Microsoft Money 2005 takes the pain out of managing your personal finances. The popular software serves as a research tool and a means of gazing into the future. With Money 2005, you will know how much you spend in different areas and what your net worth is. You will know what any investments you may have are worth and roughly how much you owe in taxes. Without bookkeepers, accountants, or financial counselors, you can become a better saver — and that's an achievement worth its weight in gold!
Keeping accurate records of your spending and income
All the personal finance advisors agree that keeping good, accurate records is the first step toward financial security. Before you can start saving for a down payment on a house, you have to know how much you are capable of saving. Before you can tell whether your investments are doing well, you have to track them carefully. If you want to make sound financial decisions, you need to know what your spending habits are and how much income you really have.
Microsoft Money makes keeping accurate financial records very, very easy. All financial transactions you make — writing a check, making a deposit, transferring money between accounts, charging an item on your credit card, buying and selling stocks and mutual funds, and so on — are recorded in account registers. You create one account (and one account register) for each bank account you have and each account you have with a brokerage house.
Entering data correctly in Money is essential. Money can't do its job well unless you carefully and conscientiously enter financial data. If all you want to do is balance your savings and checking accounts, you've got it made, because Money offers lots of opportunities for double-checking the accuracy of transactions in savings and checking accounts. However, to track investments and loans, draw up a budget, or do a handful of other sophisticated things, you need to take care when you enter the data.
Categorizing your spending and income
Each time you record a transaction in an account register, you categorize it. A check you write to a clothing store, for example, is assigned the Clothing category. A credit-card charge you make after stuffing yourself in a restaurant is assigned the Dining category. A paycheck deposit is assigned the Salary category. After you have recorded transactions for a few months, a picture of how you spend your hard-earned cash will start to come into focus. You can generate reports or charts that show precisely what your expenses are.
Estimating your income taxes
Another advantage of categorizing expenses and income is being able to estimate your income tax bill. Rather than pay an accountant to search for tax-deductible expenses or determine what your income sources were, you can generate tax reports that do the job in lieu of an accountant. By totaling the amount you spent in categories that describe tax-deductible expenses, you can find out what your tax-deductible expenses are. You can see exactly how much you received in income from different clients. Money also offers tools for estimating capital gains taxes and exporting Money data to a tax-preparation program such as TaxCut Deluxe.
Handling your investments
In the late 1990s, all you had to do to be a successful investor was to plop down money on stocks or mutual funds, but bears have overrun the bull markets of the 1990s. These days, you have to be shrewd and insightful to be an investor.
Money makes it possible to find out — literally in seconds — how well your investments are doing. You can find out how much they have grown (or shrunk) and compare the performance of your investments against stocks, mutual funds, and bonds you don't own, as well as compare your investments to indexes such as NASDAQ or the S&P 500. You can download security prices from the Internet and find out right away what the stocks and mutual funds you own are worth. As long as your computer is connected to the Internet, you can also research stocks, mutual funds, and bonds without leaving the Money program. You will find links throughout Money that you can click to go on the Internet and research investments.
Pinching your pennies
You categorize your income and spending when you record transactions in Money. Categorizing this way makes it easy to formulate a budget. Because you know precisely how much you spend in the different categories, you can set realistic budget goals by limiting your spending on a category-by-category basis. You can tell Money to alert you when you have exceeded your budget goals and in this way tame your spending. Money can also tell you when bills fall due so that you can pay your bills on time. The program can even track your frequent flyer miles.
Planning ahead
Planning for your retirement isn't easy. It's hard to tell what the future will hold. Money, however, can help you peer into the future and plan for your retirement. If you track your investments with Money, you use the Retirement Planner to project how your investments will grow and see whether your investments will cover your living expenses in retirement. Money allows you to realistically find out whether you are saving enough. The program can also show you how to plan better for your retirement and do the things you need to do now to ensure that your retirement years are golden ones.
