The Armchair Politician

In a few weeks, I’ll be starting graduate-level Computer Science courses at Georgia Tech. Tuition will be a few thousand dollars, plus I’m trying to save up to move into campus housing next semester.

None of this, however, sits well with the fact that I like to spend money.

I make enough at my job so that this doesn’t end up being too much of a problem, but I’m not a very good saver. I need goals, or something to motivate me to put money away. Graduate school is probably as good a reason as any, so I’m giving GnuCash another whirl. This isn’t my first time using it, but I’ve kept up for a month now, so with any luck I’ll be able to stick with it.

Basically, GnuCash is your standard accounting program, similar (I assume) to Quicken, Quickbooks, and the other bevy of personal accounting software. Only, GnuCash is available for Linux.

It’s got a ton of useful features. Standard, of course, is double-entry bookkeeping. When you enter an expense, for example, you tell it that the expense comes from some Asset of yours (i.e., a bank account or wallet) or adds to a liability such as a credit card. This way, any expense you make or income you receive is automatically synchronized between the two places. It becomes trivial to then monitor your expenses and income while still keeping accurate records of your financial situation.

More cool things include the ability to automagically track stock and mutual fund prices over the Internet, calculate tax liabilities (although admittedly, I still have to actually set this up…), present charts, graphs, and diagrams for things like expenses and net worth, plan budgets, reconcile your accounts, and so on.

Already I’m noticing places where I can tighten my belt a little, like eating out. At work, I go out for lunch almost daily, which adds up to a few hundred every month. Cutting back on that should significantly increase the amount I can save. I’m also rather prone to impulse purchases — mostly books and games. I don’t think I’ll stop with that, but at least I can monitor how much I’m spending on these types of purchases, and ensure it doesn’t go over a reasonable amount. It’ll also hopefully encourage me to hold off on some borderline impulse buys, if I see I’m hemmorhaging money.

At any rate, by using it I’ve already been saving up a lot more money than I had previously. This, incidentally, saved my ass when I got a notice from the IRS that I’d miscalculated on my taxes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out in which direction.

I’ve moved to WordPress. Hopefully, all of the permalinks will stay the same.

We had to put Nero to sleep today. I don’t want to go into details, but it’s for the better–she’s been in a lot of pain for the past few days, and it had to be done. I’m going to miss her like hell; I loved her more than words can describe.

I’ll miss you, girl.

I’m planning on going to the Brick Store Pub this Saturday evening with Jordi and as many friends as I can possibly muster. Anyone who wants to go drink excellent beer paired with great food that compliments it perfectly should let me know.

This is the best pub in the state of Georgia, and it’s just inside the perimeter in Decatur. Trust me, you want to come.

My email password expired, and they’ve put some new restrictions on where you can access the shell accounts from.

Oops. I wake up this morning at around 2, and figure I’ll try and get some work done. Lo and behold, my email account and several shell accounts seem to have forgotten that I exist. So, it looks like I’ll be unemployed four or five hours from now. Guess I’ll find out why in the morning.

Jordi, is PayPartners still looking for another coder or potentially a sysadmin?

I’ve been playing poker online for awhile. Still in the red, but I’m coming back quite nicely as of late. Anyway, I had just about the funniest thing ever happen in a game tonight. Long story short, I bluff early on and get called on it; however, I get lucky as hell and end up winning the hand anyway. Two of the players at the table taunt me for about five or ten minutes, leaning hard on me every pot I’m in. And then I take both of them out, winning about $100 of their money in the process.
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I have to say, I really enjoy the Budweiser “This is Budweiser. This is beer.” ad campaign. The concept that their brew is so bad that they actually need to convince people it’s beer is just too funny to me. “This is beer! We swear! No, seriously!”

Gwahahaha.

This post brought to you by the Beer Snobs of America.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry, but I had some recent inspiration. I don’t think it’s finishedyet –I’m unhappy with some of the pacing, and I’d like to make it longer. The current incarnation is pasted below.
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I’ve been reading some of Paul Graham’s previous essays, and came across one that really resonated with me. In “Inequality and Risk”, Paul argues that trying to eliminate economic equality (within a singular country, not globally) automatically implies reducing overall economic growth.

An analogy I found particularly resonant is that economic inequality is akin to the potential energy used to power a water mill. To make a similar analogy, the dispartiy betwene rich and poor is much like electric potential: without any, the circuit does nothing. If we were to have economic equality, there would be no difference in pressure to drive economic growth at all. And, of course, it’s a proportional relation; to the degree that we limit economic inequality, we inherently limit the speed of our growth.

Interesting stuff, especially for a Libertarian like me.