Thursday, June 20, 2019 • 1 min read
We have a new blog for our adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler, MV Indiscretion. We’re leaving soon for a trip through the San Juan Islands, the Canadian Gulf Islands, and up through British Columbia to Desolation Sound in two weeks. We’ll post stories and pictures from our voyage on the new website. Hope you will check it out!
Here’s the link:
Fair winds!
Friday, April 5, 2019 • 2 min read
I’m writing this tonight from the settee of Indiscretion’s wheelhouse — one hell of a place to put down words. It’s just past twilight now, and I’ve turned on the red courtesy lights that provide just enough glow to see my surroundings, but not enough to spoil vision while voyaging at night. Ahead of me lie the helm chair, the ship’s wheel and the wrap-around pilothouse windows that look out over the bow and Quartermaster Marina.
From my perch, I can take in a wide swath of the lighted marina as it shifts from the gusting north wind that buffets the stern and starboard quarter, twisting and turning the boat so that the view is endlessly moving, as are all the other boats ahead and around me. A loose halyard slaps on a sailboat’s mast off to starboard. Waves lap along the hull. Indiscretion’s dock lines creak and groan from the pressure of the wind, the sounds softened from the heavy insulation of Nordhavn construction. The slapping halyard somehow beats in time with the rhythm of the country music playing on the radio.
When I was ten, my new step-dad took me out on a commercial fishing boat, the Nushagak, which had a roughshod version of this pilothouse. Wires dangled from above the helm and giant charts covered the navigation station — more like Hemingway’s Pilar than this modern trawler. I remember a feeling of complete enthrallment aboard her, the unique smells aboard a fishing boat, the steady vibration of the engine felt through my feet, the swells making my movement unsure, and the dawning recognition that we could point her bow further offshore, chugging along inside that windowed world, and leave the world of land life astern.
On the hundreds of nights we spent on sailboats, we stayed belowdecks on the hook or at dock. But in a trawler, the promise of adventure tugs at you day and night from the beckoning pilothouse windows. It would be so easy (and comfortable!) to slip the dock lines and go. Or stay and plot out the next passage or port, while taking in the beautiful surroundings, and dreaming of more distant ports.
In all my years of sailing, I rarely felt the same sense of belonging as I do on Indiscretion, particularly here in the wheelhouse, like coming home and discovering an unfound door of childhood dreams.
Saturday, March 23, 2019 • 8 min read
When we purchased Indiscretion late last summer, we knew we needed help in getting to know our new vessel, the systems on board, and in particular, maneuvering her 60,000 pounds around docks and other boats. Coming from a smaller and lighter sailboat, operating this trawler was a whole new experience for us.
To our delight, we had the best teacher possible: Don Kohlmann from the Seattle office of Nordhavn spent a full day with us on the water, showing us first hand how to operate the boat, along with a detailed review of all its systems. Don is a terrific teacher and an all-around wonderful person. I don’t believe I’ve connected as quickly with another soul - part mentor, brother, and best friend. Getting to work with Don is one of the fringe benefits of buying a Nordhavn trawler.
Indiscretion has bow and stern thrusters — joysticks at the helm that magically allow you to turn the bow or stern in the direction you want to move. From my sailing days, I admit I was entranced with the notion of these thrusters. It felt like cheating to be able to spin the boat in this way after all the years of gliding a sailboat into a slip on momentum and prayer. And backing a sailboat in any direction was always an adventure. I certainly could have used such a thruster system a time or two over the years.
During our sea trial and later on-the-water training, I noticed Don seldom used the thrusters, trusting instead the prop-walk and prop-wash afforded by the ship’s propeller and rudder.
“Why not use the thrusters?” I asked as we left the dock and again as we returned, eying the beautiful little joysticks at the helm.
“You don’t need them, and you really shouldn’t rely on them, especially with this trawler’s big propeller,” Don counseled.
I heard none of this. This new trawler had bow and stern thrusters, and I was going to use them, dammit.
You might sense where this is going.
Once we had the boat moored at our home port of Quartermaster Marina, we were keen to take trips before summer finally ran out on us. With all of us aboard and all systems ready, I would confidently back the boat out of the slip. Any strong wind, which would tend to blow our light sailboat around, had little effect on this big trawler, giving me a greater sense of control and confidence. But then the damnedest thing would happen: as I turned the wheel to port, intending to back that way, the boat would turn to starboard.
“Wow, this boat has a powerful prop walk to starboard,” I said to myself from my perch on the flybridge. Our last sailboat had a similar issue, and it was almost impossible to back to port. “No worries,” I thought. “I have thrusters,” as I pressed the joystick, spun the stern around, and headed on our way. This same sequence repeated every time I left our marina.
A few trips later, I found myself backing out of Dock Street Marina in Tacoma. I was looking forward to this maneuver because it required backing to starboard — clearly the boat’s preferred backing angle. It was a windy morning, and I was a little nervous as a new captain, noting the wind waves on the water and the flags flapping along the quay. Everyone climbed aboard, the dock lines were retrieved, and I backed out of the slip into the fairway. People seem drawn to these Nordhavn trawlers, and a group assembled on the docks to watch us depart. I turned the wheel to starboard, smiling to myself, and the boat started turning to port. What the … ?! I gave her a little more throttle, and the boat turned faster to port, heading in the wrong direction with the wind soon pushing her further off course.
