Monthly Archives: May 2003

King Of Hearts

As I won’t be updating this blog for a few days I thought I’d leave you with a little something special to keep you coming back!
Feast your eyes on “The King Of Hearts”, Cork’s amazing new band, with Owen Kelly on lead guitar! I interrupted a photo shoot this afternoon, and snapped a few quick photos. Apologies for the small size, but if you want the 1600×1200 originals, mail me! 🙂

Gnucash – Euro & US Dollar

Right, so I have all my accounts in Euro in Gnucash. That’s now a problem since I’ll be spending US Dollars for the next 3 months, but I’ll be servicing loans and bills directly from my account in Euros.
I created a “Cash in wallet – USD” account, with a default currency of USD. That worked a treat when I transfered €200 over to it. Up popped a dialog box asking for the exchange rate or some amount. I entered 230, as that’s the USD value I got back. Nice.
That still doesn’t solve my problem though – do I create a USD version of my most used accounts? Anyone?
Do I simply convert ATM withdrawals over to Euro, and track my spending in Euro still? There’s always a few “misc” entries every few days when I can’t remember what I had for lunch 3 days ago. “Misc” entries could take care of any discrepencies.
Note: I am not doing this for business reasons. This is for my personal records! 🙂

Travel Insurance, and last minute stuff!

Getting travel insurance is a pain. It’s my own fault really as I didn’t go about getting it earlier. bah!
It’s nigh on impossible to buy insurance from most travel shops in Cork. You have to have booked a flight/holiday with them as well. One shop was willing to sell me insurance, but then they discovered their internet connection was down so they couldn’t order it online. I offered to get them up and running again but..
Eventually, after queueing for about half an hour in various shops I tried USIT. It was full of students looking for J1 visas and that took another hour. Thankfully I had Stunt Car Racer on the 7650 to keep me occupied!
The VHI were no help. Their Global product costs from €2,000 to €4,000 for the 3 months. Their Plan B only covers me up to $65,000 which isn’t much in the USA.
Everything’s sorted now, met up with Ruairi and Louise. Congrats to the two of you! The ring is lovely! Bumped into Peter Flynn too. We must start the CorkLUG meets again when I get back!
Now to pack..

Chicago Info

Hmm, must make a “Travel” category.

Thanks Darren for the following links, I’m putting them here as a reference when I’m stuck using a net cafe next week:

  1. Accommodation
  2. O’Hare Transportation
  3. Other

I’m travelling on Sunday, have a week to find an apartment. Looking forward to it now!

PHP – oo stuff

BDKR has a rant here about OO in PHP. I agree with some of what he says. There’s lots of bad code and design out there (I can’t promise to be perfect either!) but that permeates functional and procedural programming too.
I happen to like working with objects and structuring code in that way. It was a hell of a thing to get used to in college though, Before that I had done a lot of work coding in ASM on the C64. Actually having structures to work with was a real boon!
On a related topic, John mentioned a ObjectView, a PDF magazine about OO for developers. May take a look at it later.