After a year of the “keep receipts in a big folder!” methodology, based on a “we don’t need no finance software!” philosophy, I’ve found both to be somewhat lacking. After reviewing and sifting through a blizzard of options (including libre and closed-source software, desktop and web-based, gratis and paid) I decided to limit myself to…
web-based services
with minimal basic functionality (deal-breakers for me: secure, must get information from most of my online accounts, help me budget, and give me an easy “from X time to Y time” summary view)
that costs $0
and easily export/sync to a standard file format you can work with using other programs on your desktop (no lock-in).
The Contenders:
Mint is a spending tracker that automatically recommends products and services to you.
ClearCheckbook is “an online checkbook register with the added bonus of viewing reports, setting budgets, creating reminders and more.”
Yodlee is what Mint is built on top of (“that with which Mint is built on top”?).
Wesabe is a money management tool with community features built in.
The Criteria:
Does the program make me feel happy when I use it? (This is largely a function of thoughtful UI design.)
How easy is it for the program to download and use financial data from your bank, etc. accounts? (best: automatic.)
How many of my accounts can be linked to the program, so I don’t have to enter transactions in by hand? (best: all of them.)
Will it force me to review my finances on a regular basis? The most likely scenario for this is some sort of push communication, for instance “email me updates once a $timeperiod. (best: yes, and we’ll make it compelling for you to track your progress, and as a bonus, it looks pretty.)
Can I check my financial status on the go? The most likely scenario for this is being able to get reports via SMS, email, and/or IM. (best: yes, and we show you all your budget category status numbers too.)
Can I update my financial status on the go – in a way I’ll actually do it? For instance, being able to SMS in “I spent $1 on a cookie, this comes from my ‘fun’ budget” would fit the bill. (best: yes, and you can fill in all the fields via SMS/etc. you’d be able to fill in online, so you don’t have to go back and add metadata to your transactions later.)
How many and which programs does the file format you export to work with? (best: yes, Mel, we work with tax preparation software…)
Do you import file formats from other financial programs? (Not super-important, but in case I ever switch to something else and then want to go back…)
Is the program smart about moving/renaming/merging/splitting/<insert-set-operations-here> categories and/or tags for expenditures? (best: yes, and there’s an undo.)
What other cool things can you show me that I haven’t thought of?
The procedure
For each service, I am going to…
Create an account.
Link it to as many of my financial accounts as possible (savings, checking, IRA, stocks…).
Input (manually, with the online interface) May 2009 expenses so far.
Check my budget status (with the non-online interface) before taking any spending-money actions during the next week.
Input (manually, with the non-online interface if applicable) May 2009 expenses during the next week.
Review my financial status on Monday, 5/18.
Try out the criteria in the list above I haven’t exercised yet.
My Ninong (godfather) Sebastian loves his school. Over 20 years after graduating from DePaul, his passion for it is unflagging. He’ll talk about the difference it’s making – how they’ve helped a lot of first-generation college students launch careers, founded overseas entrepreneurship tracks to give bright, hard-working students overseas get a first-rate American MBA without having to leave their family halfway around the world without a breadwinner… Ninong’s commitment to that school has led to a non-insignificant number of students enrolling there – and doing very, very well – directly because of him.
I want to care that much about the schools I go to. I want someone to say the same things about me 20 years from now, about how much I love Olin and IMSA. I want them to be places such that I will be that passionate about them still, decades down the road.
And since I care about them now, I’m going to work to make that happen.
It always does; every moment alters your existence. And sometimes there are these… tiny pivots, these quiet catalyzing moments, that make you you step back afterwards and exhale, kinda cock your head up in the direction of Someone Upstairs, and grin.
Nagle reminded me that there were some things I haven’t shared yet (also, note the new “kinesthetic” category for this blog; my past two somatic awareness posts are also on there now.)
Keyboard awareness has been key for me (pun intended). This is with both senses of the word “keyboard” – computer and piano. Add that to the “and my elbow is double-jointed” thing, and you get “hello, risk factors for messing up your arms early in life!” I’m stunned I lasted this long, really. Anyway.
There’s a great contrast between the piano, where I’m acutely aware of what I’m doing because it’s my “job” to listen for this fine-tuned feedback that depends on what my muscles do (it’s not perfect, but it’s easy to adjust when I’m reading books because I can immediately go “yeah, that sounds good!”) and the computer, where my job is almost to be not aware of how I’m sitting… I feel like I need to be able to be unaware of the physicality of my input methods in order to get the mental work onto my screen. So I’m continuously trying to transfer knowledge back and forth between both.
