Question – inspired by , as well as by Quicken boning my internet downloads again: What software / system do you use to track your finances? Do you hate it as much as I hate Quicken 2007 for Mac?

I’ve got perhaps the best overall personal financial tracking system of anyone that I know. A year ago, it was truly simple. All my internet downloads from my various banks and credit cards worked with Quicken. I would spend half an hour or so a week approving and tagging expenses, and generally making sure that I wasn’t getting ripped off. Once a month, I updated my simple spreadsheet that was able to answer all the questions that Quicken reports couldn’t.

Now, it appears that Quicken 2007 is being allowed to rot in support of some other product from Intuit. At this point *none* of my credit card downloads work right anymore, and the connection with Fidelity is a matter of bitter laughter. My bank still works okay, but I’m doing way too much manual data entry here.

If I’m to be pushed off my current platform, I’m going to look around and see what “modern” personal finance software looks like.

Here are my requirements:

* Gotta run seamlessly on a mac. Sorry, but there is no chance of me running anything like this under Parallels, much less buying a dedicated machine for it.
* Gotta keep my data on my machine. If the internet goes down, or if the software vendor goes bankrupt, I can’t lose my financial records. So, Quicken “all on the web, all the time” solution doesn’t look that great to me. Plus, um, security.
* Gotta automatically download account info from the various banks and credit cards that I use.
* Gotta support categories, subcategories, and split categories for expenses.
* Gotta support monthly expense / income reports by category.

So? What do all you clever and beautiful people use?

I’m totally sold on Montreal. The city appears to be made out of art museums, good restaurants, and cool festivals. For example, this evening we intend to attend a session of the international fireworks competition. Seriously. They have fireworks every Saturday, all summer, like – a half hour show. This one will be sponsored by South Africa.

s conference seems to be going well. It’s one of these 70 – 100 person conferences where they all sit in the same session and talk to each other. At dinner it became clear that they all also know each other personally. These are people who decided that they care about infectious disease in pregnancy – and have written the books on the topic. The young folks at our table agreed that it was both cool and somewhat intimidating to see the authors who they were citing in their talk sitting in the front row.

For my part, I’m fighting with too many projects all at once. I seem to have allowed a few truly crack-brained problems to accumulate on my plate, including:

* A piece of single-author-ware whose author decided that it would be a good idea to write his very own encryption code as part of his copy protection. You download the encrypted source code, and then he emails you an anonymous link to “decrypt.c” along with a password to use if you can get it to build. The rest of the code is just as good.

* A physical to virtual migration that seems to be killing my VM-Ware instance and I’m not sure why

* A piece of cluster software that comes with its very own operating system.

Hoping to kill off a couple of those here at the francophone Starbucks before meeting up with an old friend for a trip to the botanical gardens.

We rode up in the elevator with the coach and several team members from the Toronto football team. They were huge. This is the second time in my life that I’ve looked around and seen nothing but chest at eye level. The first time was when the Russian men’s volleyball team walked around me in an airport.

One of the habits I’ve developed from the martial arts is to constantly be aware of and size up the people around me. Mostly this is to prevent unpleasant surprises and to keep a handle on the best direction to apply the Adidas defense should it become necessary. I looked these guys over … all of them 6 foot 10, huge, and obviously able to outrun me on a sprint, and all I could think was “I got nothin’.”

Still nothing to report. I’m in Montreal for the end of the week, since redmed has a conference to attend, it’s not a long drive, the weather is nice, and I can work from anywhere. So far I’m impressed. Montreal is treating me well. Good food, open air jazz festival, clean hotel with fast network, etc.

Here’s the question: I was reading some random rant about Atlas Shrugged, and the following question came up:

Are there some individuals who, because of their innate talents and productivity, should be given a free pass on the normal rules and regulations we apply to everyone else? I would take this from simple stuff like letting the basic norms of civilized, decent behavior slide, on up to forgiving outright crimes in the interest of advancing the human condition.

Anyone? Does anyone still read LJ, or should I go make a facebook poll?

I find that I’m tired of my last epistle about Merlot being at the top of my blog … but I don’t have much else to say.

I’m very much enjoying my life. I have great friends, great opportunities, incredible luck, and I think it’s a fascinating way to spend existence.

It helps that I have wood stain on my fingertips from working on the door to my new house. I had forgotten how nice it is to have projects.

We put Merlot down this morning, ending her fight with squamous cell cancer of the jaw.

