Into the clouds

[susandennis]

For a while now, my brother has been saying that PC's are seeing their final years.  All computing will be online sooner than later.  Initially, I thought he was wrong and now not so much.

When I was offline for a day and a half, I could not work or play.  Or look up a phone number. Or check my main calendar. Or find much of anything.   If all my computers die and I am forced to go to the library to log on to one of theirs I can find pretty much everything I need - info in back mail, financial info in Mint, phone numbers, calendar stuff, entertainment and work stuff. 

Clearly I have turned the corner and this morning I took another step.  Eons ago, I tracked my finances in Quicken.  Then one year they fucked up an update and Microsoft came out with a decent version of Money and I switched and I've been dutifully keeping everything in Money every since.  But...  now that logging onto each account is so easy and I track the active ones daily instead of waiting for a monthly statement and I can way more easily aggregate the info into Mint, the times I open up Money and bring it up to speed are few and far between. 

Today I gave it a shot and it's just too much trouble.  I finally gave up.  I went to Mint and exported all my transactions into a spreadsheet.  Took nearly one second and provides me all of the offline detail I will ever need.  Goodbye Microsoft Money.

--

Laundry, however, still needs to be done offline.  It's doing now.  And I'm looking forward to another meatloaf sandwich like I had yesterday. 

Happy Saturday.  

I hope everyone in Ike's path is ok.

Comments

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

I use Gmail for my mail and have no issues with that or reservations about doing it.

But I have serious issues and reservations about having my financial information online. That will stay encrypted on my local PC until such time as hell freezes over :-)

[susandennis]

I understand but am happy that I'm not straddled with severe security issues. One day I may pay but now it's a whole lot easier to live life this way - at least for ne

[howeird]

I think your brother's wrong. When I first started in computers, there were no PCs. Everyone had to store their data on a central computer and access it online with a dumb terminal. As soon as businesses started getting PCs for their managers, the peons on terminals asked for them as well. Today everyone has local storage even if their data is kept in a central location. Most folks want a local copy. It's why we don't have a paperless society, and never will.

If your Mint server goes down, or simply loses its Internet connection, you're hosed. If Money or Quicken servers go down, you're still in business with your local copy.

I don't think the day will ever come when the Internet and server farms are so reliable that they fell more secure to most of us than a local copy does. And by secure I don't mean secure from hackers, I mean secure from disappearing and secure from becoming inaccessible.

[susandennis]

I see your points BUT, when my local copy of my finances gets buggered up, I'm sure glad to have Mint.com AND also to have the copy I saved on two different servers that are not in this house. My 'local' copies are a lot less reliable than those on outside servers.

This is what I realized last week.

All the stuff I want is out there. Not here. GRANTED, my mileage is likely way different than most.

[howeird]

my mileage is likely way different than most
Y'think? :-)

Your local copies could easily be made as reliable as the online ones, it just needs a scheduled task created. But I do seriously see the point in having the online service do the work.