$$$

My NetBank checking account finally creaked open, a week after I mailed them some checks. The monkey market (ook ook) account I opened at the start of the month makes a shiny quarter's worth of interest daily, which is actually more interest than I've ever earned from a bank account before, so I'm not complaining about that.

Clearly, though, I'll need to get some direct deposit action going on. Mail slow. I plan on aiming this conduit at the money market account, liquidating chunks into the checking account as needed. And once I've settled all this banking hoo-hah (including shutting down all my other accounts, including some I still have open way back in Waterville), it's time to think about longer-term investments. Maybe start a CD, and open a Roth or something for the far-flung stuff.

This is all, of course, just to fill up my financial headspace so that I feel less self-conscious about not getting my taxes done. I really have to do them this year, too, since I'm doubtless owing the gubmint quite a bit, thanks to the non-withheld freelance and royalty checks I collected last year, every last penny of which I spent, since it was all the money I had at the time. (Remember those days? Yipe.) I have new and exciting tax forms to puzzle over, as a result; no 1040-EZ this year. Hmm.

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I am obligated to write that Mac OS X Nutshell PR column this weekend. Should be fun.

Prog News

Bought a year of full LJ access recently, and as of today I've started to take advantage of it, by subscribing to three points' worth or so of RSS feeds (free accounts have only 0.99 points to spend). I did this after I started to set up a Mac OS X RSS-reading application with all my LJ friends, but then realized that only public posts are RSS-shared. OK then... I might as well use LJ Friends page as my front-end for everything if I'm going to keep checking it all the time anyway.

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I have finally divorced my LJ Friends list from my list of people who are my friends. Which is to say, I have created an LJ Group, cleverly called "Pals", into which I have grandfathered a snapshot of my Friends list as of right now. (iJournal has a very nice interface for doing exactly this thing quite quickly. Yay iJournal.) I probably won't make any more Friends-locked posts, and make Pals-locked ones instead. This will let me add and drop "Friends" -- which is to say, people and feeds whose writing I find interesting (or no longer interesting, in the case of dropping) -- without worrying about boosting/busting the other person's ego, or letting a person I might not necessarily know well read my less-than-public posts. Excellent

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New icon is a detail from a photograph taken in Bangor, Maine three years ago.

(no subject)

Finally got a couple of books mailed out. Lots more to go, but it's good to get a start. (I still haven't opened one of the boxes, and find myself hoping that it actually does contain the MOSXiaNs I assume, and not 10 preview copies of another title, or something.)

Also emailed a pen-pal with whom I hadn't corresponded in a couple of years. The last time she wrote, she had just enlisted in the U.S. Navy. This was about six months before 9/11. Since then, I would think of her every so often, usually triggered by a news report regarding the nation's shifting military stance: Say, now, I know someone in the military, uh... But then something, the Book or something like it, would interpose itself in my mental view-tunnel before I could act on the heartbreakingly obvious follow-through of dropping her a line. I feel very bad about this, and expressed as much in my letter, trying not to sound too sappy. I hope I can rekindle this friendship, though I'll understand if she doesn't have a lot of time for letter-writing these days.

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I wonder if the Navy is the nerdiest branch of the U.S. armed forces. I seem to know several geek-ethnic people with Navy service records.

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Read a short story last night whose central plot element involved evil aliens modifying the sun so that it aged at a supernatural rate, and would go red giant, swallowing up the earth, in less than a half-century. I found this concept so uniquely horrifying/fascinating that it was all I dreamed about that night, over and over, and felt sweet relief when I woke up out of that terrible dreamscape. Twice: the first time I woke up, I quickly fell asleep again, so that I dreamed that my dream-self had woken up from a dream he was having, only to find himself still in the nightmare. Pretty intense.

(no subject)

Hum. The new version of iJournal, while it looks better than its predecessor and has some nice features, no longer seems to save your text should you prematurely quit, which I do a lot, since the mischief-loving fingertips of your super-rocket Mac expert friend J enjoy typing Command-Q when he is thinking "Command-C". This makes me sad.

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Didn't expect LJ to allow comments on syndicated posts, but there they are. I skip the comments attached to comic strips, because I can stomach only so many OMG LOLOLs, but seeing comments on dictionary_wotd entries amuses me, just in principle.