I quickly started firing thrusters, both bow and stern, like phasers and photon torpedos on a starship under attack from the Klingons, and eventually positioned the boat to safely exit the fairway, but not without first rubbing a neighboring dock and suffering the scorn of a handful of fellow boaters standing out on their bows, clearly nervous at my wayward meanderings. My confidence at docking this boat was severely compromised.
I downplayed this to my first mate Lisa, suggesting the wind was just a little too much that day, but I was concerned.
The holidays came and went, and there were a few opportunities for winter cruises that I found reasons to skip. In each case, the marine forecast showed too much wind, and I was worried about docking mishaps, especially when such basic maneuvers as backing to port or starboard seemed to elude my capabilities as skipper. I hated having to rely on those damned thrusters, which honestly aren’t that great when the wind is blowing. Since these trawlers are meant for serious open ocean passages, I knew the problem lied with me; I must be doing something wrong.
We took the boat out for an afternoon a few weeks ago for the sole purpose of figuring out this weird backing problem, something we should have done in our first week. I backed out of the slip and turned the wheel to port. The boat slowly turned to starboard — not the direction we needed to go. I took a breath and turned the wheel to starboard, gave her some reverse throttle, and she gracefully turned to port.
So here’s the thing: in all my years of sailing, I know that backing a boat is tricky. You need to have a certain amount of luck and gumption and physics to make it work, particularly in strong winds. One certainty on a sailboat is you must turn the rudder in the direction you want to go. If you want to back to port, you turn the rudder to port. This is as basic as which way you rotate the handlebars of your bicycle or the direction you unscrew your gas cap.
And yet, in this new trawler universe, the physics of backing is somehow reversed. Starboard turns to port, left becomes right, and Spock is evil and wears a beard. My brain hurt.
I motored out into the middle of Quartermaster Harbor and stopped the boat. I practiced backing the boat and confirmed what I had begun to suspect. Putting the helm hard over to port and backing down, the boat will pivot to starboard. She will equally rotate to port with the rudder hard over to starboard. In fact, with a little jockeying of forward and reverse, the boat will spin in a tight circle, in either direction, though in an opposite way from my years of experience aboard sailboats.
Don’s first-day advice came back to me as I continued these maneuvers, eventually heading over to Dockton Marina where I practiced approaching the public dock from different angles. If I gave up my preconceived notion of which way to turn the helm in reverse, the boat performed flawlessly.
As usual, Lisa got the idea more quickly than I did. “Just steer the bow,” she yelled up from the cockpit. With this mindset, it all clicked, and maneuvering became dead simple. I found that Indiscretion’s large propeller and rudder provide amazing slow-speed maneuverability, even better than thrusters. Near the dock with the stern kicked out, turning the helm to port with a burst of throttle in forward gear (“steer the bow!”), the stern will pivot as if by magic to starboard.
I realize now I should have spent more time listening to Don on that first day on the water. In later discussions with other trawler captains, I’ve learned that the force of water from the big propeller against an angled rudder creates a powerful sideways thrust that is incredibly helpful when docking or maneuvering. I used this new-found knowledge on a recent trip and found my new mastery of this ship near docks and other boats damn satisfying. And relieving.
Once I accepted this change in the laws of boat-steering physics, it made me wonder what other deep-rooted beliefs I hold about the world that are patently untrue under a different set of circumstances.
I recall driving in Ireland when everything seemed backward. I sat on the right side of the car, with the stick shift in my left hand, while driving in the left lane of the road. Even the brakes on bicycles in Ireland are reversed. Talk about a challenge to long-held preconceived notions.
I think the lesson here is two-fold: first, I recognize I still have a lot to learn as a new captain of this beautiful trawler, and I will do my best to continue my crawl up this steep curve. And second, I need to be more open-minded and flexible in my thinking, both afloat and ashore, to make sure I don’t turn into an older dog that can’t learn new tricks. Life can surprise you at just about any age.
Friday, March 15, 2019 • 3 min read
Indiscretion, our Nordhavn trawler, has a Maretron onboard computer system which monitors most of the vital components aboard the vessel. From a display at the helm or master stateroom, I can review the wind speed outside, fuel, water and holding tank levels, state of the batteries, engine temperature, rudder angle, water depth, etc.
The system even has cell service and can text me when some parameter falls outside of normal, like this text I received at 2 am, indicating a low battery:
Let me say this first: I think it’s damn cool that my boat can send me a text. Second, I’m a heavy sleeper, and I didn’t receive this until I woke around 6 am. By the time I arrived at the boat 15 minutes later, the batteries were critically low.
I spent all morning checking shore power connections, contorting my body into various electrical cabinets and lockers, trying to figure out why the boat wasn’t connecting to power. I started the generator to charge up the batteries to buy time. I searched the internet and the Nordhavn owners group forums. I calculated how long I could run the generator before running low on fuel. I began to grow desperate.
Lisa called at noon.
“Did you figure out what’s wrong?” She asked. Her voice sounded perky and rested.
“Not yet. Did you need something?” I wanted coffee and answers — not more questions.
“Did you look in the owner’s manual? They have some pretty good instructions on the electrical system,” she offered.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course I looked at the manual. And the Nordhavn Owners Group. And I’ve searched everywhere on the internet. I don’t know what’s wrong. The damn charger’s probably broken,” I sighed.