As redmed notes, we had around 55 days from the diagnosis of “days to weeks” in which to say goodbye. Let us not discount the value of having time to say goodbye.

We also got the advantage of a slow, inevitable building to our decision to end her life. At first she was just acting weird and not eating very much. Things picked up slowly – with bloody drool being the least of our worries (even when she drooled on my face one morning while I was asleep). Towards the end, we had gotten used to the blood stains on the carpet and the truly horrifying blood spattered walls of the closet (“cancer cave”) where she would lurk unless we encouraged her to come out and sit with us. She couldn’t eat dry food at all, and we felt awful for giving her nothing but dry food once we realized the state of her jaw. Towards the end, she was getting subcutaneous fluids every morning, pain drugs every third day, antibiotics every week, and eating baby food when she decided to eat. She had dropped from perhaps 12 pounds to just over 8 pounds in under two months.

She carried an oder of rot, and she couldn’t clean herself. Her little paws were matted with blood from trying. I took to bathing her nightly, for which she seemed grateful.

The decision point, for me, was when I saw her gagging on her own tongue. She hadn’t been able to get it in her mouth for a while, and the tip of the tongue was black and chapped. My dad had pointed out that animals can’t complain. “A bird will drop frozen from a branch before it utters a word of complaint,” and so on. Looking at her struggling to swallow, I finally got it. She hadn’t eaten in days. She was going to end her days choking on her cancer – unless I helped.

We both sat with her for a while this morning, then wrapped her in a towel and set out for the car. We stopped to play on the grass outside the apartments for a bit, and she made a token effort to eat grass. Of course, with a broken, swollen, useless jaw and no teeth … it was a bit tricky. Still, there was rolling – belly to the sky – and little feet kneading the air. Once in the car, I finally understood something that my mother said at my grandmother’s funeral: Go slow, hearse driver, go slow on that last ride.

The vets have been unfailingly compassionate this whole time. We got the “hard sell” on putting her down perhaps a month ago … and after that they did their best to care for her gently and according to our wishes. We could have put a feeding tube in her gut … or amputated her jaw … but we were going for palliative care, and that was exactly what we got. All of the techs, and most of the vets, have gotten to know us over the past two months.

We had entertained vague notions of having her die peacefully at home, but it wasn’t going to happen. She was suffering more and more, right there in front of us.

When we arrived and told them what we wanted to do, they immediately put us in a private room. We signed the paperwork and paid – which I thought was a nice touch. Nobody wants to wait around to pay the bill after something like this. Then they took her and set up an IV line, brought her back, and let us sit with her for a bit. Eventually, the vet came in and talked with us, then fed the pink juice into her IV line. I’m in awe of this chemical. As soon as it hit, she stopped purring and just laid her head down. Her little heart stopped almost immediately … though we had to close her eyes for her. We sat for a while more, until the vet came back in and asked if we were ready to say goodbye. We were – and now we’re down to one cat.

She’s been a good companion for 13 years. Merlot joined us only a year into my relationship with redmed. She was always the friendly one with us and guests … welcoming anyone with a free hand to scrub her belly and hold her on their lap.

I don’t know what happens to cats after they die. My philosophy says that if the specks of consciousness that make up the two of us happen to meet again, that we won’t recognize each other – except perhaps by a habitual pattern of kindness. I hope that we did well by her – I hope that she had a good life for a cat. I regret the times that I yelled at her to be quiet … and I wish that I had been able to explain things a bit better to her when she was scared or disturbed at yet another relocation.

While I’m sad, and while I’ve come to loathe the phrase – things are going as well as can be expected.

Thanks for listening.

I was at the vet the other day (tending to cancer cat), and saw something sort of amusing:

There was a woman with a Chihuahua, whose anal glands had just been expressed (the dog, not the woman). She was deep in conversation with the desk staff about how frequently this needs to be done, how to tell when the dog needs it, whether she could do it herself, the fact that it’s her daughters damn dog and she’s not squeezing foulness out of its – what again?

While she was talking, two men brought what appeared to be a small bear through the door. Okay, it was actually a dog – but this monster weighed in at 181lbs. That’s more than *I* weigh. Big dog was limping. They started filling out paperwork for the emergency visit.

Big dog noticed little dog.

Little dog had *totally* seen big dog come through the door, and hadn’t taken his eyes off it since that moment.

