Understanding Nothing

Personal finance software universally sucks. I have two theories for why this is:

Firstly, there actually is no personal finance software. It’s all just dumbed down versions of corporate accounting software. No matter how it’s dressed up to be ‘user friendly’, at the heart of it all is the core underlying assumption that you want to run your personal life like an accountant runs a business. Many people have been sucked into this way of thinking, in large part because it’s the mindset that using such software foists upon you, but really it’s a poor model.

The second reason is that it’s almost all created by Americans. By itself, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it becomes a bad thing when it reflects their view of the world, which, particularly in matters of personal finance, doesn’t really hold true in other countries. And I’m not just talking here about the assumptions that are generally built into how relatively complex things like mortgages, or sharedealing, or taxes, or retirement accounts, etc work in different countries. Mostly I’m talking about the really simple things like not assuming everything is in US dollars! Sure, there’s generally a token nod to other currencies, but most finance software cope can’t even cope with simple multi-currency transactions (like all the times in Switzerland when I got a bill in Swiss Francs but paid in Euros), never mind the more complicated ones (like the time I bought my bus ticket from Bulgaria to Macedonia using my last remaining levs and made up the difference in Euros). And because most people who write finance software have never lived somewhere like New Zealand where the smallest coin is the ten cent piece, they tend not to cope very well with things like Swedish Rounding, where your total is rounded if you’re paying by cash (but not if by card).

Of course it’s possible to do these things in most software, but only if, under theory #1, you can think like an accountant and do the equivalent of lots of complex ledger entries. But lots of things that are deliberately really complex in business accounting are commonplace in people’s personal lives – like asking your friend if they have eighty cents to avoid needing to break another €10 note.

Most people get round all this by just ignoring it. Who really wants to have to record that their shopping bill was €14.80 but eighty cents of that came from Steve anyway? Well, me. I’m a firm believer in the “track every penny” school of thought. And I hate how hard it is for me to do so. In the 5 months of this year so far, I’ve been in 9 different countries. I keep every receipt, and record every item from every one of them. And it’s much too much hassle. I’ve tried numerous different software packages, and they’re all terrible for me. There’s a lot of innovation in the area recently with sites like Mint and Wesabe springing up and giving the old faithfuls of Quicken and Microsoft Money a serious run for their money. But there’s increasingly an assumption that most of your spending detail can be automatically obtained from your bank records so you don’t need to type it in. It makes sense for them to concentrate there, as having to painstakingly enter all your spending is the thing that puts most people off ever actually keeping track of where their money is going. But the more that part gets automated away, the less these companies work on making it really easy to enter transactions manually — which leaves me worse off, as I do the vast majority of my spending using cash, and my bank records thus tell me next to nothing. Even on the rare occasion where I pay for my groceries on my debit card, I don’t just want a total spend entered—I want a full breakdown of every line item. I want to know at the end of the year just how much I spent on milk or eggs, not just on “groceries”.

So I want software that works for me. That assumes I’ll be travelling a lot and working with multiple currencies. That makes it easy for me to enter detailed records rather than a chore. That deals with all the little details I raised last time I ranted about this.

It may be that I’m the only person in the world that actually wants this software, but I suspect I’m not. In the current economic climate people are watching their pennies carefully. Almost every personal finance book suggest that people literally track every cent they spend for at least a month. I think lots of people would like to know much more about where their money goes, but the pain of keeping track currently outweighs the benefits for a lot of people. So I want to make that easy.

I have a detailed vision of how that software would work, but I can’t build it by myself. Anyone want to help?