“Do you want me to come down there and help you?” She asked.
“No.”
She could probably hear me banging a cabinet door shut, and sensed I wasn’t in a talkative mood. She let me go.
To be honest, I hadn’t looked in the owner’s manual. Who does that? Since I had run out of better ideas, I pulled out the thick binder from its resting place under the pilothouse settee. I flipped through the book until I found the electrical section, and my eyes were drawn to a bolded typeface section describing a set of A/C breakers in the master stateroom’s medicine cabinet. One of these breakers was tripped. I would never have found this hidden panel in my haphazard search. Once reset, everything came back to life.
I had a couple more late night texts from the boat over the following week, each easily resolved, but I still didn’t know what was tripping the system. It turned out I had plugged our winter space heater into a different outlet during a cabin cleaning session which had trouble handling the voltage and would intermittently trip the breaker. Once I changed outlets, the texts stopped coming.
Lesson: read the manual. And buy your first mate flowers.
Friday, March 8, 2019 • 2 min read
Lisa and I attended a training session at Northern Lights in Ballard, the company that manufactured Indiscretion’s engine and generator. This one-day “Captain’s Course” is taught by Bob Senter, a respected authority on practically everything within the engine room of a trawler.
It was a pleasure to meet Bob and take in some of his knowledge throughout the day. We also got to meet about a dozen other captains, many of whom owned Nordhavns.
Lisa was the only female in a large group of middle aged men, but never hesitated to ask questions or engage with the discussions. Here she is changing a fuel filter on a Diesel engine near the end of the day:
As a CPA and finance professional, I must have attended hundreds of training events in my career, but I swear none were as enjoyable or engaging as this engine class. Partly this was because I was learning something so completely new to me, but really I think these other fine captains made the day so great. Almost immediately, I found myself among fast friends with common interests, all with a thirst for adventure — so refreshing in a training event.
We have a two-day follow-up training session in May to soak up additional engine knowledge from Mr. Senter and meet more of our fellow trawler captains. We chose to hold off on this more intensive engine training until we had a chance to muck around on the boat and get a better sense of what we needed to learn after operating her for a while. This turned out to be a good idea as we have learned a lot these past six months, some of it the good old fashioned hard way.
Monday, January 28, 2019 • 7 min read
I spent last weekend in Las Vegas to attend my niece’s Little White Chapel wedding on the Strip. Frequent flier miles paid for our tickets, placing us in the far back of the plane. On the way home to Seattle, my family took the whole row on the port side of the aircraft, while I settled into the opposite aisle seat. A couple soon appeared and clambered into the seats next to mine. They had flown down for the weekend to see Billy Idol perform and were on their way back home.
I felt my seat grow a little smaller as I wedged my body and gear inside the proper confines of my aisle seat. I’ve flown in a lot of middle seats in my life. Those armrests go with the seat-bearer. Trust me on that.
The woman, dressed in sensible travel clothes, sat in the window seat and soon busied herself with a book. Her companion, fitted out in trim, athletic apparel, was personable enough upon introduction, but soon fell silent, back straight, eyes open and staring forward. Unmoving.
Before every plane trip, I make sure I bring along enough distractions to keep me occupied for the duration of the nerve-rattling tin can captivity of air travel. While I’ve flown nearly a million miles over my life, most of it shuttling between airports and corporate conference rooms, I still maintain an unshakable dread of flying. I’ve woken from nightmares of being stuck in the middle seat of a plane with nothing to read. Seriously.
In the old days, to take my mind off the jolts of turbulence, I weighted down my bag with two or three books and a couple newspapers, along with an ample supply of work projects. For this particular trip, I brought my Kindle with a newly begun 1,000-page novel, an iPad loaded with the day’s Wall Street Journal, a movie and a few episodes of a TV show I’m following, and an iPhone with 300 hours of music and a slew of games. Pair all this with noise-canceling headphones, and I carried more entertainment gear than the tiny seat back pocket could accommodate — my electronically-insulated cocoon.
While the man beside me continued his meditative trance, bugging the shit out of me, I considered my obsession with keeping busy on planes. I try to meditate every day, but I cannot imagine a two and a half hour meditation while hurtling along at 34,000 feet in intermittent turbulence. Taking a car ferry every day like I do is far more dangerous than flying, based on the data. Yet I need something at hand to occupy my mind in any confined space, especially a multi-hour strapped-in plane ride.
I thought this fellow, in his enthusiasm for seeing Billy Idol, must have forgotten to bring along reading material. You know, rushing out the door with your bags and tickets, excited for the bright lights of Vegas and to see a beloved entertainer. This can be forgiven. I think. But wait. The Airline Magazine was resting at eye level in the seat-back 11 inches from his direct line of sight. Did he ever flip through it, even as a diversion? No, he did not.
My air travel anxiety began even before I made that walk down the gangway to board my first flight. When I was seven, my mom shared a story with me about a strange feeling she had at the gate before boarding a plane to Guam when she was in her early twenties. At the last minute, she followed her instincts and decided not to board. The plane crashed with all passengers lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A horrifying event. Looking back now, I don’t think this actually happened to my mom. I think she made the whole thing up after reading about something similar in the National Enquirer or watching a TV show on ESP. I can’t ask her now, but even if it wasn’t true, it instilled a healthy fear of flying in me at an impressionable age.
