Author: Andrew Huey
Hello Kitty
My continuing, unexplainable, desire to acquire oddball Hello Kitty items continues unabated. However, I am still successfully restraining myself. I will NOT buy Hello Kitty toilet paper. Really. Unless I see it for sale at San Diego or something.
Boondocks
The Boondocks has been running strips over the last few days comparing the presidential candidates to various superheroes and villains. Today’s strip is particularly good — George Bush as the Joker!
Hello Kitty Pez
I just saw these on eBay. OK, I’m not actually going to buy them, but I’m really tempted.
Non-obvious tech tip of the day
Downloading quotes for a preferred stock into Quicken:
“Edit the symbol name in Quicken by removing the space, the P, and the R, and replacing them with a hyphen (-). “
Oh yeah, I would have eventually figured that out on my own. The P and the R! Of course! And here I was thinking I could just type in the ticker symbol as-is, off Quicken’s own friggin’ web site! What was I thinking?
big picture
I was just looking back on some financial stuff for the last year. It seems I often forget to look at the big picture with this stuff, instead getting caught up in the details. One mutual fund that I have in my IRA has been a bit of a dud since the market went south in 2000/2001. I was gratified to see that it had gone up from about $25 to $35 over the course of the last year. Then, I zoomed back a bit more, and remembered that I bought it at around $40 back in the nineties, and that it had hit a high of about $100 before the crash. Oh well, maybe it’ll get back to $40 before I retire, so it won’t be a net loss.
movies
I’ve read a bunch of top 10 lists from various movie reviewers recently, ranking the best movies of the year. I tried coming up with my own list, but I could only think of 5 really good movies. Not that anyone cares, but here it is:
- Millennium Actress
- Triplets of Belleville
- Finding Nemo
- A Mighty Wind
- LoTR: Return of the King
Phish
livephish.com | 12/30/03 American Airlines Arena, Miami, FL — Phish + George Clinton = phunk?
Python
I had to learn Python this week for a little project at work. (OK, I guess I didn’t have to learn Python, but it seemed like the best tool for the job.) Just for reference, here are some key sites, if you’re going to try to pick up Python:
- Main Python site: http://www.python.org/
- wxPython – a GUI toolkit for Python: http://www.wxpython.org/
- py2exe – a tool to turn Python programs into Windows EXEs: http://py2exe.sourceforge.net/
I’ve also found that the Python 2.1 Bible is a decent book to get started with.
coffee
My coffee maker died this week, after about 15 years of daily use. Assuming Krups still makes good stuff, I suppose I can justify the cost of this thing. While I’m waiting for it to show up, I can still make espresso with the old machine, so I should be able to get myself out of bed and off to work without too much grief until then!