All my playing with end-of-year travel plans has given me itchy feet. I’d like to go somewhere interesting for a few days sometime soon, but I don’t really care so much where. This is something the internets are meant to help with, but though the US is well served with any number of useful quirky travel sites, Europe doesn’t have so many of the “Just show me good deals” versions if you don’t live in certain key cities. So, in the DIY spirit, I wrote my own. I gathered a list of all the commercial airports I could find in Europe, grouped them by country, and wrote a script that searched on ITA in turn for all flights from Tallinn to any airport in that country over the next 30 days, and tell me the cheapest date to travel there. It’s a slightly nasty site to screen-scrape (and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any alternatives that you don’t have to pay for, as some of the puzzles they set job applicants involve scraping the site), and the code certainly isn’t pretty, but, thanks to Google Charts, the results are:

(Green is the cheapest, red the most expensive, yellow somewhere inbetween.)

My plan is to widen this beyond Europe, have it run every day, set some threshholds and have it email me any time something interesting appears. I suspect, however, that I’m much better served from Riga:

Thankfully there’s a comfortable bus to there!

I’ve been a bmi Diamond Club holder for many years. Unlike most Frequent Flier programs, airmiles you earn in this scheme never expire, so I’ve built up quite a few of them. However, it’s looking increasingly likely that bmi won’t actually be around for much longer — at least not in its current form. The most likely outcome seems to be a takeover by Lufthansa, and subsequent conversion of Diamond Club to their nowhere-near-as-good Miles and More scheme. So it’s looking like a good time to turn all my airmiles into a fun end-of-year escape-the-Tallinn-winter trip.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last week learning how best to go about that, and discovering all manner of interesting ways of combining the various rules in interesting ways. (Much of this is learned from the fine folks at Flyer Talk, which, once you can get beyond all the jargon, is an amazing source of tips, tricks, and useful advice.)

The first thing you need to get the hang of is the bmi zone chart. Rather than spending miles based on the actual distance you fly, the world is divided up into a series of zones, and you pay a fixed rate per flight based on the zones you’re flying to/from. (This is purely in terms of the miles spent—you still need to pay the taxes depending on the airports you use, which, of course, differ everywhere.) I found it hard to keep track of which countries were in which zone, so I drew a pretty map.

The biggest problem with constructing a suitably interesting trip is that you’re only allowed one stop-over (visiting a city en-route for more than 24 hours) per ticket. So, for example, if you were to book a return from London to Sydney you’d only be allowed to stop off in other place (e.g. Singapore) in either direction. However, you can purchase one way tickets, so by getting two of those, instead of a return, you now get a stop-over in each direction, so could stop, for example, in Singapore for a couple of weeks on the way there, and Thailand on the way back.

What I then noticed was that to go from Zone 2 (Central/Eastern Europe — where I currently am) to Zone 10 (Australia/NZ — where I want to go) is 50,000 miles each way, but two singles from Zone 2 to Zone 8 (East Asia) and then Zone 8 to Zone 10 are only 25,000 each. Thus, by going via South Korea or Japan, for example, you can effectively get 3 free stops in each direction – effectively turning a naïve two destination trip (e.g. Copenhagen – (Bangkok) – Auckland – Copenhagen) into a seven destination trip for the same price (e.g. Copenhagen – (Bangkok) – Tokyo – (Hong Kong) – Auckland – (Sydney) – Seoul – (Delhi) – Copenhagen)! These are all published Star Alliance routes: Air Asiana, for example, fly Seoul to Copenhagen via Delhi and Zurich three times a week.

If you really wanted to, you could also (again, for the same price) omit the last ticket, and return Auckland–Copenhagen via L.A. or Vancouver turning it into a complete round the world trip at half the mileage cost of an actual round-the-world ticket!

I wrote a little script to analyse the entire zone chart for other free multi-zone detours, and discovered there were quite a few of them (including some where the detour actually lowered the total price, such as Zones 2–7 via 10 which is only 70,000 miles, instead of 80,000 direct!)

Of course, the longer the route, the more complexity there is in trying to piece it all together.  You get significantly more value spending the miles on business class flights than on economy, but availability on those disappears quite far in advance on popular routes (and isn’t available at all on many Singapore Airlines flights as they reserve those for their own card-holders rather than their Star Alliance partners). But I’m currently contemplating trying to piece together a 2-10-7-9-8-2 route, which is only 110,000 base miles, and would theoretically allow something along the following lines:

Riga – (Cairo) – Bombay – (Bangkok) – Manila – (Tokyo or Sydney) – Auckland – (Shanghai) – Tashkent or Almaty – (Istanbul) – Riga.

