The Net Monkey

This blog has sadly lost it’s relevance to me. Why? To be honest, I don’t think it’s worth a lot of my time to update it.

Increasingly, I spend time on Twitter and Facebook, leaving little purpose to anything that is posted here on the blog. Why post that awesome YouTube video here when I get a much greater audience on social media sites? And worrying about cross-posting is just a waste of time.

With that being said, I’m just stating what I have been practicing for some time now: this blog is pretty much dead. I will keep it up and maintain it for the sake of posterity, for myself, really.

I also have little interest in keeping this blog as an aggregator, of sorts, for the things that I do elsewhere. I find that I prefer to keep most of my social media activity as private as possible, which is why I keep my Twitter and Facebook feeds locked down. Having such information easily available here is a bit scary to me now.

As of right now, all references to my FriendFeed account are removed, and the stream itself has been made private. I’ve also removed the sidebar widget showing my recent Twitter posts, and the link allowing people to send me an email (which was never used anyway).

On the flip side, I’m keeping links to my Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm accounts. I’m not concerned with the information posted on those sites, and I have the ability to make items as private as necessary, in the event I need to do so.

For the time being, consider this my last post until otherwise noted, but some day I may revive this thing, if I ever decide that I have something worth sharing with the world. Maybe some day I’ll start a blog dealing with email infrastructure? I don’t know; it could happen.

Well, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

My trip to London, Brighton, and Edinburgh was a total blast. After coming back to work this week, I can tell that I really, really needed the time off to deflate.

For those of you interested in some pictures, here you go.

It’s that time of year again when I gallivant off to Europe. I’m going to be spending about 10 days in the United Kingdom, mostly in London, but with a few side trips to Brighton and Edinburgh. I’m stoked! Bye!

I’m heading up to Chicago for the weekend.  I’m going to see Ladytron and The Faint at The Metro tomorrow night and then plan to spend the rest of the weekend hanging out with my friend Shane.  It ought to be a bitchin’ time.

I’ve recently come to the realization that the pretense of being a Quicken user is just a waste of time.  I haven’t updated anything in it for months; it’s tedious and just an overall pain in the ass.

Instead, I’ve been actively using Mint.com.  It’s freakin’ awesome!  It’s able to connect up all of my important accounts: checking, online savings, auto loan, 401k, student loans, etc.  They’ll even let you track the value of your important assets like your car and home.

There are two exceptions, unfortunately: I’m not able to track my two Health Savings Accounts.  It’s not a big deal, really, because I rarely use either account, but it’s worth nothing that they’re supposed to contribute to my overall net worth.

So, why do I like Mint.com so much?  Here are some of my reasons.

• Mint.com automatically pulls data from many more sources than Quicken 2009, without me having to go to the financial institution’s web site and download the data myself for importation into Quicken.
• It’s much, much, much simpler to use.  It provides my net worth and let’s me see how I’m spending my money with pretty graphs and stuff.
• Mint.com has an iPhone application, allowing me to see my current balances and transactions from anywhere at any time.  This is huge.
• It’s free, for now, but I would definitely pay for it.

It’s really a good financial tool for those of us who are too lazy to dick around with Quicken, and the ability to check my accounts on my mobile device is a really big deal for me, especially when I’m traveling.

So, with all that being said, I don’t intent on buying another version of Quicken again.