Stevo

I am overweight at 183lbs being a 5′7″ male. I don’t think I am as overweight as the programs say like the wii fit :p which are not acurate anyways. I feel like I need totrim a few pounds but more importantly I need to be more active.
This is where it begins, first off I remove TV from my weekends. Instead I take my family out geocaching or play games with the kids. Second I take newton for a short jog twice a day, morning and night regardless of what else we do. No more excusses to sit on my butt, it is time for action. Third and last for now is to count the calories using an iPhone app called “Lose it!”.
Once I get into the groove of this it will be time to make the fourth step of joining a gym. This will be the hardest since it will mean getting out to a gym and putting exercises together. That doesn’t sound tough but actually doing it is a tottally different story.
Wish me luck and I promise to keep posting my progress here.

I have been working very hard for the past few months trying to get our family back into a position where we don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. After a recent attempt to move to San Francisco we lost all of our investments (house, savings, etc) and eventually had to declare bankruptcy. It has been a struggle, weeding out what we don’t need, tightening our belts on what we do, and saving every every penny we can so that we can get back on track.

I started using just a spreadsheet to create our budget and keep track of our savings, this worked ok and allowed me to go by paycheck to paycheck for a while, but now that we have some savings back and have trimmed down the spending we can move back to a month to month budget. The spread sheet is ok for this but I wanted something a bit easier, and something we could both use from various places so that we don’t stray away. With both of us having laptop computers and iPhones it made sense to find something online. After a search for a bit I found that most did not have everything we needed in it, also security was a concern, not that we put much information in but this is our money we are dealing with. Since I could not find anything worth using I decided to start creating my own, a small iPhone web app that we could log into and update our information. I started with iWebKit5 which is a great system of JS and CSS, which with a bit of PHP I was able to pump out something pretty simple quickly BalanceBook.

After a bit of work on my site I decided to take one last look for an existing solution, this is where I found Wesabe. A very easy to use site that has a free iPhone app with it as well . It gives you a great way to budget using “Spending Targets” that work on a month to month time frame, and has a few graphs so you can see how much you spend when and on what. It is very easy to get started and they even have a system to import your transactions from your bank, this way you don’t have to enter in each one manually. There is also a Cash account which you can use to say this is how much spending cash you have or other things. One drawback I have found is that on the iPhone or Webapp there is no “Add Transaction” for your bank accounts, you have to do this from the main site (oddly you can edit existing transactions?), so you have to create a Cash account where you can add transactions. It would also be nice to have the ability to define your “Spending Target” periods (like say every 2 weeks or from the 1st to 14th and 15th to end of month), and the ability to group your savings, so you can say have $200 for Car Maintenance and $500 for Car Insurance in the same savings account. Aside from that the site works very well and I can’t wait until they are able to cut through all the red tape and link to Canadian accounts (transaction uploads will have to do for now).

So I work on Songbird and apparently it doesn’t need to have the 64bit version of the libIDL in MacPorts. I was building with no problems on a recently upgraded desktop computer. I then tried to build Thunderbird and got major fail:

ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libIDL-2.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libglib-2.0.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libintl.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libiconv.dylib, file is not of required architecture

Thinking this was something to do with MacPorts I tried a sudo port selfupdate, this failed even worse!

dlopen(/Library/Tcl/macports1.0/MacPorts.dylib, 10): no suitable image found.  Did find:
	/Library/Tcl/macports1.0/MacPorts.dylib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
    while executing
"load /Library/Tcl/macports1.0/MacPorts.dylib"
    ("package ifneeded macports 1.0" script)
    invoked from within
"package require macports"
    (file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 39)

OK so what the hell, well a little Google search and I find that there is a new version for Snow Leopard, so I downloaded and tried the update again with success.

Now off to build again after the update completes…

Her we go back to blogging and creating my online pressence. Facebook, Twitter, and any other cool social sites of the day .