Which, if I can pull it off, isn’t bad for only 10,000 miles more than a simple Riga–Auckland return! Suggestions / alternatives / gotchas / etc. welcomed!

On a regular basis I go driving or cycling with a GPS in logging mode. This creates a nice big GPX file of where I was on a second-by-second basis.

Whilst on such travels, I often take photos. My camera timestamps these photos, but doesn’t have a built in GPS.

So, I want something that takes the photos, and the GPS tracks, and writes the GPS information into each of the photographs.

So far, so good – there is all manner of software out there to do this.

However, this relies on the clocks in my GPS and camera being in sync, which isn’t always true (and even if I were to remember to synchronise them every time I go out that doesn’t help with old photos which are really badly out of sync, such as from my round-Australia drive where I was crossing timezones on a regular basis and would often forget to update the time on my camera for several days).

GPSPhotoLinker, which I normally use, is almost good enough here, but not quite. It allows me to adjust the time on all my photos by a specified amount. But then I need to work out what that amount should be, and that’s a decidedly non-trivial problem.

Generally I can pinpoint fairly accurately where at least one photograph was taken, but then I need to manually find that point in my GPS tracks to work out what time I was really there at – which is also non-trivial as if I’ve stopped to take a photograph, and my GPS is logging every second, I’ll have a variety of points all roughly around the point. And it’s even worse if I’ve been past that same point several times. GPS Visualizer is quite helpful here as it will plot a GPX file onto Google Earth with timestamps as waypoints, but it’s super slow, and really doesn’t like big GPX files (of the type you might get if you drive 300+km a day logging every second…)

So what I really want is something that will take the GPS track, and a set of a photographs, and plot the photos on a map for where it thinks they were taken. Then I should be able to take one or more of the photos and drag them to where they were actually taken, and the software will use that new information to adjust all its timings and replot all the other photos. Then, when I’m happy they all look like they’re in roughly the correct location, it can write the GPS info to the photos.

Does such a thing exist?

If not, how difficult would it be to even write a little utility that does the plotting of photos onto Google Maps and then lets me “try out” different scenarios simply by giving it an offset and having it move all the photos accordingly, until I get a good enough result by trial and error? It doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult, but there are too many components of it I don’t know anywhere near enough about to actually do it.

Anyone any thoughts or pointers?

Karen thinks that Narita might be her favourite airport. Personally, I hated it. I’ve had a few bad immigration experiences before (all in the US, natch), but my arrival in Japan was definitely the worst of my round-the-world trip. If I recall correctly (and I’m willing to accept that I may have somewhat exaggerated the story in my mind), it took somewhere in the region of 39 hours from entering the Immigration Hall until actually getting processed, with at least half of that involving being slowly shunted around in a dense mass of people all slowly wending their way towards an actual queue. To make matters worse, between the time I bought my RTW ticket and when I actually arrived, Japan introduced the process of fingerprinting all tourists. I was tempted to try to remove mine, but, well, that would have required too much pain.

My best airport experience of the trip, as previously reported was in Dunedin, but as it was for a domestic flight it doesn’t really count. My arrival in NZ was quite a mess, but that was mostly due to the boarding desk in Tonga checking me and my luggage the whole way through to Dunedin, even though they weren’t supposed to, as I needed to clear immigration and customs in Auckland first. And having a pot of hot coffee tipped over me by a flight attendant on the connecting flight didn’t help much either, but that’s not really an airport story…

My arrival in Samoa was probably the simplest process of anywhere: the immigration desk was staffed by a very friendly and welcoming woman who seemed positively enthusiastic to see everyone, and customs was a fairly simple “put your bags on this conveyer belt so we can x-ray them” affair. Unfortunately I associate that arrival with the subsequent no-show of the transportation that had been pre-arranged to take me to my accommodation, and the overly aggressive taxi-drivers who volunteered to take me there instead. I was finally rescued by the mini-bus for a neighbouring hotel who then got confused as to where I’d said I was staying proceeded to leave me at a completely different place. Thankfully I noticed that the sign outside it didn’t seem quite right before the driver disappeared.