Then, in my teens during my short-lived boxing career, Chuck Robinson, a 17-year-old welterweight, two years my senior, made it on the Muhammad Ali Boxing Team all the way from our little small-town Washington state boxing program. He got to spar with the great one himself at Ali’s gym in Santa Monica. Chuck was an exceptional athlete, and to me and many others, a real local hero. He and 13 other amateur boxers flew to Europe in the Spring of 1980 to compete in the qualifiers for the 1980 Olympics - a dream of mine and near reality for Chuck. Somewhere over Warsaw, the aircraft suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and spiraled out of control for 26 seconds before crashing. The muscles and tendons between wrist and forearm of most of the athletes were severed on impact, suggesting these young men were awake and gripping their seats at the time of the crash. The plane disintegrated as it plowed into the ground, killing all 87 aboard.
Wreckage of LOT Polish Airlines Flight 7
I think about Chuck and that awful half-minute of terror every time I fly.
As I considered my seatmate, I realize the two of us must exist on separate ends of a personality spectrum. Me, with with my gadgets sprawled on my lap as we taxied down the runway, intent on distracting myself from the potential of immediate demise; he, with his zen-like serenity, oblivious to the unnatural motion and angle as we made our ascent to the heavens, only to plummet to our deaths should one of a hundred possible mechanical failures present itself.
When the drink cart rolled through after a rough bit of turbulence, I ordered a beer, maybe my last, I reasoned. He took only water.
Near the end of the flight, I stole a glance his way, sure to find him asleep, perhaps a spot of drool pooled on his fitted microfiber shirt. But no, I saw his eyes were open and intently focused .... on nothing. I turned away, abashed. A part of me wanted to be like him, to be relaxed and calm, to be present, even during this suspended limbo of plane travel, maybe crafting a beautiful sonnet or the perfect line of code as he stared at the seat back ahead of him. Yet, at that moment I found myself hating him. His smugness and self-assuredness. His straight spine and posture. His stillness.
After the plane landed safely and people began the slow disembarkment ahead of us, we exchanged pleasantries. Welcome home, I said. You too, he said. That must have been some show, I said. He and his companion smiled and nodded. I helped take down their bags from the overhead compartment.
While we waited our turn to leave the plane, I wondered again at my nervousness of air travel. Do I need all these distractions underway, or am I obscuring an opportunity at more profound personal enlightenment to fully experience the present moment and embrace the wonderful but temporary life we have been given? Maybe this man has the right of it.
I looked around and found entire rows of people with their heads pointed down, intent on their tiny screens, catching up on what they had missed in our three-hour sojourn from tarmac to tarmac. The siren song of voicemail and text message pings filled the stale air of the plane all around me like the sounds of a pinball machine. I was not alone in this constant need for distraction.
As I followed my seatmate and his companion up the aisle, I vowed to myself: next time, I will face down my demons and experience the joy and terror of the moment even as we careen and jostle through the skies above.
Writing this from the Alaska Airlines Boardroom as I await my flight to San Francisco, I have already broken that promise. I would save a child from a burning building, but I won’t board a plane without a well-stocked iPad.
In my acceptance of these shortcomings, I tip my hat to the well-found soul in seat 34B.
Sunday, January 6, 2019 • 10 min read
See my Quicken 2020 for Mac Review for the most recent review.
I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989, making this my 30th anniversary with the program. Though I started on a Mac, and use a Mac today, the vast majority of my use has been on Windows. A little over two years ago, I switched to the Mac version of Quicken which I wrote about here.
As I wrote then, I had very high expectations for the Mac version under new leadership, independent of Intuit, and the financial benefit of a new subscription-based business model. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version of Quicken, Quicken 2019 for Mac.
I began my career in public accounting, and while I no longer provide accounting or auditing services to clients, I am still a licensed Certified Public Accountant here in the state of Washington. My finances mirror those of many mid-life families: a half-dozen investment and retirement accounts, college savings accounts, a home, etc., though working for a publicly-traded company these past twenty years has also allowed me direct experience with stock options, restricted stock units, and a variety of employee benefit programs that follow that kind of employment. I’ve always tried to be disciplined when it comes to money, a natural-born planner, and I’m comfortable managing my own finances. With this background and financial situation, I have had many opportunities to evaluate and tug on the boundaries of Quicken as a personal finance program, particularly on this evolving Mac version of the software.
For most of my time on Quicken, I used the Windows flagship version of the program. I switched over to Mac for most things about 15 years ago, except for Quicken which initially wasn’t available at all, and early versions were either too basic or too buggy. I had to run Windows virtually inside a Mac which was a hassle, so I was eager to move to the native version of Quicken. Each year I would await the latest incarnation for the Mac, only to be disappointed by the one-star feedback of early adopters on the Mac App Store. I finally took the leap in 2016 after Quicken 2017 for the Mac was released, and initial feedback was mildly positive for the first time. I planned to run parallel systems between Mac and Windows, but that became too much effort, so in January 2017, I switched entirely to Quicken Premiere for the Mac. I chose the high-end version because I needed the investment accounting and tracking features.
