Will the quest ever end? Will my life ever be simple? Probably not. But in the meantime I can keep accumulating tools and options to make life better.

The latest in my quest simplify my life is Remember The Milk. I just signed up today. Anyone tried it out? Have anything to say? Post it in the comments. Love to hear from you before I invest too much time, you know?

Link

Tags: Lists, Organize, Remember the Milk, simplify, Tasks, To Do

I signed up with PayTrust about two months ago. I like their overall idea and process:

• You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust’s secure processing address
• You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills.
• If you haven’t pre-configured your bill to arrive at PayTrust, they will alert you of an unanticpated bill, and you can go in and setup a biller for the bill.
• If the bill is expected, they email you who the bill is from, how much it is, and when its due.
• You can pay the bill via PayTrust (direct debit from your bank account) or via another mechanism (I use Quicken’s Bill Pay integration with Bank of America).
• If you want to see the bill, you can login to PayTrust and via your bill online. You can even download a PDF of the bill.

So far this has worked pretty well. I haven’t had any issues, and I haven’t lost any bills (that I know of).

What would I change?

• Its a bit disappointing that even though Intuit owns PayTrust and Quicken, there’s not any integration between them. I would love to see my PayTrust bills show up in Quicken and I could just pay them from my Quicken interface.
• The direct debit to make a payment gets taken out ~5 business days prior to when you want it to arrive at the biller. Bank of America doesn’t charge me till the date I want it to arrive there - even though they probably did send the money earlier. Bank of America treats it more like writing a check: it’s not really “arrived” until the other party has actually received the payment.
• The quality of the scan is somewhat poor. At home I was scanning ~600 dpi, it looks like the scans PayTrust makes are around 75-100 dpi. Its generally legible, but c’mon, space is cheap!

PayTrust Rating:

Tags: Bill Pay, PayTrust, Quicken

One of our 2 Canon MP780 printers seems to have stopped working. The new equivalent model from Canon is the MP830. If I was still a Windows user, I’d probably dig it. However, being an Ubuntu user, I know it’s not the right choice for me.

So after much consideration, we bought an HP 7780. We also have an HP 7410. The 7780 adds to the feature list by allowing you to scan directly to a shared drive or memory card.

HP makes themselves the defacto winners of my printer wars because of HPLIP. They have done a great job of supporting Linux. (Oddly they do a crappy job of supporting Windows, but that’s not my problem anymore)

Actually, more than halfway, but who’s counting?

Tax season is over but, as you may have heard, Intuit had a rough end of season.  That’s why I dropped off the face of the earth for a while.  There were a lot of issues to be dealt with.

So I’ve been on vacation this week.  I ended up working pretty regularly.  I answered calls, returned emails, and thought about some work stuff that I need to deal with.  But I’ve had other things to do, too.

Toby had surgery this Monday to remove a cyst on his side.  It extended from the muscle to the rib.  He was in a lot of pain those first few days.  He’s doing much better now, and wants to run and play.  I’m taking him off pain killers so he’ll settle down a bit.

I made an action list of stuff I want to get done.  I finished 80% of it - the easy 80%.  I still want to scan all my bills/statements/receipts and go paperless.  I’ve found that scanning all the stuff is only part of the hard part.  Naming and filing everything logically takes a while, too.

Alright.  I’ll post more later.  Peace.