I’m also becoming more aware of what my level of mental and physical awareness is when I am…
at the computer
at the piano, sightreading
at the piano, playing something I know, having a good time, playing musically and listening…
1 and 2 are both very cerebral, and somatic awareness is almost nil. 3 has a ton of awareness in both directions. Based on this, one breakthrough was from trying to find the 4th counterpart – computer with awareness. I tried to type while listening to my computer keyboard, playing it melodically with a rhythm and body motion as if it were a piano piece – and different kinds of piano pieces (Prokofiev != Bach in terms of everything, including physical movement, etc). Instead of musical phrases, I leaned into and paced my typing to sentence phrases. This didn’t disrupt my mental flow as much and gave me some access to my physical one, but there’s a ways to go before using my computer can be more than a just-my-brain activity.
Yes, it did strike me that a “you’re typing too hard” indicator might be a useful bit of technology to exist. Since the computer doesn’t know how hard you’re striking keyboard keys, it’d have to be on the keyboard itself, or on a listener near the keyboard that can
It still feels awkward, though – it’s hard to determine when my physical awkwardness comes from inexperience doing the right thing, or simply doing the wrong thing. I wonder if I’ll get a gauge for that in time.
I met Maya, Esther’s daughter and the teacher of this weekend’s workshop, yesterday. This is a good prompt to write more notes for Nagle – or rather, using Nagle as an excuse to write more notes for myself. Taking a note from Nagle, here are photographs. As going shirtless is not as socially appropriate for me, these photos are a little less informative. It’ll come as no surprise that my default posture is… well, let’s insert your favorite negative adjective here, shall we?
The right two pictures are same as the left two, with some annotations (line of hips, as indicated by the waistband of my jeans; vertical line drawn from my heels, tilt of head as inferred by the angle of my glasses (which weren’t repositioned on my nose between photographs, so this should be relatively accurate). On the left of each two-photo set is my usual slump. On the right is me attempting to tallstand (a technique from Esther’s book).
When I tallstand:
I’m taller! (Not as much as the photo shows. The camera is also shifted a little.
Weight shifts towards my heels; I feel more balanced, like there’s less muscular effort holding me upright. There still is muscular effort, though, and plenty of it. A lot of that muscular effort seems to come from my quads.
My pelvis is a little more anteverted…
…but I think I might be curving my lower back inwards and compressing it a little in order to antevert my pelvis. I’ve worked to minimize a lower back compression, and mostly gauge my progress by how tall I am, but I don’t know if this is as good as it can get, or if there are other adjustments I should make (and how to get somatic feedback on them).
My sternum definitely feels more open, even if my shoulders only roll back that far (they’ve gotten better in the last 2 weeks, so you can imagine how they started out).
My head tilts back more, but not enough. My neck won’t straighten more than that – the muscles are too tight. As best as I can identify them, the culprits are my sternocleidomastoids, levator scapulae, subclavius, maybe my scalenus anterior, and the traps and pecs in general (more pecs, I think). This note might be something to take to Abi. This is based on my observations that the stretch/tension when I tallstand (or roll my shoulders back in general) seems to lie below my clavicle, between my sternum and behind my ears (the back of the jaw), down the back sides of my neck radiating up into the base of my skull, and directly in front of my shoulder (the space between and directly below my glenohumeral and sternoclavicular joints).
So, more concretely, questions:
Have I missed or misidentified any likely culprits on the long list of suspected tight muscles? What kind of self-care can I do to release them? (Definitely also an Abi question.)
How do I get feedback/correction on not “crunching” my lower back while tallstanding?
Since tight muscles mean there’s a pronounced forward cantilevering jut in my neck (that shouldn’t actually be there) for a little while longer, how can I best hold my head to help adjust it in the right direction as my muscles loosen? If I tried to make my chin level, it’d jut forward more; what’s a good compromise?
I’ve been having a hard time monitoring my neck alignment in general, since you can’t see a mirror you’re facing sideways to. Aside from having other people take photos, what can I do? I’d love for this to be kinesthetic rather than visual feedback. Note also that my shoulders are still tight enough that raising my hand to my neck to feel it changes the way I carry my neck, so that may not work so well.