Let me be clear about something before I get into what’s changed in the latest version of Quicken. While I take issue with how slowly the Mac version has developed, particularly in light of the abilities of its Windows counterpart, Quicken is still superior to any other personal finance program on the Mac if you need robust investment tracking. There may be better cash flow and budgeting software (Banktivity and YNAB, for example), but these apps fall short, in my view, of keeping tabs on the intricate accounting treatment for the variety of obscure transactions that flow from owning stocks, mutual funds, stock options, and employer-granted restricted stock. For this type of financial management, Quicken is still the only personal finance software game in town.
Quicken 2019 for Mac was released with little fanfare in November 2018. Since I purchased a 20-month subscription to Quicken Premiere last year during an Amazon.com Black Friday sale, updates like the 2019 edition have been provided at no additional charge. I didn’t even notice the name had changed since it came through as a regular software update.
The software saw a half-dozen meaningful updates throughout 2018, suggesting the annual renaming to a new year is more marketing than substance these days. So, the improvements I’ll note here relate to software updates during all of 2018 vs. just since the 2019 rebranding.
Performance. Last year, I complained of performance delays when switching investment views and exiting this program. These lags have mostly been corrected. Quicken claims that portions of the program are four times faster in 2019. Opening and closing the program is much quicker, and, while I still see the occasional beachball icon when viewing investments, the overall program seems faster and more responsive. I’m using a newer iMac to run Quicken, so your mileage may vary, but my experience has been positive.
Investment Tracking and Analysis. Long a sore spot on the Mac, investment tracking and analysis continued to see updates in 2018. It’s been a while now since I’ve used the Windows version of Quicken, but I no longer feel like I lack analysis features for my investments. I can view investment returns by class of investment (stocks, bonds, cash, other), security, holding period, etc., and drill into lots of purchases for my original cost basis, current gain or loss, and most recent market changes. I’ve read reports that others are still having difficulty with accurate investment return results, but in my case, it’s working flawlessly. This is a big deal to me, and it’s nice to see the improvements Quicken made to the Mac platform.
New Export Capabilities. I have complained about the lack of decent reporting in Quicken for Mac and will discuss that more in the next section, but some of this has been mitigated by Quicken’s new export to Excel functions which are available in more areas now, including investments. This allows you to copy data out of Quicken into a spreadsheet for analysis and reporting. I’ve used this function for the past two years in creating my own “Budget to Actual” report in Excel, but now you can do this with a lot more of your financial data. I was never all that happy with even the most robust reporting available in Quicken’s legacy Windows product and found myself using this copy/paste function a lot to do my own report creation and analysis. Not everyone will use this functionality, but for Excel nerds, it’s a handy addition.
Reporting Improvements. Reports in Quicken for Mac finally gained the basic and longstanding Windows capability of drilling down to transaction-level detail. The details open in a new window which can be customized and saved as its own report, or exported to Excel. This will be a much-used feature as I prepare my taxes this year. I wish a Budget to Actual report were available in the Mac version, as this drill-down capability would be a big help in more quickly identifying the source of budget variances. Maybe next year.
Other Updates. The Quicken data file is now encrypted on your hard drive, so long as you are using a password to access it. In reading the software release notes, Quicken made some improvements to other areas of the program, but most all of these slipped by me unnoticed. If you use the Bill-Pay feature, things are cleaned up and more intuitive to use. I was flummoxed by the complexity of this service when I first tried it and stopped using it even though it’s a free service as a Premiere subscriber. I feel more confident in paying my bills through my bank’s Bill-Pay feature than Quicken’s offering. This has improved allegedly, though I haven’t tried it again.
Reporting, Particularly Against Budget. Reporting in the Mac version of Quicken has improved a little, but not near enough. As I mentioned, I still can’t get a report of my income and expense against budget, a staple of the Windows version and basic financial management. Instead, you get a bizarre on-screen visualization of budget performance for the month, or an unwieldy 12 month stacked grid, neither of which I find at all useful. A software engineer without any financial sense must have put these views together. As a workaround, I export actual and budget figures out of Quicken to create a proper actual vs. budget report in Excel. I’ve automated this the best I can, but still takes a time each month to update references and labels, and once in Excel, loses its interactivity and drill-down capability.
Quirky Transaction Download Errors Every time I do an online update of my accounts, I receive the same throttling error for a random set of accounts with my primary bank. I have a half-dozen banking, savings, and credit card accounts with this bank which is apparently too many. I click the “try again,” and the process completes. I’ve researched this error online and discovered that many users suffer from this across a variety of financial institutions. Quicken’s response is consistent: “your bank’s servers must be busy. Try again later.” Downloading transactions in Quicken on Windows was always a tricky proposition, so I can’t say this is a Mac issue. Just irritating. Editor’s Note: These download errors were fixed in Quicken’s August 2019 (version 5.12.3) update. Thank you, Quicken!
Mobile App is Underwhelming. Quicken’s iPad app has been out for a while. I tried it out when it first came out and was underwhelmed. I tried it again for this review, and I am still unimpressed. I’m not alone: the app ratings are abysmal which many reports of the app crashing or not being able to log in. Quicken also released web access in the fall with similar capabilities.
Trapped Investment Data. One of the biggest reservations I have with the Mac version of Quicken relates to its file export limitations. While Quicken promises a “Data Access Guarantee,” the export functionality of the Mac program remains severely crippled. Investment accounts, and all the related historical transaction details, cannot be exported. This limitation affects not only your ability to move back to the more robust Windows version of Quicken should you grow tired of the Mac’s shortcomings, but also impacts your ability to switch to other personal finance software products on the Mac if you decide to give up on Quicken altogether. The lack of this basic export function feels intentional to me to keep customers from leaving the product.
