Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

I was just typing up an email, and noticed that I looked down at the keyboard to find the delete key. I asked myself why, and then looked at the keyboards around me. Home, End, Delete, Insert, page up and page down are all grouped together, but on every keyboard I use, they're in a different configuration.

My Dell keyboard at work is:

Home PgUp
End PgDn
Delete Insert

My Thinkpad:

Insert Home PgUp
Delete End PgDwn

My new keyboard at home:

Home End
Insert PgUp
Delete PgDwn

All three configurations make sense (especially the Thinkpad, which has an additional complexity of space issues), but it seems that at least on the desktop, there should be a standard.

I've been trying to get a good Outlook filter to determine internal from external mail. You'd almost think this is a standard request, but it's actually pretty difficult, especially at a large organization like Intel. After some time trying to figure it out and following some bad advice from Microsoft, I ran across Ray Jezek's Blog : Outlook Rules with Exchange.

The idea is fairly sound, but alas, does not work at Intel, where we have many Exchange servers. When a message moves from one server to another, the message gets Internet headers, so the idea of filtering a message header for the word "Received" doesn't work.

I tried other variations on this theme, though, and finally came up with the solution. My rule now matches any message with a message header containing the text of one of the servers listed in Intel.com's MX records. Internally, our mail will not use one of these hosts, so that's the only sure-fire way to catch external, and only external email that I've found. I suppose if the sender listed the IP address of the mail host my rule would fail, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. ;-)

The other day I had a sudden and mysterious slowdown in compile times within Visual Studio. When I didn't see an associated CPU spike during the compile, I increased the verbosity of the compiler and checked the output, only to see it pausing at a file copy.

Here I had added my project's SQL Express database to a library directory rather than the web site, so studio dutifully copied the database over. All this was fine, except that during development, I bulk loaded a ton of data, and the file was now about 240MB.

Note to self...don't copy 240MB database files as part of your compile. ;-)

So I'm now giving Google Reader a try, for the following reasons:

1. I am going on an extended, paid leave from Intel shortly, and will likely not be using my notebook much
2. As a result of #1, I want to be able to read my feeds anywhere
   
3. I believe Outlook RSS is contributing heavily to random slowdowns
4. Outlook RSS is certainly helping Outlook slam my hard disk (this is a problem in Outlook 2003, seems to have gotten worse in 2007, and is even crazier with several RSS feeds)
5. I don't see duplicate posts in Google reader the way I was in Outlook. In Outlook it once got so bad that my RSS feeds were consuming more than 250MB of storage in my account, mostly due to one 2MB post that it refused to detect as a duplicate.

I tried Google Reader a while ago and wasn't a big fan of the interface, but now that I'm using it a bit more I like it. A big problem for me is that it defaults to expanded view, which I still don't like. List view is much better, as I rarely read the items (the trend tools tell me that over the last few days I've read 10% of posts in even my favorite feeds).

Another problem is offline usage, which was somewhat fixed by Google Gears. I don't like the fact that I have to manually click the icon to download data (apparently this is supported in gears, but not implemented by the reader developers...fix this!). I suppose I'll have to deal with this, but it's one more thing to remember if I'm taking a flight.

On the flip side, I love the fact that I can click on a folder and see all the posts for all the feeds underneath it. I couldn't do this in Outlook (and only sort of could in some other products I tried), and resorted to using Yahoo! Pipes to combine a bunch of feeds that weren't updated frequently. The problem is that I couldn't clearly see the source of the post anymore, since pipes renames the source to the name of your pipe, and I couldn't figure out how to undo this.

