I woke up this morning to check my email and found a very exciting update from Google. I’ll be attending Google I/O, which I was already very excited about. Google arranged for my favorite band to entertain at the reception after the first day: Flight of the Conchords. How the Conchords could fit this into their schedule is a mystery, I wonder how many people at Google are die-hard FOTC fans.

Lisa and her family brought over a cleverly created spam manger or spanger complete with a crocodile & baby cheesus wrapped in lefse. Its great.

The future of personal finance software will be online. I regularly use buxfer to keep track of shared expenses with my roommates and friends. Often we’ll share groceries or meals and its easy for one person to pay the whole bill, then enter the transaction online later and split it evenly (or unevenly) among the participants. This is a lot less messy than everyone getting out their wallets to see who can make change then everyone accounting for their share of tax & tip. Its a bit fairer than alternating payers, as it doesn’t matter if you go to a spendy restaurant one night and a cheap one the next.

Buxfer recently added the ability to track your shared payments by account and to import transactions from a very limited set of banks. This expands buxfer from just a shared payment application to a personal finance tracking application. This space is filling rapidly. Mint.com recently won the techcrunch 40 competing against 39 other tech startups. Wesabe and Geezeo are similar applications, although mint.com has the cleanest interface.

I’ve used quicken to track my finances since starting college (and have the graph showing the inverse relationship between net worth and education to prove it). I am still using it but I’m ready to jump ship once there is a viable online application that can download info for all of my accounts and track stocks & loans. Right now, mint and wesabe do not provide the loan & stock tracking I’d like but most importantly, neither integrates properly with my checking account at Mechanics Bank.

The last thing I want is what they currently offer on the front page of their site: a box of software. I can’t remotely manage my finances using quicken nor can I use any computer except for the one on which it is installed. I also get the responsibility of dealing with backups and updates.

It seems to me that if Intuit wanted to stay relevant, they would either create a competitor to these finance startups or acquire one. They certainly have the widespread brand recognition to attract non-early-adopter users to the service and also already have established relationships with most financial institutions in terms of syncing transactions. Given the state of quickbooks online which requires Windows AND Internet Explorer, I’d imagine that an aquisition might be the more effective route.

Geezeo added the ability to track investments and loans this week, so I’ll have to check that out. I love the concept behind buxfer and it would be great to be able to use one application to track my personal finances and shared expenses. They have a ways to go until they’ve got something to compete with mint, but at the rate they have been adding features it may not be long.

Its only a matter of time until I can reduce the commercial software count on my computer.

Not wanting to be the last of my friends to cancel their myspace accounts, I pulled the plug today. (Preston did it the day before, but hasn’t written about it yet). I realized that I rarely logged in, most of the messages I got were spam and not very many of my friends were on myspace. Most of the people who were my friends on myspace were also on facebook and were much more active.

Myspace is difficult to navigate, full of irrelevant ads and lacks most of the features of facebook. It won’t be something I miss.

I graduated this month. My parents & grandmother came out and went to three different ceremonies: Berkeley department of City & Regional Planning, Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and Berkeley College of Engineering. I actually had the wrong color hood at the engineering ceremony, it was supposed to be gold but I was given Orange by Jostens. They really don’t know whats going on when it comes to distributing graduation stuff.

See pictures by Preston Theler.

Old School Fly Ride

Features:

•A PA System for talking to people outside and the ability to turn on a siren, ice-cream truck music, or several animal sounds.

•Forward and backward facing fog lights for illuminating the areas in front and behind.

•A Thule Roof Rack with Fairing

•Off road lights mounted to the roof rack

•4×4 Taurus Off-Road custom made decals on sides and back (from a friend with a hookup in the automotive signage industry)

•The turn signals on a relay with the fog lights to coordinate blinking with the appropriate direction.

•17 red clearance lights, relayed to the interior lights, mounted under the seats to make the interior glow.

•Red bulbs in all interior light fixtures

•Two 12″ Rockford Fosgate Punch XLC subwoofers in the trunk powered by a 400 Watt Rockford Fosgate Amp.

•CD Player.

•Gold distribution blocks mounted on the passenger side for fuses and ground.

•A light up red switch panel below the stereo to control lighting.

•Car Bra.

Continue Reading…

I associate colors with letters and numbers. I have done this as early as I can remember but I did not learn that it was a recognized neurological condition until recently. Below you can see the alphabet the way I view it along with various numbers and punctuation. If you are interested in learning more, visit some of the links at the bottom, or follow the synesthesia webring link to other sites.

Synesthesia is estimated to effect up to three percent of the population. Continue Reading…