If you are using the Windows version of Quicken and you have investment accounts, you should be very cautious before migrating to the Mac version. You’ll likely be able to move everything over to the Mac, but you’ll be stuck with limited choices of ever leaving. Shame on Quicken for taking our financial data hostage.
So, after all these years, where do I stand with Quicken for Mac?
Like a year ago, I feel like Quicken could be so much better, but it’s still the best software, on the Mac or the PC, for complicated personal finance. Quicken for Mac is good enough that I’m not willing to go through all the work to revert back to the Windows version and deal with running a virtual PC on my Mac. I’m disappointed that my Mac data file can’t export to other software programs. I hope future Quicken versions will finally improve enough to be on par with Windows, though experience makes me very skeptical.
If you’re a Mac user with an extensive investment portfolio, but still on the Windows version, I would recommend staying that more robust software until the Mac version allows proper data exporting.
Are you a Quicken for Mac user, or a Windows user thinking of making the switch to Mac? Let me know your questions and feedback in the comment section below.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 • 8 min read
Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels, would have been 104 years old today. Mr. O’Brian passed away in 2000 but left behind a treasure of twenty meticulously researched historical sea novels set in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The books center on the friendship and adventures of its two main characters: Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and part-time intelligence agent.
As a sailor, I appreciate the technical portions of driving a tall ship on the open sea. I'll admit, even with many years of sailing experience, I don't fully understand all the jargon that describes the maneuvering of these massive ships from 300 years ago, but I do get the gist of it. I delight in sailing along with Captain Aubrey from my comfortable armchair, plowing through hurricanes and typhoons, avoiding icebergs, clawing off a lee shore in a tempest, even fleeing an erupting volcano in the middle of the ocean.
It's not always foul weather and danger: I revel in the many lovely passages depicting beautiful weather, trade winds pulling the ship along at 12 knots over an easy rolling sea that brings smiles to the officers and crew alike. And of course, there are the gruesome depictions of sea battles, frigates gliding along through thick smoke, cannons blasting huge iron balls through the hulls and rigging of their enemy, spars shattering, men dying instantly in bloody rivers on the deck, or later on the archaic operating table in the ship’s cockpit.
I discovered this series shortly after O’Brian’s death and began to devour them one after another, immersing myself into a life at sea aboard a frigate in the 18th century.
O’Brian engages all five senses in these novels: the sounds of the ship creaking at sea and the shriek of wind through the rigging, the taste of intricately described meals with wonderfully strange names (Solomongundy or Spotted Dog anyone?), the smell of gunpowder and the stench of men crammed in close quarters below deck, the feel of the backstay burning your hand as you slide down from the crows nest, and of course the incredible sights of a beautiful blue ocean, tropical islands and the incredible view from the lookout of tall ships under a full press of sail.
I don’t often reread books, especially a whole series of books, but I’m about to finish my third reading of this set, more than 5,000 pages all told, and will almost certainly reread them. You might say that I am continually reading these books since there seems always to be a volume resting on my nightstand. The books have become such comfort over the years that I read them alongside other books, in between books, and in the middle of the night should insomnia strike. Before long, I’ll be a world away, sailing along on a topgallant breeze, with whatever troubles that had awoken me soon put astern at a 10-knot clip.
I love these books so much that I own them in four different formats: on my Kindle, two different hardbound sets, and the audiobooks, narrated by the wonderful late Patrick Tull, whose incredible voice has now become indistinguishable from the voice in my head as I read these myself, and whose performances can make even the longest commute exhilarating. I also keep a set on our trawler, MV Indiscretion. There’s no better place to read O’Brian than on the hook in some secluded bay, the rocking of the boat in perfect cadence with the rolling of a frigate becalmed in the aqua blue of the Mediterranean.
Why such fondness, you ask? Beyond the seafaring and nostalgia for a simpler time, it’s the two polar opposite characters of Aubrey and Maturin, and their enduring friendship that draws me to these books again and again.
Jack Aubrey is larger in life in many ways; his knowledge and experience in commanding a tall ship with all that goes with sailing such a complex vessel in usually hostile territory, with hundreds of souls to lead; his innate sense of battle strategy, somehow always sniffing out the wiles of his enemy and often winning engagements, and lucrative prize money, even when he is outmatched and outgunned; his ability to work out the position of his ship based on the position of stars and a startlingly difficult set of trigonometry equations. And yet it's Jack's glaring weaknesses that, to me, make him a more believable character. As talented as he is at sea, he is equally disastrous on land, easily swindled of his money by crooks, often to calamitous ends. His fondness for women and multi-year voyages away from his wife back home in England conspire to get him in hot water across several hemispheres of the globe. Barring the running of a ship and the fighting of the enemy at sea, Jack is often hopelessly inept, and finds himself being saved time and again by his dear friend Stephen Maturin. It's these shortcomings on land, coupled with his general good nature and cheer, make “Lucky” Jack Aubrey a memorable and lovable character.
