I have an old tube-based clock (analog!) radio at my mom's house. Back in the 70's my brother Jeff souped it up so that even on halfway volume it's earsplitting.

It only got AM stations, so I would set it to an annoying station and it was on the other side of the room. I set it a little less than halfway on the volume.

It didn't take long for my brain to be aware that the click when that radio came on gave me less than a minute as the tubes warmed up.

Most days I got up and across the room before it got to plaid.

Hmm, yeah, the one I have (which is an iHome knockoff) gets louder and louder until the walls shake, not "to the volume I set". Hmmm.

Firefox News:

Today was supposed to be the official Firefox 3 Beta 4 Test Day. It was originally scheduled to end at 5:00 pm PST this afternoon (8:00 pm EST), though according to an apparent update Mozilla's schedule, the Test Day festivities have been extended until 6:00 am EST (3:00 am PST). An amendment to the Test Day page currently reads, "(We will use the Release Candidate for testing)!"

Do we have any Quickbooks fans in the house?

I really, really need to get a handle on my financial life. So, I've been logging things and crunching numbers and being kind of obsessed.

I need a process for keeping track of incomings and outgoings in some sort of rational way.

My fear about quickbooks (which I appear to have on my new computer) is that there are classes and consultants making a fine living out of its complexity. Is it really that hard? And is there an alternative?

Excel! It's what I use. Well, OpenOffice.

Kevin, I have an excel spreadsheet for collecting and summing checks, but I was hoping for a bit more functionality...like keeping track of expenses vs. income...maybe invoice production. etc.

QuickBooks does not have to be complex, bonny. I use it to track my brother's store finances and we keep it pretty simple. THe Help files are actually pretty helpful, I have found.

Another option if you just want to try things out is GnuCash, an open source double-entry system. It's got good help files, and it's aimed at personal finance and small businesses.

Have you used it, DX? Where did you hear about it?

I will look at both. I like that gnucash has customer tracking and invoices but I'll check out the quickbooks help files too.

I used to have a simple filemaker pro based tracking system but the maker went out of business...well to be honest, I stopped paying attention long before that, now I'm a bit intimidated by the options.