's save files are much too big, because they're dumping out extremely verbose XML; they compress down about ten-fold. I wonder how hard it would be to wire zlib into the program so they got automatically compressed.

I also read a whole bunch of investment advice over at The Motley Fool. Again, I expected this to be a drag, but it wasn't; they're really good at laying out your options in clear, witty language, and at making the subject interesting. Annoyingly, Fidelity's website has regions which don't work with Mozilla—not the actual "invest online" forms, but the bits where they explain the details of each mutual fund. Which is important to know before one goes off and buys them.