Banking online
Money was the first computer program to offer online banking services. Over the years, Money has refined these services such that online banking is easier than it has ever been. You can pay bills online, download bank and credit-card statements, and balance your account online.
How Microsoft Money Can Help You with Your Finances
Forcing an Account to Balance in Microsoft Money
If, despite all your detective work, you can't find the problem that keeps your account from balancing in Microsoft Money, you can force the account to balance. Forcing an account to balance means entering what accountants call an adjustment transaction -- a fictitious transaction, a little white lie that makes the numbers add up. If the difference between what your statement says and what the Balance Account window says is just a few pennies, enter the adjustment transaction and spare yourself the headache of looking for the error. A few pennies here and there never hurt anybody.
The words Account Adjustment appear in the register on the Payee line when you force an adjustment transaction. Money gives you the chance to categorize the transaction on your own. After you have torn out your hair trying to discover why an account doesn't balance, follow these steps to force an adjustment transaction:
Click the Next button in the balance Account window.
Click this button even though the account has not been reconciled. The Balance dialog box appears and tells you that the account isn't in balance and asks what you want to do about it.
Select the Automatically Adjust the Account Balance option button.
Choose a category from the category drop-down menu.
Click OK.
Timing Google's Crawl
Google crawls the Web at varying depths and on more than one schedule. The so-called deep crawl occurs roughly once a month. This extensive reconnaissance of Web content requires more than a week to complete and an undisclosed length of time after completion to build the results into the index. For this reason, it can take up to six weeks for a new page to appear in Google. Brand new sites at new domain addresses that have never been crawled before might not even be indexed at first.
If Google relied entirely on the deep crawl, its index would quickly become outdated in the rapidly shifting Web. To stay current, Google launches various supplemental fresh crawls that skim the Web more shallowly and frequently than the deep crawl. These supplementary spiders (automated software programs that travel from link to link one the Web, collecting content from online pages) do not update the entire index, but they freshen it by updating the content of some sites. Google does not divulge its fresh-crawling schedules or targets, but Webmasters can get an indication of the crawl's frequency through sharp observance.
Google has no obligation to touch any particular URL with a fresh crawl. Sites can increase their chance of being crawled often, however, by changing their content and adding pages frequently. Remember the shallowness aspect of the fresh crawl; Google might dip into the home page of your site (the front page, or index page) but not dive into a deep exploration of the site's inner pages. (You may, for example, notice that a new index page of your site appears in Google within a day of your updates, while a new inner page added at the same time may be missing.) But Google's spider can compare previous crawl results with the current crawl, and if it learns from the top navigation page that new content is added regularly, it might start crawling the entire site during its frequent visits.
The deep crawl is more automatic and mindlessly thorough than the fresh crawl. Chances are good that in a deep crawl cycle, any URL already in the main index will be reassessed down to its last page. However, Google does not necessarily include every page of a site. As usual, the reasons and formulas involved in excluding certain pages are not divulged. The main fact to remember is that Google applies PageRank considerations to every single page, not just to domains and top pages. If a specific page is important to you and is not appearing in Google search results, your task is to apply every networking and optimization tactic you can imagine to that page. You may also manually submit that specific page to Google.
The terms deep crawl and fresh crawl are widely used in the online marketing community to distinguish between the thorough spidering of the Web that Google launches approximately monthly and various intermediate crawls run at Google's discretion. Google itself acknowledges both levels of spider activity, but is secretive about exact schedules, crawl depths, and formulas by which the company chooses crawl targets. To a large extent, targets are determined by automatic processes built into the spider's programming, but humans at Google also direct the spider to specific destinations for various reasons.
