Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead. Freed from the Shackles of Timeslips

Ok, I’ve been using TimeSlips for project based billing since the DOS days before the web existed and we’ve always had a love-hate relationship.  Actually usually it was usually hate-hate. The interface felt clunky. Even after 15 years of use there were things I could never remember how to do.  Maybe it’s me, you say? Well Barb hated it with a passion as well.  Back when LineSight, Inc. was using TimeSlips Remote it caused us a never ending stream of pain, but we couldn’t find anything better.  We dropped TSRemote for the desktop version,  but billing day never rose to the happy day it should be.

I just got a new machine and vowed not to defile its pristine drive with the dreaded TimeSlips. The hunt was on.  We weren’t asking for much:

• A Simple, clean interface.
• The ability to define clients, projects and timekeepers who are either employees or consultants without sitting through training and changing our business model.
• The ability to enter time after-the-fact, or in a “meter is running” fashion from whatever device we happen to be on.
• The ability to easily see how much un-billed time we have.
• The ability to easily create invoices.
• We’re cheap.  This needs to FLOSS or pretty darn inexpensive.

A couple of years ago we helped a client with about 120 remote employees select Journyx, but that was also far to complicated for our needs.  Same for Replicon.  We did a quick survey of the FLOSS options available and churned through the Wikipedia comparison chart.

Ultimately we stumbled on Harvest. It seems to fit the bill perfectly. Within about 1o minutes we had all of our clients, active projects, tasks, and timekeepers entered.  Ok, Barb is going to  go back and cut-and-paste client addresses, but really we’re good to go.

We both installed  Windows 7 desktop widget installed and Voila !  We’re in business & all set on our 30 day trial.   More as the trial progresses…

For as long as I can remember I've spent most of my days solving problems I didn't know I had when I woke up in the morning. I've also liked pepper. On Monday, a casual mention of "Ubuntu Linux " in a magazine sent me off downloading software to burn ISO images (CDBurnerXP Pro ) so that I could install this great new gift on a PC abandoned by my father. In my small home office I'm currently running Windows 2000, Win XP, Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.6, and am usually connected to a CentOs 4.6 machine and a hand full of Win2k servers. Since Ubuntu Linux is "linux for human beings", I thought I'd give it a go. No dice. Three quarters of the way through the boot process something would hang, and after multiple attempts I gave up, and surrendered a small portion of my humanity. Along the way I downloaded a new version of bittorrent , and the latest build of Fedora Core 9. What the heck.

It's been dawning on me lately that simple things might actually work better. I believe the exact moment of this epiphany was when I was trying to build an Asterix box for the house. Our 2.4GHz cordless phones (or our neighbors) were knocking out the linksys WRT54G wireless routers I have scattered around. Something called "Asterix @ Home" (now called trixbox ) beckoned. Our home would have it's own multi-line VOIP server connecting us to the world. I just needed a Plain old phone to test some wiring. A trip to Family Dollar and $7 later and I had a working phone that sported a callerID display and a bunch of programmable buttons. That's when it hit me: My little family dollar phone had no power supply, no configuring, no patches, no upgrades, and unlike the VOIP box, it got a dial tone. A miracle, and for less that 10 bucks. Now I've freed up another machine to try to install Ubuntu on. No, wait.

Our new house has a postage stamp sized lawn. My move to simplicity really started a a bit over a year ago, a couple weeks after we moved in. The grass was growing. Not wanting to be the scourge of the neighborhood I set out to find a lawnmower. I would also need a gas can. Since, we don't have a garage, we'd need a shed to store the mower and the gas can. There were some very cool shed designs in an old issue of popular mechanics at the library, but the grass was really getting up there.

I'm now the proud owner of a 1930's vintage Montgomery Ward Reel lawnmower. It's been lovingly cared for by my 90 year old neighbor since it's original purchase, and since he has three others he thought $30 was a fair price. The lawn looks great. It takes about 10 minutes to cut. The mower fits nicely under the porch wrapped in garbage bags. Spray the blades of a reel mower with Pledge furniture polish, not 10W40 and the grass won't stick. It's simple. It was cheap. It works as well or better that its complicated cousins.

That brings me back to pepper. I've always loved the stuff. As a kid I thought it was great when waiters in restaurants would come around with giant pepper grinders. Great fun. I've had a succession of cool looking grinders, all of which disappeared during the move. A crisis. Must. Have. Pepper. This lead to the $1.39 cent purchase of the above picture "Best Yet" pepper. Amazingly enough, this stuff comes pre ground ! And ground to a powdery fine wonderful consistency never attained by any of my fancy grinders. And the taste…who knew? Chicken soup suddenly tastes like Grandma's.

I'm sold. Simple is the way it should be.

I’d pretty much sworn off Chinese food after a series of run-ins with the super-buffet’s common in the Midwest, and probably elsewhere. Our eastward move to a teeny tiny town has left us with damn few culinary options. After nearly a year, I wandered into Ming Moon, a strip mall restaurant squeezed in between the Rite-Aid and a Verizon store, and it was a beautiful thing.

Fast forward six months and I’ve eaten my way through half the menu and, but for the fried dumplings (don’t let them sit for an hour in a truck and then eat 8 of them), I’ve been in moo-shoo, won-ton glory.

Last week I found their 100lb secret yummy ingredient, sitting right there for all to see. Had I known that all these years it was not MSG that was making me feel all itchy and odd, but inferior MSG, oh the time I could have saved. Like bad drugs cut with rat poison, inferior MSG is ruining perfectly good evenings the world over.

And I’ll bet this is just the beginning…