So I suspect I’m left with Sydney as the best all-round arrival process. There everything flowed incredibly smoothly and quickly, and I was outside looking for a cab quicker than getting off a lot of domestic flights.

Oslo still remains my all-round favourite airport, though. There’s a sense of design and beauty about it that you just don’t see in most airports.

And I’m still a little bemused that Tallinn airport seems to have tripled in size since my departure. I was the second person off the plane, and was very glad I wasn’t the first, as I would have had no clue where to go if I hadn’t been able to just follow someone who had obviously been through it before. We arrived away at the far side of the airport where they punish incoming passengers from the UK and Ireland for being non-Schengen, and they don’t really seem to have managed to put up any signage yet for how to get to anywhere.

I expect that any of the side trips I take over the next few months will be much smoother, however, now that most of Europe is effectively borderless.

So Mint has won the TechCrunch40 award. It’s good to see the world of personal finance software being shaken up again by companies like Mint and Wesabe – it could certainly do with it.

I’ve ranted before (many times, in fact) about how badly business accounting software sucks. I doubt it will surprise anyone if I say that I think that personal finance software is universally terrible too.

Whilst companies like Mint and Wesabe show a lot of promise, and are challenging some of the core assumptions of entrenched software like Microsoft Money and Quicken, I’m not going to hold my breath for them to become particularly useful to me any time soon.

I’m far from the ‘average customer’ for this sort of software, and some of the things I see as absolute requirements are going to be way down the priority list for many other people, but I’ve far too many other things to be expending my efforts on right now to build this myself, so I’m going to throw out my wishlist in the hope that someone, somewhere, might listen.

Firstly, all financial software I’ve seen gets one core fundamental thing completely back to front. They’re all account based. Before I can tell it that I spent some money I have to tell it what bank account or credit card or whatever I used. This is incredibly silly. The primary thing I’m interested in recording and tracking is my overall spending and financial status, not my individual account details – I can already get that information online for each of my accounts. Aggregating the data into one place is mildly useful, but isn’t even particularly important to me, never mind the key focus. I spend money. That that money happens to come from bank account A or B, or credit card X, Y, or Z is secondary at best. Sometimes it comes from several of them, like when I had to buy a replacement laptop recently and the price was higher than my daily limit on one of my bank cards so I had to split it over two. Most software makes me artificially split that into two transactions. It’s not. Deal with it.

This is partially related to the fact that I buy lots of things with cash. Most software lets you run a ‘cash’ account, but they don’t really take it seriously. For me it’s the default position. If I bought something, assume I paid cash. Let me say that actually I put it on a credit or debit card as an optional extra field. The new wave of tools are even worse at this than old ones, as they assume that most of my data entry can be eliminated by importing bank and credit card statements. Whilst that feature is quite nice, it’s only going to get a tiny percentage of the transactions I want to record. And even the ones it does get won’t be as detailed as I want. Because the other overarching difference between me and most users is the level to which I’m anal about data entry. My financial software needs to let me revel in that. I don’t just want to record that I spent €22.19 on groceries at the supermarket. I want line entries for each item. I want to know how much I spent on milk last year.

Trying to eliminate the need for data entry by fetching all my records directly from my bank isn’t going to work for me. I’d rather you put much more effort into making my data entry really fast. You already know from previous transactions that when I say I was shopping at Rimi and bought milk that it cost 9.50 EEK. Auto-completing ‘milk’ as I type it is useful, but you should also be guessing the amount I spent too. If you get it wrong it won’t slow me down from having to type it anyway, but when you get it right it speeds me up. It will also have the useful side-effect of letting me notice much quicker when they put their prices up!

