Well here we are in Arizona. The fist night went well, and Andrea liked the Orange Blossom smell of Arizona spring.

It's here! Now I need to buy a wireless Ethernet bridge.

UPS Package Tracking
Status: In Transit
Scheduled Delivery: Mar 21, 2002
Shipped to: SAN JOSE, CA, US
Shipped or Billed on: Mar 18, 2002

That's right, folks. My ReplayTV should be here in a matter of minutes! I hope it's worth it. If I had known they were shipping it from Tempe, I would have just picked it up this weekend.

After nearly two years of banging my head against a wall, searching Microsoft's "knowledge base," scouring the newsgroups, upgrading twice and seriously contemplating deleting all my credit card account information and starting over, I've finally solved an extremely annoying problem with Microsoft Money.

The issue: despite setting my total monthly debt payments at a healthy, serious-about-paying-off-my-debt figure every month, my debt reduction planner was scheduling the minimum payments, which according to its own projections would extend the payments out through the year 2013, and then pay off the cards in one ridiculous lump-sum of $5,000 or so at the end. Obviously, the planner should have allocated my full intended monthly payment amount among the credit cards to pay the total off in a few years. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the stupid thing to work right, and just guessed the payments myself every month. This is not a good idea for English majors, by the way.

The solution: I deleted my Macy's account, which had been acting weird and showed a credit, though I had not updated activity with Money for months (it's an Enron-style off-budget account). Problem solved; it's allocating the monthly payment just fine now.

While I didn't actually work on the issue continuously, I did keep looking for a solution every few months for at least two years. Finally, I feel like I've accomplished something great, when I should have just switched home-banking applications. Microsoft should thank its lucky stars that I liked the automatic online banking features so much, or the company would be $20 poorer. And then where would it be?

Senate passes campaign finance measure

Wow, this is big. I can't believe it passed.

I just got off deadline and feel like I've just gotten over college finals or something. Writing all day can really wear a person out.

Here are the Monterey pictures!

Is the weekend over already? I visited Monterey for the first time on Saturday and saw the real Cannery Row made famous by the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. I suppose "real" is relative there, since it's a tourist attraction now and every other building is a Steinbeck memorial. But it was pretty cool. I'll post pictures later today.