Stephen Maturin is Jack Aubrey’s friend, onboard physician, intelligence agent for the British Government, and in most ways the complete opposite to the commander. O’Brian uses Stephen to help the reader understand the intricate workings of a ship, for Stephen never entirely adapts to life at sea, and his confusion during various operations provides an opportunity for the author to teach us as well, usually in a humorous way. This passage from The Hundred Days cuts right to Stephen’s challenges at sea in two beautiful sentences:
A little before the evening gun Preserved Killick, Captain Aubrey’s steward, an ill-faced, ill-tempered, meagre, atrabilious, shrewish man who kept his officer’s uniform, equipment and silver in a state of exact, old-maidish order come wind or high water, and who did the same for Aubrey’s close friend and companion, Dr. Stephen Maturin, or even more so, since in the Doctor’s case Killick added a fretful nursemaid quality to his service, as though Maturin were ‘not quite exactly’ a fully intelligent being, approached Stephen’s cabin. It is true that in the community of mariners the ‘not quite exactly’ opinion was widely held; for although Stephen could now tell the difference between starboard and larboard, it still called for some reflexion: and it marked the limit of his powers.
Maturin has his share of faults beyond his obliviousness to maritime rules and customs: he’s an off and on opium and cocaine addict, quick to temper and generally shrewish when interrupted from his studies, ill-dressed and wearing clothes often stained by blood, human and otherwise, and by most accounts, a small, not very handsome man.
Stephen’s genius shines brightly through these novels. As an intelligence agent with an extreme sense of morality and outrage against the French, he finds himself frequently involved in treacherous spy missions that put him in perilous danger with only his sharp wits to extricate himself. He is also an amateur naturalist and brings to the pages a wonder at seeing such a variety of wildlife around and about the ship and the remote anchorages they visit. O’Brian’s lengthy descriptions of the birds, insects (especially beetles), whales, and all sorts of flora and fauna thrust the reader into the midst of Maturin’s obsessive personality. These passages comfort me like a warm blanket, and I often look about when I’m on a walk with a new sense of interest in the wildlife around me. Stephen is also the ship’s surgeon, and the descriptions of operations in the bowels of the ship, lights swinging this way and that, can’t help but transport me back 300 years to the dark ages of medicine, making me thankful for the modern age.
Beyond the beautiful settings and adventures afloat, the books showcase a unique friendship these two men share, and the equal footing they hold throughout the stories. I can’t think of another book or series of books where a pair of characters, particularly ones as different from each other as Aubrey and Maturin, provide such a balance in the storytelling. On long voyages, they play music together in the ship’s great cabin, Jack on the violin, Stephen on the cello, often playing off the other improvisationally. I suspect this serves as a theme for their relationship throughout the series; each of them switching off in the lead role in some caper, only to reverse roles and allow the other to shine as the story unfolds.
They quarrel like brothers, and over the course of twenty volumes, have their share of falling out, but always find a way to strengthen their friendship and be stronger together, and with most all of their adventures, success is only achieved when they pull together. It may very well be this enduring friendship that I love so much about these books. Every one must yearn for such a perfect friend in their life if only to find it in the pages of a novel.
So, today I celebrate Patrick O’Brian’s birthday and thank him for the gifts he has bestowed on all of us. As I conclude my third time through these books, I will start yet again from the beginning. I cannot not read them. The idea of saying goodbye to these two dear friends is too much to bear at this stage of my life. And with the vast body of work here across twenty volumes, and my memory not being what it once was, starting over remains a new experience, accompanied by a comfortable “deja vu” feeling with every delightful page.
If you haven’t had a chance to meet Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, there’s not a moment to lose. Trust me. You are in for an extended treat.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018 • 7 min read
Lisa and I have celebrated 22 wedding anniversaries. For at least the past dozen years, we haven’t exchanged gifts beyond small tokens like flowers or chocolates. Instead, we go out to dinner, just the two of us, to celebrate the occasion. This year we celebrated at May’s Kitchen, a Thai restaurant on Vashon that is so good, it is worthy of special occasions like anniversaries. As we were heading out the door on our way to the restaurant, Lisa surprised me with a package.
“Wait, what’s this?” I asked with apprehension. She was breaking tradition. “I didn’t buy you a gift.”
“Don’t worry. It’s for both of us. It’s a marriage saver,” she replied with a cryptic smile.
I opened the box and found a pair of Eartec wireless radio headphones. These are two-way radios used by crews of larger yachts to talk to each other during critical boat maneuvers like docking. I can don a set of these up on the flybridge and Lisa can wear a set down in the cockpit and we can talk to each other without raising our voices. A marriage saver.
Eartec UL2S UltraLITE Wireless Radios
I had wanted a set of these, but couldn’t quite justify the cost, and honestly, admit to the implication that the two of us needed to improve our communication skills afloat. But I was delighted to have them as a gift and over dinner brought up the prospect of geeky code names we could use while docking.
“We’ll definitely need code names when we’re on the radio,” I ventured. “Let’s see, how about we go with fruit names? You can be Blackberry and I’ll be Pomegranate,” I suggested. I had already given this some thought on our way to the restaurant.
“Blackberry? I’m supposed to be Blackberry? Where did you come up with that name? I don’t want to be Blackberry! In fact, I don’t want to use code names at all. We have enough to think about when we’re docking, I can’t remember a code name for you. Plus it’s dumb.”
I decided to let this go for now, given the initial negative response. But oh yes, we will use code names with these cool radios.