Next: multiple currencies. Most financial software is written by people in the USA, and it shows. At worst it assumes everything is in US$. At best dealing with multiple currencies is usually an add-on, and quite a clumsy one at that. So far this year I’ve bought things in about ten different currencies. My primary bank account is multi-currency. I can have cash in it in about 25 different currencies simultaneously and transfer between them at will. I’ve yet to find any personal finance software that copes with this.

And, again, I shouldn’t have to select a currency before entering something, or, worse, set up a different account for each currency I use: ‘cash (GBP)’, ‘cash (Euro)’, etc. Let me set a default currency that, when I don’t give any more information, will be assumed, and then let me just type €20 or 20 EUR to override it. And by ‘or’ I mean my choice, not yours. Needless to say all the reporting should be able to cope with this. Please don’t tell me that last month I spent 38EEK + €4.20 + £1.19 on milk. Instead give me a proper total in any (i.e. all) of the currencies that I use.

And of course there are language issues too. When I’m entering my grocery shopping in whichever strange country I’m currently spending time, sometimes I can’t remember what one of the things I bought was. That’s OK. Let me enter “päeval seemned” now, and later, let me change it. But it’s important that it remembers, so that the next time I forget it automatically changes it again for me.

Or, alternatively, just let me emulate this myself through a hierarchy of categories. Then I can just put ‘Млеко’ in category ‘milk’ and have everything work itself out. But please don’t restrict me to some arbitrary number of categories for no reason. Or, worse, make me type the entire tree every time. Just let me type ‘Млеко’ and have it autofill the whole way up through milk -> drinks -> groceries, or whatever I’ve set up. In fact, if you implement this right I’ll be able to get even more anal and record the brand of milk too and have it cascade up. And, of course, I should be able to analyse the spending at any level of this tree, with drill down and roll up, over any time period of my choosing. That should go without saying, but you’d be surprised how bad most financial software is at letting you do things that should be obvious.

Being able to add comments to any transaction is fairly standard. Less common is per-line-item comments. What I really want is even fancier still: I want to be able to specify data fields that apply on a per item basis depending on what that item is. So when I buy Fanta at the supermarket I want to be able to say whether it was 1 litre, or 1.5, or 2 or whatever — in a way that lets me later query just how much of the stuff I drink a month. Or the average price I paid per litre. (Did I mention before that I want my financial software to let me be really anal? I mean this much more than you probably imagine!) When I buy books I want fields to magically appear for the author and title, for each book.

Similarly, when I buy dinner at a restaurant, it should prompt me to fill in the tip given. And let me get reports later on which restaurants I tip highest at. And of course it should cope with the scenario where I pay for the bill on my credit card and my dinner companion(s) gives me cash. And with me then marking my share of that bill as been a work related expense, and let me balance that off later against a particular repayment. With reports in the meantime of all my unclaimed and unpaid expenses, of course.

And, whilst we’re on balancing things off, don’t assume that all transactions happen instantaneously. Most systems aren’t as great as the Estonian ones. When I pay off a UK credit card from a UK bank account the money leaves my account on one date, and usually doesn’t reach my credit card until 3 or 4 days later. Yes, I want that to just be entered as one transaction, but I’d like it to be able to have different dates at each end, please. And the same for fees. Transferring money between different bank accounts in different countries often incurs fees at each end. I want to enter all that as one transaction, and just have the right thing happen. But that’s close to impossible in the account-based systems I’ve already ranted here about.