The folder aggregation feature allows me the ability to undo the work in Pipes, and now I can see the sources. Rarely do I click on an actual feed...mostly I walk through folder by folder and mark all as read unless something catches my eye. Oh - and the keyboard shortcuts are nice too. Eventually I'm sure I'll want search capabilities, but hopefully that will be done before I actually need it. In the meantime, Google can work on the offline issues. ;-)

I've been working on this list for some time, and now I think it's finally near comprehensive. This is the full list of software I install. Software is organized by category, where:

• Basic software gets installed on any machine
• Home software gets installed at home
• Development software gets installed on any machine whenever I need it
• Business software gets installed on my work laptop
• Server software is installed on my home server (expected to be up 24x7)
• Portable software runs directly from my USB key
• Portable - Development software is used for development from my USB key

Make sure to check out the other sheets in the spreadsheet. They include:

• Resources to find good tools
• Firefox addins (there's no good way I know of to simply install a large number of addins, which would be nice for initial install)
• Configuration Options, which describes how I configure the various OS and application options (it would be nice to optimize this). I don't have that list built yet, but hope to soon.
• Software I've used in the past and have removed for one reason or another. Interesting trip down memory lane for me, but I thought keeping the list would be good for others who might want to avoid some of the items on that list

I've also setup (but not tested) two InstallPad files to help streamline install of several of these applications. These are items from my Basic category and items from the Home and Development categories.

I'll keep the list updated and current, and when I do an initial install, I'm sure the Installpad files will get tested and the list updated with stuff I've missed. Here's the URL again for reference:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p9VpnOc6eSLLWVL_yUTWrFg

I can't believe it took this long to find out this little factoid about myself. I was on the phone today with a customer service agent, and I announced my name as I always do: "Hi, this is Emil Lerch. I'm calling because...".

In this case, however, after I described the issue I was having, the customer service agent said, "I'm sorry, did you say you were with Merrill Lynch?". Thinking about it, I can totally see how under a bit of distortion, my name does sound a bit like a giant brokerage firm. Who knew?

Lately I've been questioning the value of Quicken, since the integration with financial institutions is finicky and getting everything updated appropriately takes a really long time. Typically, I use Quicken for 3 purposes:

1. See our net worth
2. See how we spend our money
3. Seed tax software with donations and such

A distant 4th is to see how our investments are allocated and determine if any rebalancing needs to be done, but the last time I did that, we just put everything into a spreadsheet.

In order to accomplish these goals, usually once or twice a year I spend 2-3 days getting everything entered into Quicken and reconciled. I don't really think we're that complex, but with 2 Roth IRAs, 1 regular IRA, and investment account, 2 individual bank accounts, 1 joint bank account, 2 401(k) accounts plus 2 profit sharing accounts, 2 stock option accounts, 1 529, 2 credit cards, 1 investment account for Kathryn and a bank account for Kathryn, we have over 18 accounts (there are a few others...I thought one time I counted 23, but since then there's been some consolidation), Introduce dependencies between accounts (e.g. you should reconcile credit cards before the bank statements), and things get really messy.

All this leads to today, where I thought there must be a way to accomplish my goals faster...I'm a data packrat and it rubs me the wrong way to abandon the long history of data I have in Quicken, but I really don't use all that stuff. I did some Google searching and ran across this marketplace interview that describes a website called Yodlee MoneyCentral.

This site is way, way cool. I set up most of my accounts in about an hour, mostly because I already have my account login information stored and synced up in KeePass Password Safe. It keeps track of all my financials (mortgage, house pricing manual or through Zillow, credit cards, bank accounts, investments) as well as rewards accounts (airlines and such), and provides automatic transaction download and categorization.

Other than entering in usernames/passwords (yes, this can be a leap of faith), the site does the rest, and seconds after setting up the accounts you can see how your spending is categorized, your total net worth, portfolio positions, etc. Now that (almost) everything is setup, I'm interested to see the charting available for history...it lets you see how your investments, transactions, and net worth change over time, but it can't get a large amount of historical data on initial setup (I suspect this is due to the limitations of the financial institutions more than Yodlee). It also provides email alerts for bills, balances (high or low), large transactions, securities expiration, airline mile postings/expirations, etc.

So, the information for this month is available now, after a one-time cost of about an hour. Had I tried to see total net worth in Quicken today, I couldn't, because it would take me about 16 man-hours to bring it up to date. There is still an account or two that it was having problems with (I think this is due to recent web site changes at TD Ameritrade), but already I know my net worth +/- 10 percent (which would be reduced to 0 if I wanted to login to TD Ameritrade and add the summary amount to the total on Yodlee).