Technically, the Google index remains static between crawls. Google matches keywords against the index, not against live Web content, so any pages put online (or modified) between visits from Google's spider remain excluded from (or out of date in) the search results until they are crawled again. But two factors work against the index remaining unchanged for long. First, the frequency of fresh crawls keeps the index evolving in a state that Google-watchers call everflux. Second, some time is required to put crawl results into the index on Google's thousands of servers. The irregular heaving and churning of the index that results from these two factors is called the Google dance
Getting to Know the GarageBand Windows
Apple's GarageBand 3 (included in the iLife '06 suite) lets a musical wannabe make music with a MacBook Pro — complete with a driving bass line, funky horns, and a set of perfect drums that never miss a beat. In fact, the thousands of prerecorded loops on tap in GarageBand even allow you to design your music to match that melody running through your head, from techno to jazz to alternative rock.
GarageBand 3 also produces podcasts. You can record your voice and easily create your own show, and then share it with others from your iWeb site — even add photos if you like.
As shown in Figure 1, the GarageBand window isn't complex, and that's good design. The important controls are described in the following list:
Figure 1: The GarageBand window — edged in wood grain, no less.
Track list: In GarageBand, a track is a discrete instrument that you set up to play one part of your song. For example, a track in a classical piece for a string quartet would have four tracks — one each for violin, viola, cello, and bass. This list contains all the tracks in your song arranged so that you can easily see and modify them, like the rows in a spreadsheet.
If you're creating a podcast, a Podcast artwork track like the one you see at the very top of the list in Figure 1 can also appear.
Timeline: This scrolling area holds the loops (see the following bullet) that you add or record, allowing you to move and edit them easily. As a song plays, the timeline scrolls to give you a visual look at your music.
Loop: This is a prerecorded clip of an instrument being played in a specific style and tempo. Loops are the building blocks of your song. You can drag loops from the loop browser to a track and literally build a bass line or a guitar solo. (It's a little like adding video clips to the timeline in iMovie HD to build a film.)
Playhead: This vertical line is a moving indicator that shows you the current position in your song as it scrolls by in the timeline. You can drag the playhead to a new location at any time. The playhead also acts like the insertion cursor in a word processing application.
Create a New Track button: Click this button to add a new track to your song.
Track Info button: If you need to display the instrument used in a track, click the track to select it and then click this button. You can also control settings such as Echo and Reverb from the dialog box that's displayed.
View/Hide Loop Browser button: Click the button with the striking eye icon to display the Loop Browser at the bottom of the window; click it again to close it. You can see more tracks at a time without scrolling by closing the Loop Browser.
View/Hide Media Browser button: Click this button (which bears icons of a filmstrip, slide, and musical note) to display the media browser at the right side of the window; click it again to close it. By closing the media browser, you'll see more of your tracks. If you're already familiar with iDVD or iMovie HD, you recognize this pane in the GarageBand window — it allows you to add media (in this case, still images or video clips) to your GarageBand project for use in a podcast.
Return to Beginning button: Clicking this button immediately moves the playhead back to the beginning of the timeline.
Play button: Hey, old friend! At last, a control that you've probably used countless times before — and it works just like the same control on your audio CD player. Click Play, and GarageBand begins playing your entire song. Notice that the Play button turns blue. To stop the music, click Play again; the button loses that sexy blue sheen, and the playhead stops immediately. (If playback is paused, it begins again at the playhead position when you click Play.)
Time/Tempo display: This cool-looking display shows you the current playhead position in seconds. You can also click the time/tempo indicator (the blue LED numerical display at the bottom of the window) to change the tempo (or speed) of your song.
Volume slider: Here's another familiar face. Just drag the slider to raise or lower the volume.
Getting an Idea of What You Can Do with BitTorrent
All kinds of people and businesses are using BitTorrent to distribute large data files. For example, BitTorrent has found popularity among those people sharing versions of the Linux operating system, and that's just the beginning; there are many more examples of businesses and individuals taking advantage of this technology. Here are just a few ways that individuals, groups, and businesses are using BitTorrent:
Distribute computer operating systems: The Linux operating system is an open-source operating system available for free. In fact, it is the main alternative for computer users who don't want to be tied to Microsoft Windows or the Macintosh OS. Because of the way Linux is licensed, any developer can download and alter it because so many versions are available. As you can imagine, an entire operating system can be quite large, which is one reason BitTorrent has become a favorite method for distributing Linux.
