Times Reader

I downloaded the Times Reader (Beta) for Mac a few months ago, when it was first announced. I played with it a few days and then deleted it finding that I preferred reading the email headlines and then surfing around NYTimes.com. But after a recent plane flight when I couldn't get to the website I decided to give Times Reader another look. Here are my thoughts:
- I wish that it scaled better. At the middle-sized font (they let you choose from 3) most articles are divided across 2 pages. But the Reader window is limited to a small portion of my screen. I am sure this is for some reasonable technical reason but it feels clunky almost to the point of annoying.
- Partly because articles are divided a lot of navigation is required -- the keyboard shortcuts help out a lot.
- It doesn't keep track of what has been read and they don't keep stories to a certain date. So I skimmed through the whole paper yesterday and today it is showing me a bunch of the same stories. Maybe I don't really understand how it works. On the 28th I went back to the 26th and found an article whose byline was the 27th??? Anyhow it doesn't give me a feeling that I am in control of my reading experience and that was one of the things that I really hoped to get from this application that NYTimes.com doesn't offer.
- The Most Emailed section is way better than the NYTimes.com version. It includes pictures and short summaries of the article whereas NYTimes.com just shows the headline.
- I don't know if it is Times Reader itself or Silverlight but the application seems to spend a bunch of time with the spinning beach ball. (I guess this might be a function of the app being in beta...)

I'll keep playing with it but as of now I am not sold

Money Management Software

It turns out that I am pretty tired of Quicken. It seems to be a bit buggy and the amount of advertising in it is really annoying. Plus I have been using the Windows version and hear that the Mac version stinks. Even if I wanted to switch there is no good way to convert from Windows to Mac (Intuit provides a tool but basically says "Use at your own risk -- we didn't design these to convert back and forth."). So I am stuck with Quicken for Windows in a Parallels session (which is nice and all but it's slow and clunky).

As a result every few months I think I'll try Wesabe, or Mint, or Yodlee, or Morningstar. But I always back down and then forget most of what I have learned in doing the research. Keep in mind I haven't used any of these sites--this isn't a review--just some notes to myself about what I have learned about each site. So here goes:

Wesabe:

Tim O'Reilly is an investor and backer which makes me like it from the get go. They are crazy about security and data rights -- their philosophy is that you own your own data. They don't take account numbers or user names or anything. Instead of automatic updates of account information it is semi-automatic. They provide uploader tools so that you can download info from your bank to your own computer and then upload it to Wesabe. This means that all they have is a pile of data -- no way to access your accounts.

The focus of the site seems to be on managing spending and saving -- tracking cash flow. They claim to have nifty reports and so forth and let you compare your habits to other people. They can help you by providing a community to work on spending goals (or savings goals).

The big downside is they do nothing to track investments, zip, zilch, nada so they don't really meet my needs.

Mint:

They claim to do both cash flow and investment analysis. You provide account login information when you sign up and then they automatically retrieve transactions from your financial insitutions. The rub here is that they claim they don't store any of this stuff (username, passwords, etc). Which, I guess, is, technically speaking, true because they use yodlee for this (see entry below). But it means that all of your passwords and login info is stored in a single place on the web. They also claim that Mint is "read-only" so nobody could mess with your accounts even if they broke into your mint account. I guess this is also true. But the credintials that are stored by yodlee are the same ones that you use to log in to the banks' websites so again all of your info is out there in one place as best I can figure.

Seems like it might be worth trying if I wasn't paranoid about having all of my username/passwords in the hands of a single website.

Yodlee:
Based on the look of their website they got their start as a financial aggregator not a consumer website. They offer a personal money management page but it does not appear to be their primary business.

You provide yodlee with all of your usernames and passwords and they periodically log in to your financial institutions and get updated account information. They also make some mention of managing money all in one spot so it may be that they can initiate transactions from their website.

Like Mint they claim to show you investment accounts too.

Morningstar:
Focused entirely on investments. They provide no cash flow or budgeting tools. They also provide no tools for automatically updating accounts -- you have to enter all transactions by hand and there doesn't seem to be an uploader. Finally there is a monthly cost to use the service. On the other hand they are the industry leader in providing investment information and the tools do seem to be pretty useful (I signed up for one of their free 14 day trials and put in some fake data to try things out.)

That's all I can think of for the moment. See you in a month when you get sick of Quicken (again).

White House Communications Feedback

Mark Leibovich writes in the New York Times Magazine, 'The podium job [of White House Press Secretary] is all-consuming, especially in an age when daily briefings are televised. As Axelrod says, “You can send markets crashing and troops in motion by one slip of the tongue.”'

Isn't this a sign that we have our feedback loop out of whack? If we engineered a car such that operating the turn signal incorrectly caused the freeway to back up wouldn't that be a problem?

focus follows mouse

Steve Yegge gives this a much more thorough treatment on his blog. But if you want to fix Terminal.app so that focus follows the mouse between Terminal windows then this
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
does the trick.

link to Put Change.gov under Revision Control

A concrete suggestion from Tim O'Reilly for improving transparency in government.

Campaign Analytics

I am really interested in how much money Obama raised from small donors vs large donors. Does the argument "even if he has some 'large' donors it doesn't matter because even if he looses them they are a very small percent of the total" make sense?

This story has a bit of info on the topic.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html

Firefox vs Safari

I am not looking to write the definitive guide. I don't even consider myself a browser afficianado. But I do dabble and now I am finding that I forget why I choose one over the other.

I use Firefox as my day to day browser for a few reasons:

• phishing filter (no longer after Safari 3.2)
  
• adblock plus
• renders more sites correctly than safari
• force windows to open in tabs
  
• all my stuff (history, bookmarks, etc) are already there
• center click in safari doesn't open a background tab
• clicking on an RSS feed adds it to google reader (could I get Safari to behave this way?)
• when you cut and paste something into blogger it works on Firefox but not for Safari
  

Of course Safari has some things going for it too:

• respects the home/end key fix to make home go to beginning of line and end go to the end of the line