Alone

Started: 2004-03-11 12:58:13

Submitted: 2004-03-11 13:46:23

Visibility: World-readable

Gem departed yesterday for Walla Walla College, tagging along with Willy, Bethany, and my mother. Willy is checking out the college, meeting with professors, and other exciting stuff. Bethany and Gem are along for the ride; Gem's parents are driving out tomorrow. As a result, I'm all alone in the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Yesterday evening, I visited my local meatspace video game rental store (namely, Blockbuster) and rented up a copy of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, which looks like it could be entertaining. (Entertaining enough to pay the current US$50 list price remains to be seen. How quickly do video game prices drop?)

I've come across a brilliant scheme for keeping better track of my budget: write a Perl script to query gnucash on the current balance of every budget item and generate a handy little summary page Gem and I can carry around on our Visors and consult whenever necessary. I don't actually have any proof that this is possible, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be.

Hmm... poking around Google reveals that Perl support for gnucash is minimal to non-existent. (All I really want is to query the balance of a handful of pre-determined accounts.) I suppose I could parse the xml file myself and add up the numbers... which seems like more trouble than I really should have to go through, but at the moment I'm not sure I've been given any other options.