Goodbye old friend (Quicken)

Back in April when there was a lot of talk about Mac OS X Lion coming out and it not supporting Rosetta. As I relied on Quicken for my accounting and have been using it for almost 20 years, I decided to start looking for a replacement sooner rather than being forced to make a decision when Lion came out. Intuit was pretty quiet about what was happening with Quicken and considering the last real Quicken version was Quicken 2007 (Quicken Essentials could only give me a snapshot of my investments and not track them), I didn't have high hopes for an Intel native version of Quicken coming out for Lion.

So I looked at all the options and settled on iBank 4. The interface was pretty and pretty much imported my 20 years of Quicken data. I've been told that there are former Quicken people working on iBank, so that gave me a little more reassurance that they know what they're doing. There are a number of things to get used to in iBank, but that's expected as I can't unlearn something after 20 years!

Now that I'm fully in Lion mode, I had to bid a fond careful to my old friend, Quicken. Quicken helped me budget my way through college, track all my expenses, keep my accounts balanced and reconciled, and gave me a good picture of where I stand financially. However, it is time to move on and for all the other ex-Quicken or soon to be ex-Quicken users, make the leap now to something else as it will make going to Lion much easier.

Looking for beta testers - iPad movie app

Have you tried to edit video in iMovie on the iPad and found your video doesn't appear?

Do you want to take just your iPad on vacation, shoot videos with your compact digital camera and edit a video before you return home without a desktop computer?

If you answered yes to either question, then do I have an app for you.

If you have an iPad 2, iMovie for iOS, a compact digital camera such as the Sony DSC-WX9 and some time to test an app, let me know. I'll need your devices UDID and I can sign you up!

The Art of Googling

Several years ago, I wrote about how librarians will become experts in web searching. While I still believe that this is true, there is no reason that everyone can't become masters at getting good search results. Lately, I've noticed that the ability of people to effectively search using a search engine (my engine of choice is Google) is quite limited and if people learned how to search better, it would really help them.

Anyone can enter words into a search engine, it takes some skill to figure out which words are going to produce the best results in the shortest amount of time, hence "the art of Googling". If you enter too few words or too many words, the results will either be non-existent or provide too many that the results are useless. Even if you enter the right number of words, you have to know which words will get good results.

I seem to have a knack for searching as I can get results quite quickly. Maybe there should be a high school or college class in searching. If more people could search by themselves, us tech savvy people would have to answer far fewer questions that we consider below our pay grade!

Effectiveness of stop signs

The question for today is "are stop signs effective?". I've been running along the same route for 5.5 years and either I've been noticing people failing to stop at the stop sign more or people just care less. At this particular intersection that is a 4 way stop, a small number of people actually slow down and stop, some slow down and continue, and the remainder simply just blow through the stop sign.

On my run today, I saw a teenager not bother to slow down and make a left turn at this intersection. He didn't seem to care that there was a stop sign. This intersection is getting more and more dangerous for me as I have no idea if people will stop. I decided to stop for a minute on my way back and take a video of a car running the stop sign. I didn't have to wait long for this to happen; maybe 15 seconds.

[quicktime width="568" height="336"]https://blog.gruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/IMG_0563.mov[/quicktime]
How can this intersection be made safer? Does this happen to all 4 way stops where no one is around to notice? Maybe steal spikes that puncture tires can be made to come up if people fail to stop.