Should my quads be activated while standing? If not, how can I release them without feeling like I’m going to topple over?
I’m starting to get to the limitations of how far I can learn about this for myself, which is great, because tomorrow is the start of the workshop, and my questions list is slowly falling into place.
I thought this would be a good brainstorming exercise. This is a partial list; as I get used to delegating, it’ll get better. (Actually, this blog is a better design notebook than any paper one I’ve ever had – I just need a way to sketch easily in here…)
Get me off mailing lists that just won’t unsubscribe me.
Summarize podcasts and YouTube videos with spoken words that I can’t understand (read: nearly all of them)
Call for product information / warranties (for instance, my drumset’s electronics have spazzed out again.)
Email me directions and store hours for local providers of some product that I want to get
Monitor my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts for Critical Mass Of People That I Should Respond To Now
Balance my books (enter these receipts into my system, please)
Schedule appointments (meetings, talks, etc.) and remind me to prepare for them. And booking plane flights and long-haul bus/train tickets. Yay for not dealing with that stuff this summer!
Find teachers for things I want to learn. Books, tutorials, and equipment, too. Like learning scouts!
Evaluate (online) software for me
Wake-up calls
Exercise routine and piano practice inspiration emails (“training reminders”). Actually, hm. This gives me an idea.
Mini-research sprints
Keeping me fed with new information (pushing the books I want to read onto the Hold list for the library, then poking me to pick them up)
Selling things on craigslist, ebay, amazon, etc. for me. Well, listing them, anyway.
Find other, more specialized people for me to outsource bigger jobs to.
Yep. You heard that right. I’m actually going to attempt to learn one thing this summer. And one thing only. All else is subordinated (or more likely, folded into) that. We will see how it goes.
I’ll probably delve into writing, photography, film, sound recording, drawing, transcription, editing, site metrics, surveys, graphic design, and tons of other things while doing this. But the end goal is to find out how to capture things and place them online for maximum documentation effectiveness – the smallest documentation-time-to-impact ratio possible.
Documentation time is everything from packing the camera bag to writing a script to designing slides to uploading my film to YouTube (or a similar service) to subtitling it and setting up a ratings system to responding to comments to… you get the picture. Impact is loosely described as how well it fits these kind of criteria:
is it easy for me to search for, find, stumble-upon, discover, and re-understand it later?
is it easy for other people to do the same?
even if I don’t tell them about it?
can I tell “how well it’s doing” easily, at any time? Can I get feedback on, and tweak, the things I put up in response to feedback on how to make it more effective?
can other people do the same without me being a bottleneck?
if there was some other goal of the project being documented, is that goal achieved better or more easily after it’s documented in this manner?
Since I need not-to-do lists as much as I need to-do lists, here’s stuff I won’t be learning this summer. This is not to shut off opportunities as they come up, but it is saying that I won’t chase these down, and that I’ll deflect them into my actual summer learning project if they’re really stubborn.
Stuff I will not reallyreallyreally learn this summer
Another language
How to dance (partner, break)
Becoming an actual decent runner
Engineering in the “traditional coursework” sense (this one is hard for me to say no to, since I keep going “but I should learn VLSI, I should go through Strang’s text on wavelets…” but these are all things that I keep on blathering about and never doing, so I’m just saying NO! for 4 months and seeing whether absence makes the heart any fonder.)
Electrical/mechanical fabrication. Also incredibly hard. I will probably be dragged into a machine shop at some point by virtue of the people I am living with, which will be awesome. If so, I will push it into my actual summer learning project by documenting the heck out of it – but I won’t seek to spend every waking moment!!! chasing this stuff down. See #4.
Becoming a better coder, tester, software engineer in general. If this comes as part of my job, awesome; it probably will, same rationale as #4 and #5.
Art. Again, hard to say no to. Again, probably will casually sketch anyway. Again, won’t feel guilty about not seriously studying it right now. Sketches are a great form of documentation, though. As is photography and film. So. A bit of wiggle room, here.
Business (in the formal “let us study things and open books on operational theory huzzah” sense). Same as above.
Acting/stage presence/speaking. Ditto. Also plenty of wiggle room if I ever videotape a presentation of mine.
Cooking.
I’m sure there are more things.
This is active as of now until August 31, 2009. Ramp-up starts now, should be going full-blast by June 1st. Hup!
