I’ve been having some trouble lately with RoadRunner from Time Warner Cable.  Their DNS servers are ridiculously slow and I decided to take some action and switch to OpenDNS.  Details follow.

First, I configured my Buffalo router running DD-WRT to use OpenDNS and to update DynDNS of my dynamic IP address.  Then I  configured  dnsomatic to update OpenDNS  so that my custom network settings will follow my home network as the address changes.  Actually, my dynamic address at home hasn’t changed more than a couple of times in more than a year, but it’s nice to have a static domain name to use when connecting to my network from elsewhere.

I think my tubes are considerably faster and I’m not getting the flaky name resolution failures that I’ve been getting recently.  Plus, when I don’t have to support TWC in their ignorant and greedy bid to redirect DNS requests from nonexistent domains to their advertisements.

We’ve been playing around with budgeting and tracking spending.  I actually have a box of receipts on my desk from the last month or so that I had planned to go through and categorize in Google Docs or an Open Office spreadsheet.  It’s daunting looking at this big box of random slips of paper.  I have no idea how people track spending.  I carried a check register in my wallet for awhile and tried to record each transaction as it occurred.   Not very successful.

Now I’m trying GnuCash.  Brandi had some experience with Microsoft Money and it seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for our needs.  I also don’t use Windows so it wasn’t really an option and GnuCash is free.  I downloaded transaction from American Express and imported them easily, but my credit union, North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union, only offers CSV downloads.  GnuCash doesn’t recognize CSV.  So, I wrote a python parser to convert the CSV file to QIF, which GnuCash does understand.  Here’s a link to secu2qif.

We’ll see if we get anywhere.  While I was parsing I did notice that both the state and federal revenue services have issued  us refunds, which was a nice surprise.  They were both quite quick, I think.   Boy, that mortgage interest deduction was a nice benefit.