Author: ashworthdavidg

Happy Place

We have been back six weeks now and they have been busy ones. A number of my projects have come to completion these last few days and I feel the glow of accomplishment.

  • the ornamental gardens are growing well
  • the vegetable garden has been planted
  • the hall has been repainted
  • the workbench is made
  • new shelving built in the garage

We went to Victoria for the weekend in April and enjoyed being tourists. Aimeé is working part-time with a friend cleaning houses so we should have more time to recreate this year.

It rained today and the forecast for tomorrow is mixed, giving me time to review my TODOs and set priorities. I need to get back into the garden soon and get ready to open up the cabin, maybe next weekend.

Nerd Reversion

I had been using Quicken for bookkeeping since 2000. As I moved away from Windows and retired those devices, it became more difficult and inconvenient to continue using Quicken. I searched for cloud-based alternatives and finally found CountAbout last year. The basic plan costs only $9.99 US per year and it does everything I need. I highly recommend this service.

Over the past year of using CountAbout I had occasionally thought about developing an equivalent application myself, not to save money but as a fun project. Two weeks ago, with nothing else to do, I finally started prototyping and today my replacement application does everything that I had imagined. I learned OO PHP and Javascript, and used extreme programming techniques to create the prototype. My application is not pretty but the UI is efficient and I improved on some of the CountAbout workflow.

During the project I reverted to the obsessive software engineer that I used to be. I resented interruptions and was constantly thinking of the various technical problems that I was facing. While that’s how I got things done, it didn’t make me a better person. I like myself better as a gardener.

We arrived in Garden Bay on March 21. Today, March 22, was sunny and I spent the afternoon outside cleaning fallen branches and inspecting my messy garden. Next priority will be rose bush pruning.