Big dog very gently and smoothly, and with an almost kindly expression, shifted around his owner’s back. He then lowered his huge head (which was easily larger than the entire other dog) all the way to the floor, so that he was at eye level with the chihuahua. “Hello? What are you?”

The chihuahua started trembling. Then, in a display of raw bravado to equal any I’ve ever seen, simply turned his back on the big dog. “No, I ignore you.” Tremble.

Eventually the woman noticed what was happening, and with a little yelp she snatched up the precious and put him on the counter. The owners of the big dog were very apologetic.

Everyone else in the waiting room, me included, were grinning from ear to ear. It was cute.

Just read Matt Taibbi’s incendiary rant on Goldman Sachs, after hearing him on NPR yesterday. How wonderfully angry he is! And to hear him saying the same things I’ve been saying for months to years now, but coherently and with independent fact checking … neat!

The article is very much about how Goldman Sachs specializes in riding the leading edge of securities and trading fraud. They seem to have mastered the idea of both making the rules and exploiting them. Convincing the government to bail out AIG (so that AIG could pay off their debts to Goldman) and at the same time allowing Lehman Brothers (Sach’s big competitor) to default. Genius! While that’s all true, I really resonated with something he said on the radio:

When I was somewhat naive about these things, I would hear about big bonuses and profits for bankers and wall street types and assume that meant that, in general, the economy was doing well. That they were some sort of barometer for our national finances as a whole. The reality is this though: Any profits and bonuses shown by the finance houses are money removed from the useful economy. That money does not go to create jobs, to invest in businesses, or anywhere but the least useful place in any economy: Rich people’s pockets.

In the article, he also makes the important distinction that the banking assholes with whom I’ve dined over the years never seem to get: There are companies and people who produce things or provide services to other people or companies … and then there are the fucking parasites. Banks are parasites. Banks and finance houses do provide some valuable services – but they also pull money *out* of the system and they don’t directly *produce* anything. That’s fine and good as long as they make the system more effective as a whole. When the parasite nearly kills the host (as it seems to do every decade or so), it’s time for a purge.

A related point is that when the derivatives market exceeds the size of the *real things* market (oil futures as opposed to oil itself, for example) price fixing, bubbles, and a crash are the inevitable result.

After the endorphins wore off, I settled down into a bit of a funk. Here I am with my 10 years worth of retirement savings, my fresh mortgage, my recently paid off credit cards, and my decent earning potential for the coming couple of decades. I would like to be able to stop working at some point with a reasonable nest egg. I don’t want millions … but I want my house paid off and I want to not fear the idea that I might live well past 100 years old.

What’s a bright, enterprising guy to do when the sharks are busily feeding in the waters of finance?

Well first off, don’t swim with the sharks. Day trading and small time investing are for suckers. I treat that crap like going to vegas and playing blackjack. It’s possible to make a small profit by working very hard and never making mistakes. However, at the end of the day you’ll still have to look yourself in the mirror and realize that you could have spent the day creating something rather than trying to scam the world out of a few bucks. Also, the house always wins in the long run.

Secondly, buy into companies that pay dividends. Invest in companies that use their money to make things or to provide services, and demand dividends. Paper is worthless, Wall Street’s estimates of corporate value are worthless. We all thought we were rich because we owned shares of artificially inflated companies. You know what I want now? I want to do business with companies who will *pay me* for the privilege of holding my money. You know what they call that? It’s a savings account, a money market, or a certificate of deposit. It’s a bond. It’s also investing in power companies. God, I love power companies.

Thirdly, live well within my means. We’re on the way to this – and as of October 1 we’ll be rational again (right now the house and apartment are overlapping and it’s a little crazy).

Finally – to return to the first point: Do not swim with the sharks.

You wanna know how bad off the cat is? I just gave the cat a sponge bath (she hasn’t been able to clean herself very well for a while, and she smells pretty bad) … and she *liked* it. Purring and purring and offering one blood-matted paw after the other to be scrubbed.

Now that’s one bad-off cat.

On the other hand, we are now more than a month after the first time we seriously said our goodbyes and were emotionally ready to put her down. A month of playful, if sometimes gross and bloody, adventure and life.

I hope I’m so lucky.

My brother’s wedding last weekend was absolutely beautiful, and I need to document it in another post. First, though, I want to set pen to paper about our late night adventure with the belligerent drunk.

The wedding was at my dad’s place, which is about 50 acres of farm and forest way out in the middle of nowhere, VA. We were parked maybe a 4 minute walk from the main party tent.