Distribute your film to create buzz: Filmmaker Rick Prelinger is one of those who has used BitTorrent to do something he has never been able to do before. Prelinger used clips of publicly available industrial, educational, advertising, and amateur footage from 1940 to 1980 to create the documentary collage, Panorama Ephemera. Using BitTorrent, several thousand people have been able to download the film (which Prelinger has licensed for reuse and viewing). For Prelinger, BitTorrent made distribution easy — and inexpensive, which film distribution traditionally isn't.
Distribute your book: Author and Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig used BitTorrent to make his book Free Culture available for download. (You can also find and download an audio version of the book, created by volunteers who each read a chapter.)
You can download both Panorama Ephemera and Free Culture from LegalTorrents LegalTorrents, a Web site that lists legally downloadable torrents that are licensed for public use or viewing.
Distribute musical recordings: Rock groups Phish and the Grateful Dead encourage concert-goers to make recordings of their performances; those large digital files are shared by fans using BitTorrent.
The Web site Etree.org is a community BitTorrent tracker for sharing live concert recordings of artists that permit their performances to be recorded. You can find recordings of Phish, the Black Crowes, Blues Traveler, the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, and many others through Etree.
Distribute beta software: The game World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online role-playing game created by Blizzard Entertainment, was released in November 2004. Prior to its release, however, Blizzard provided beta versions of the game to its testers using BitTorrent, eliminating shipping and production costs for software that would be patched on a nearly daily basis.
Today, software, tomorrow the world: Even the BBC is getting in on the action. Although it doesn't use the BitTorrent format, the BBC is investigating the use of a very similar peer-to-peer technology to provide TV shows to consumers for up to seven days after they are broadcast. The BBC ran a trial in late 2005 and used the interactive Media Player to deliver digital rights managed TV shows and radio programs to 5,000 participants.
Plenty of people are sharing content they shouldn't. Sharing copyrighted content is a crime.
Linux Smart Homes: Managing Your Media with MythTV
MythTV is an open source program that you can use with Linux. With the MythTV digital video recorder, you can watch TV, pause and resume live TV, schedule recordings, and do everything that a typical PVR (personal video recorder) can do. However, you can do a lot more than a typical PVR will let you do. You can use MythTV as the control center for all the media on your system. You can organize and play all your music files by using the MythTV Music menu. You can play videos stored on your system by using the Video menu choices, and you can organize and display slide shows of all your images by using the Images menu.
Playing music with MythTV
MythTV gives you the ability to organize and play the music files you have stored on your system; for instance, you can use it to play MP3 files that you've ripped from your CDs. Before you can use the music player, though, you must enter the directory location that contains the music files. Here's how:
1. From the MythTV main menu, choose Setup --> Music Settings --> General Settings.
2. Enter the path to the music files in the Directory to Hold Music field.
3. Click Next, then Finish, and then press Esc twice to return to the main menu.
4. From the main menu, choose Music --> Select Music.
5. Use the arrow keys to highlight the music you want to play and press the spacebar to select it.
6. Press Esc when you're finished to return to the Music menu.
7. Choose Play Music from the Music menu.
8. To stop playing music, press Esc.
Playing videos with MythTV
MythTV gives you the ability to organize and play the video files you have stored on your system. Before you can use the video player, you need to enter the directory location that contains the video files. Here's how:
1. From the MythTV main menu, choose Setup --> Videos Settings --> General Settings.
2. Enter the path to the video files in the Directory That Holds Videos field.
3. Choose Next twice, then Finish, and then press Esc twice to return to the MythTV main menu.
4. From the main menu, choose Videos --> Browse Videos.
5. Use the up- and down-arrow keys to find the video you want to play and press the spacebar to select it.
6. Press Esc when you're finished to return to the Video menu.
Viewing image slide shows with MythTV
MythTV gives you the ability to organize and view slide shows of image files you have stored on your system. Before you can use the image viewer, you need to enter the directory location that contains the image files. Here's how:
1. From the MythTV main menu, choose Setup --> Images Settings.
2. Enter the path to the image files in the Directory That Holds Images field.
3. Choose Finish then press Esc to return to the MythTV main menu.
4. Choose Images from the main menu to open the Images page, where you can see your images.
5. Use the arrow keys to navigate through the images.
6. Press the spacebar or Enter to see a full-size view of the highlighted image. Press Esc to return to the thumbnail view.
