Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I’ve decided to start keeping a journal. Not this blog, but an honest to goodness journal, something for me only. A chance to get out all of the things that I want to say but don’t to burden people with listening to. Sometime I’ll talk about why i decided to start a journal, and a few other things i’ve been considering doing. For now, I just want to talk about what software I ended up using for journaling.

I looked around a little at various software packages that were available for journaling. I specifically didn’t want to just use a big text file, because getting to a specific day would be a pain. I didn’t want something that worked on windows only. I use windows for a few minor things, but tend to prefer OS-X/Linux for my personal stuff. I wanted an interface that is mostly the same across the various systems, something that would allow me to easily move the journal around and keep it synced up among my various environments.

What i ended up with was……………ascii text files. 1 file for each entry. Broken out into year and month sub folders, but with the full date in the filename, edited with emacs, and stored in subversion. Pretty simple eh? Yeah i thought so, i’d even spent 10 minutes considering writing my own software till i realized that it was rather a silly thing to write software for.

With this setup it should be relatively straightforward to write a script to create a book form of this data for printing out if the urge ever hits me. Hopefully someone will do me the favor of running rm -rf journal when expire so that noone ever reads the journal.

Another area where simplicity won was in my bookkeeping, i tried Quicken, I tried Money, I now use one of those composition books they sell at staples to do my books. I have a spreadsheet that mirrors this mostly so i can pull out some numbers at the end of the year. Both Quicken/Money seem to manage your money at the end of the month, or when bills show up in your bank account. I don’t find this particularly useful. It’s much better to write down what you spent every day, that way when you get a bill you know it’s accounted for. The simplest way to do this for me has been just a composition book with a few columns drawn in with a ruler, and a few minutes every evening/morning.

Simplicity..wins.