Lastly, my perennial bugbear of corporate accounting applies here too. I want to be able to apply a useful lifespan to certain things I buy. Unlike corporate software, in personal finance this shouldn’t be a default position. I don’t want to depreciate my carton of milk over three days, or assign a daily value to it. I’m not quite that anal yet. But I do want to say that the DVD player I bought lasted for 18 months. Or that my new phone should last me at least 12 months before I upgrade. (And of course correct this later when I don’t actually replace it for 15 months.) Then I can have the normal reports on both a purely cash in/out basis, and also something closer to a company’s P&L that pretends I paid for the DVD player at £5 a month rather than all up front. Done properly that gives a much better picture of my real spending, rather than having everything appear to fluctuate wildly every month based on a variety of non-recurring purchases.

Very little of this should be difficult. There aren’t really any complex algorithms here, and even the tricky UI issues (changing input fields based on other ones) are commonplace in major Ajax toolkits these days. It’s all just a Small Matter of Programming. Any takers?

Update 25/9: Yesterday I bought a bus ticket in София for €10 + 5lv (to clear out my Bulgarian currency before leaving). I know of no personal finance software that will allow me to enter that transaction.

Update 2009: More on this.

Ed is curious as to whether A-Z of browser URL auto-completion can reveal any insight. So, let’s see:

• A = http://antispam.kasei.com/
• B = http://bitmetv.org/
• C = http://craigslist.org/
• D = http://dohop.com/
• E = http://en.wikipedia.org/
• F = http://facebook.com/
• G = http://google.com/
• H = http://hanza.net/
• I = http://iii.co.uk/
• J = http://jwz.livejournal.com/
• K = http://kayak.com/
• L = http://last.fm/
• M = http://maps.google.co.uk/
• N = http://needahotel.com/
• O = http://oanda.com/
• P = http://priceline.com/
• Q = http://qantas.com.au/
• R = http://reddit.com/
• S = http://seb.ee/
• T = http://thegreatescapade.com/
• U = http://use.perl.org/
• V = http://vienna.yapceurope.org/
• W = http://wexas.com/
• X = http://xkcd.com/
• Y = http://yourmaninindia.com/
• Z = nothing at all

Approximately half of those are directly or indirectly related to travel, which is of little surprise as today as my last day in Estonia.

It’s been absolutely fantastic living here, and I think I’ve managed to successfully detox from the poison that is living in the UK. This became very clear when I was in London for EuSpRIG in July, and was completely overwhelmed by just how many signs there were everywhere telling me all the things I wasn’t allowed to do. And then, later, when the Toaster came to visit, and I got to watch him flounder outside his normal environs, I got to marvel at just how pervasive the poison has become, even within those are aware and actively resist it.

But, for a variety of complex residency issues, it’s time to move on. Tomorrow I fly to Vienna for YAPC::Europe (See ‘V’, above), and then at the end of the week I’m off to Скопје for a while. Macedonia appear to be trying to reinvent themselves as the new Estonia, the government are making a lot of the right noises (10% flat rate income tax!), and the technology infrastructure is, rather bizarrely, amongst the best in the world (100% wifi coverage across the whole country). So I’d like to see first hand what it’s like down there, below the Germanic divide. (Although I’m not looking forward to the 40ºC heat.)

After that I plan to chase the light by flying south for the winter. The travel bug has bitten hard: so far this year I’ve spent time in Estonia, California, Northern Ireland, Finland, Norway, Slovakia, England, and Sweden. With Austria and Macedonia already scheduled for this month, I should easily meet my goal of one new country a month. I see no reason why I can’t keep that up for at least another year or two.

I’ve almost, but not quite, managed to reduce my possessions to one suitcase full. I plan to offload a few more things in Vienna to achieve that target. Even though I marvelled at how liberating it was to declutter before moving here, in the 8 months I’ve been here, I’ve still managed to accumulate too much stuff again. (Mostly books. I tried to give lots of them away for free on Facebook, but to marginal success. The rest I gave away to the fantastic little second-hand bookshop just south of Town Hall Square who couldn’t believe I didn’t want any money for them.) Hopefully as I pick up the pace of travel, I’ll manage to keep my ‘stuff’ to a minimum. Really, I don’t need very much other than a laptop and some changes of clothes.