I’ve tossed this idea around with a few friends, and now that I can type, it’s time to get it written down so it’s better refined (and I get more pokes towards making it real).
Basically, I like dreaming big. I like seeing how I’d like a different kind of reality to be, and then running as hard as I can towards it, bringing as many people as I can take with me along the way, for as long as it takes to make that reality actually happen. Sometimes it takes a very, very long time. This is occasionally rather tiring, but talking with friends running towards their own dreams counteracts exhaustion remarkably well – a sort of mutual ass-kickery.
So here’s a strawman with a lousy name (“The Long Haul Club?” Come on.) to get things going. Rules for participation:
You must have something that you’re aiming for in 12 years. (Why 12? Long term enough to be audacious, short term enough that we can see the major life changes that we may have to blend in, like marriage/kids/a house.) That goal can change over time, but you’ve always got to have some big dream that you’re shooting for with all your heart. This gets publicly posted.
Call circle, every day. Everyone has someone that they call and someone who calls them. You come up with a list of 6 questions you’d like to be asked each day – stuff ranging from “how many hours did you sleep?” to “did you say thank you to someone today?” to “did you do something music-related?” “did you say no to something you wanted to do but didn’t need to?” and… well, the list goes on. Any questions you want. You can change those questions at any time. These get publicly posted too.
Ass-kicking meetings once a month. Everyone piles into somebody’s apartment’s living room (this obviously only works for local buddies… I’m not sure if a phone call or a chat would work as well, but we could see) and commiserates. This works best, I think, if the folks in the group are already good friends, and if each circle isn’t too big (say, cap at a dozen). One other thing you do for sure each month is pay yourself – see the next section…
Pay yourself to work on what you’re dreaming of. We’d agree on a hourly wage for ourselves – say, $40. Then each month, everyone would have to put aside 40 hours worth of salary – in this case, $1,600.00 – for working on their dream. If you spend at least 40 hours that month working towards that goal, you pay yourself the $1,600.00 – get paid to do what you love. (Think of the rest of the group as a Board of Directors for your dream that decides whether you made good headway or not for that month.) If you spend less than 40 hours, you pay yourself however many hours you did work, and put the rest into the Jar O’ Givingness.
Give effectively. The third thing that the group does each month is take what’s in the Jar O’ Givingness – plus whatever else they want to find/put in – and collectively Does Something Awesome For The World with it. Donate it to charity. Use it to fund an event for something that they care about (buy pizza for an after-school tutoring program and then show up on that day and help ourselves).
Obviously less corny names must be found for these things. Suggestions welcome. The design rationale behind is that, as I grow up, I want to always:
Get paid to do what I love and dream about
Learn how to give – and give well and effectively, where it will have the highest-leverage impact
When I was trying to get myself used to (what I would previously have considered) “dissonant harmonies,” I was listening to a lot of Thelonious Monk. Now that I’m working on the fluidity of my scales and arpeggios, I’m listening to Art Tatum. Who is mildly terrifying to hear in the “Great Master Has Just Displaced Ten Thousand Enemies Without Breaking Into Sweat” way. Incredible technical runs that sweep complexity across the keyboard, executed with clarity and evenness and a calm, breezily effortless mezzoforte.
He makes it sound easy. He makes it look easy – of course your hands just kind of land like that when you casually swing your elbow out, traipsing over flat thirteenths on the way. And then you think about what you would have to do to play the same, and break out in a cold sweat. To compare, here’s Tatum playing a rendition of Dvorak’s Humoresque with utter calm, and a pretty darn good guy playing the same.
In the meantime, I’m laboriously picking out fingerings for each scale and chord and piece I play. There’s an interesting vector notation system I may try, but I really think the thing I need most is just practice.
Via Fafner’s blog. As my hands continue to improve, I’m going back through emails and comments and having fun seeing what I’ve missed.
I never thought of Bach as a pedagogical designer before – it was always “just music” to me, and it wasn’t until about 3 weeks ago while browsing through a music shop and reading the preface of a book of his 2 and 3 part inventions that I learned he actually designed some of his pieces to teach students things (…such as how to play pieces with multiple voices).
HOW DID I MISS THIS?
I think I’m going to appreciate playing piano pieces more now. It’s this wonderfully monotonically increasing thing (monotonically increasing things* rock.)
*some of them, anyway. Stuff like “tumor size” or “number of civilians killed in conflict” are numbers I would rather keep at zero.