7. Press the M key to activate the menu on the left side of the screen.
8. Use the up or down arrows to highlight your menu choice and press the spacebar or Enter to select it.
9. To stop the slide show, press Esc.
10. To exit the image viewer, press Esc from the thumbnail viewer page.
Mounting a Thin TV Display in Your Home Theater
One of the bigger advances in TV displays in recent years has been the depth of the units — displays are getting thinner and thinner. Instead of just plunking your new display on top of a table, consider mounting it on the wall or ceiling (such as in the case of projectors) instead.
Mounting a display can be easy if you plan and design well up front. There's more than one way to mount a display. Ask yourself some questions about how you intend to use your TV before you settle on a particular mounting approach:
Is viewing flexibility an important consideration? If you want to be able to see the display from two different locations, a swing arm mount is great — you can merely swing the display around to face the desired room. You might do this so that you can watch your plasma TV in the family room, but then swing it out so that it can be viewed from the kitchen, too. It's great for watching cooking shows!
Where do you want to put the display in the room? Plan for your cabling in advance. Are you mounting this on a brick wall or in front of a window? In these instances, a ceiling mount may be better because it will be easier to run your cables invisibly.
Are you planning on mounting your display over a fireplace? It can get hot over a fireplace in use, and this heat can damage your display. A lot of TVs don't have a cooling fan — they use convection for cooling and have to be five inches from the wall. If you're short on space and cooling is a concern, look for a TV with a fan. If there is a lot of heat coming up from the fireplace, you will really need a mantel to deflect the heat away from your TV.
How do you want to use your display? Will you want to view this while lying on the floor sometimes and on the couch at other times? You might want a swing mount with a high degree of pitch so that you can change the angle as you desire. Do you want to press a button and have the display automatically appear? Look for pop-up and ceiling automated products for this purpose — often used in limited spaces.
If you intend to use a swing mount and have chosen to buy third-party (that is, non-display-driven) speakers, you will want to make sure you can purchase an add-on accessory to mount your center speaker onto the display itself, rather than bolting that particular speaker to a wall. Doing so ensures that your center speaker swings along with the TV . . . thus avoiding that weird situation in which lips move in one place but the corresponding dialog comes from another.
Is this room subject to different lighting during different times of the day? Pitch wall mounts — ones that can shift a display up and down — are good for rooms that have glare during certain times of the day.
Is this a permanent installation or something you might change as newer TV display models come out? Many homes trade up TVs every few years and swap TV sets from room to room in a hand-me-down fashion. Automated lift mounts are pretty permanent installations in most instances.
How does this have to look? Is decor an issue? If you need this to be really flush with the wall with all your cables well hidden, then you might want to go with a swing arm (as opposed to a static) mount because a swing arm allows you to use a recessed area in the wall. You can connect the mount to the wall and then pull out the mount and connect all the cables and display. When you're done, you can push the mount back against the wall, and you have a fashionable flush installation. You may not be able to do this with a static mount because it's harder to hide all the connected cables. Also, you can design your mounting so that you can go with artwork that slides over the display or opt for a decorative trim to the display. You can even buy a certain material to cover your display that acts like a mirror when the display is off but is transparent when the display is on.
Do you care about specific orientations for your display? With some mounts, you can rotate your display into a vertical position. If you're into photography, the display can go into portrait mode, for instance, for those vertically oriented pictures. Or, you might want to view the display horizontally but store it vertically, if space is a consideration.