Even better, the figure it reported was more than I thought. ;-)

So I've been running this machine now for the past few weeks, and so far, it seems great. Most parts were purchased from newegg, and here's the final list of parts purchased. In all cases, I went for maximizing price/performance ratio. The case in particular was a great win...I was amazed how good it was for the price.

Here's the bill of materials (note that the CPU was purchased from Intel rather than newegg, and parts that no longer are sold by newegg don't show up on the wishlist anymore): http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=5160671

Here's a quick rundown:

• Rosewill R103A case: $25
• MSI NX8600GT Video card: $112. This is a great card, but actually my only real mistake. When I ordered the motherboard, I went with a 965P chipset, thinking it had integrated graphics. It did not. The downside was a little extra cost. The upside is that while I'm not a gamer, this video card will support gaming graphics, and has dual monitor support as well.
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard: $120. Looks like they aren't making it anymore, but it's pretty good
• 4GB (2 modules of 2GB each) GSkill memory: $244. This is designed for dual channel operation, and one of the places I loaded up, as I run multiple virtual machines on the computer. The project actually consolidated 2 machines onto 1...I'm probably one of the few consumers in the world doing server consolidation in their house.
• Scythe CPU cooler: $50. Not needed, as the CPU comes with its own fan, but this is quiet. Between the fanless video card, quieter hard drive and this cooler, I can just barely hear the machine.
• Western Digital 120GB SATA hard drive (OEM): $50. Again, not exactly needed as I had a hard drive in the other machine, but quiet and fast.
• Core 2 Duo E6600: $123 with Intel employee discount. Here I really saved some money, but had I not gotten the discount, I would have gotten the E4500, giving me VT for $146.

Reused from one of the old machines was a DVD drive (and keyboard/mouse/monitor), but had I needed to purchase, I would have gotten the Lite-on LH-20A1L-05 SATA burner with lightscribe support for $36.

This gives me a very nice machine at $724 total cost. Had I not made my motherboard error, it would have cost $612, and if I were doing this for someone more normal, it would have cost $526 by adding the DVD burner and removing 2GB of RAM.

Interestingly, Windows Vista reports an experience of 5.2, due to the processor...

I find that internal sites and "logistics" sites (e.g. travel) tend to have a crazy number of popups for no reason. Seriously, don't the people at these companies use the Internet? There is a place an time for a popup, but these guys go nuts. Here's the popup count for a typical "view my claim status" on Intel's (outsourced) health benefits site:

• Go to the home page. Browser reports that a popup was blocked. Whatever this is, it's irrelevant to what I'm doing. I've never viewed this popup.
• Click login. A popup window appears to collect my user/password. The original screen is not used again.
• Click "manage my account". Another popup. At least in this case, the old screen is marginally useful, as I could go back to it to get to another transaction (like changing my address vs. managing claims, where I am now). Of course, I've never gone in to do more than one thing at a time, so leaving this window is useless to me. I'm now at 3 pages open and haven't even gotten to my claim yet.
• Click my account (flexible spending account), and claims, without popups. Awesome. These are 2 out of 4 mouse clicks on the site that did not generate popups.
• Click the claim to see details. Another (blocked) popup, but this one actually is important and the only popup that I might make an argument to keep, as it is intended for very detailed information, has a 2D barcode and is generally printed out, then closed.

For those that are counting, I now have 4 windows open, and generally, I will never do anything except print the last window and close everything. My absolute favorite has to be the popup on clicking the login button...there are more things wrong with that than I can even count.

A little bit of randomness. We had an air conditioning tune up yesterday. Basically, they just checked everything out...no actual maintenance was required). During the check-out, they asked if I had a bunch of vents closed. I had been closing the downstairs vents to force the cold air upstairs in the summer. However, the idea backfired somewhat, as this just created back pressure that kept the cold air sitting in the vents rather than coming through the house.

The technician told me never to close more than 1 or 2 vents in the house at any given time. Another AC tip - to reduce the temperature difference between upstairs and downstairs (without zoning), set the fan to "ON" rather than auto. The AC compressor won't kick in unless the temp gets to high, but leaving the fan on will ensure that the air continues to get circulated throughout the house.