The life of the global nomad beckons.

On Monday night I was booked on an Easyjet flight from Belfast to London, and then another from London to Tallinn on Tuesday morning. Inbetween times I had arranged to stay with MWK. As my new life has encouraged me to massively trim back on the amount of stuff I own, I decided to arrive not just with gifts for his children, and some Finnish liquorice pipes and Moomin lollipops, but also a whole bunch of crazy books that I thought needed a better home than just a charity shop.

I realised that if was going to be able to deliver everything I wanted, I’d be over my luggage allowance, so I decided to be pro-active and book an extra stowed bag via the Easyjet website.

Suitably pre-arranged, I arrived at Belfast Airport to discover that my 42kg wasn’t just a little over my 2 x 20kg limit (but hey, no big deal, I can put a few extra things in my hand luggage if they’re really going to be picky), but a lot over my 1 x 20kg limit.

It took me a while to work out what they were saying, as it just sounded so completely insane. Even after the ensuing fight with the check-in attendant, I had to go confirm it with their ticket desk, as it couldn’t possibly be true.

But, indeed, scarily it is.

If you pre-book extra bags (the website helpfully allows you to purchase room for between 1 and 8 extra), you are indeed allowed to check in extra bags. But … you can’t actually put anything in them!

Well, that’s not technically true. You can move some of the stuff that would otherwise have been in your first bag into them, but you can’t put anything extra into them. Your weight allowance remains fixed at 20kg. Anything above that is still charged at £5/kg.

So, if you had gone on a huge spending spree and availed of their generous “8 extra bags” offer, the only thing you’re really buying is the ability to ensure that none of your bags weighs more than 2.2kg. If you actually arrived at the airport mistakenly thinking that you had bought an extra weight allowance, your now filled extra bags would cost you an extra £800.

The Easyjet staff were obnoxiously smug about this, in a “Wahey! We’ve caught out another idiot” way, explaining with glee that the website explains all this clearly.

I guess it does, if you make sure you read the small print, have a degree in advanced logic, and have a lawyer’s mind that knows that just because you’ve paid extra money for something, it doesn’t mean that what you’re going to get is what you actually wanted, and thought you were buying.

I get paid to program computers. I should have known better. But pick an average person on the street and try to explain the difference between “all bags must weigh less than 20kg” and “each bag must weigh less than 20kg”. I’m having a really hard time believing that Easyjet aren’t being deliberately obnoxious here, knowing that the vast majority of people will arrive at the airport and have no choice but to pay the extra fee.

But they’ve now joined KLM on my list of airlines never to fly on unless there’s absolutely no alternative.

Having driven most of my friends insane over the last few years with my continuous ranting about what a terrible place the UK was becoming under a government who was seemingly dedicated to overthrowing three hundred years of rights in the course of a single decade, I decided I’d like to try living somewhere else for a while. To paraphrase Martin Fowler slightly, “if you can’t change your country, change your country”.

When I started looking in earnest for a suitable candidate, Estonia kept popping up as a serious contender, which surprised me slightly as all I really knew about it I’d learned from Eurovision! But the more I read the more I decided it was the place to relocate to for a while, and a visit in October sealed it.

So, as of this week, I am now resident in Tallinn. I’ve created a new blog at http://eek.tmtm.com/ for those who want to keep up with the more mundane details.

I’m sure Ed will be able to keep me adequately informed as to the important details of what’s going wrong back home, but at least for now my despair in that regard can become a little more abstract.

hfb writes about the driving in Boston. I only had a car when I was in California, so I didn’t encounter the drivers in Boston. I did however encounter the parking. In South Boston everyone double parks. I even saw the occassional triple-parking. But one night a brave cop decided to start ticketing cars that were double parked. This was entertainment at its best. One driver tried explaining that he had parked like this for twenty years without a problem. Most of the others just stood transfixed to the spot, mouths agape, seemingly wondering just what they were doing wrong.