We could have used them a few weeks earlier as we were docking in our own slip at Quartermaster Marina on a blustery afternoon. The wind was gusting to 20 knots as we made our approach, the strongest winds we’d faced in a docking situation so far on this trawler. At the most critical juncture of the procedure with our bow inside the slip, now mere feet from crunching into a dock or another boat, a neighbor fired up a circular saw. The loud piercing whine obliterated any communication from Lisa three decks below.
“What?” I yelled from the flybridge. “Port or starboard?”
I could hear nothing but the whine of the saw and an indistinct yell from Lisa. The visibility is great from the flybridge except for the immediate area close to the hull. Time was of the essence.
“I think she said ‘port’.” I pushed the stern to port with the thrusters, toward the dock.
Seconds later, as the saw’s shriek finally died out, the words “Starboard, starboard, STARBOARD!!!” came hurtling up from Lisa, clear as a bell to anyone within a mile of the marina, each successive command rising in volume and urgency, the last one a full-throated yell loud enough to wake the gods above.
Just as we were about to crash into the dock, I pushed the stern away with a mere touch of the thruster joystick. Disaster averted. Every return to dock without a fiberglass repair bill is considered a success, but you can see how we might have benefited from these two-way radios.
We tried out the Eartecs on our very next trip. We were docking Indiscretion at Poulsbo Marina for the first time and needed to back into the slip, a new maneuver for us.
The thing about docking a large trawler yacht that no one tells you is how slow the process is. About twenty minutes prior to arrival, we start preparing. Fenders put out on both sides of the hull, dock lines ready to cast over the sides, marina maps consulted, stabilizer fins centered, thrusters powered on, perhaps a call to the marina to confirm our slip is vacant, and for me, a shift of helm from the pilothouse up to the flybridge for better visibility. Meanwhile, as we get closer, we slowly drop our speed from seven knots to around two or three knots when we close with the marina itself.
The View from Indiscretion’s Flybridge Helm
We decided we would don our radios early since it was our first time using them. I clicked on my unit and adjusted the headset. The ear cushion is comfortable and the adjustable microphone juts out in front of my mouth, making me feel like a fighter pilot.
“Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry, this is Pomegranate, do you copy, over?” I said in my most serious radio voice.
“Stop calling me Blackberry!” came the immediate response, loud and clear. With these radios, everything is self-contained within the headset itself. There are no wires to clip on your belt, no buttons to push to talk. It’s very natural to communicate this way. You can also raise the microphone up to mute it should you decide you need to say something your mate shouldn’t hear. Battery life is a staggering six hours with these radios. I hope we never face that long of a docking process.
We made our slow progress toward the marina with me up on the flybridge and Lisa down below readying fenders and dock lines, yet now able to easily talk to one another.
When we were first dating, I got transferred to New York for a six-month assignment, so we spent a lot of time on the phone during our courtship. Lisa has a fantastic telephone voice and I’ve always loved talking to her on the phone. These ship radios reminded me of those times and I found myself flirting with my wife of 22 years while helming the boat. We also took in the sights together of a new harbor and commented to each other about various boats we passed. I noticed that she was out of breath a lot as she hauled out fenders and muscled the dock lines in place, while I sat comfortably at the flybridge helm, meditating on the ever-changing sea below. I will enjoy this division of labor for as long as it lasts.
Docking is my least favorite activity on the boat. I’m always nervous even after 20 years of damage-free encounters. Having flirty small talk with the love of my life as we made our way toward the slip helped relax me. I found myself smiling and laughing with her as we carried out the much-practiced dance of docking … stopping the boat as we came even with our slip, spinning the stern with prop walk and prop wash, gauging the impact of wind and current, backing down slowly, small adjustments as needed with the bow and stern thrusters, in and out of gear to slowly move her into the berth, then a touch of forward to bring her to all stop.
This was the point where Lisa was supposed to say “the package is secured,” as I had suggested to her multiple times beforehand. But no, all she said was: “we’re in. All good.” She has some practicing to do on our code words and radio spy talk. But in the end, a safe stress-free landing without shouting is good enough for me.
Love Birds
Wednesday, August 15, 2018 • 7 min read
After two decades of sailing, we have crossed over to the dark side.
A few weeks ago we bought a powerboat, a Nordhavn 43 trawler, that we’ve named Indiscretion. She isn’t a typical go-fast stinkpot kind of powerboat. Her cruising speed of 7 knots isn’t far off from sailing. We won’t win any races. But she’s a stout little ship, with the displacement and hull design to withstand open ocean conditions, and an engine and fuel supply to take us from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of diesel. A sistership circumnavigated the world a few years ago. We don’t expect to cross oceans, but we do have plans to go places that require blue water passages, up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and going there in a boat that can handle just about anything provides real peace of mind.
I knew letting go of sailing would be tough. For a long time, my happy place was at the helm of a boat under sail. No matter what might be stressing me out at work or at home, it fell away as my hand grasped the tiller, the engine noise died away to a blissful quiet, the sails filled and the boat put her shoulder down into the waves and wind. There’s so much to do to sail well, it took my whole attention, leaving little room to fret about anything else. And the connection to the wind and waves and water was magical, particularly at night with with the feel of wind on your cheek for sail trim and the amazing glow of phosphorous lighting your wake.
Yet as the years piled on, I found that my aging body wasn’t quite as lithe and agile as it once was to cope with the physicality of sailing. Low back pain turned into something worse a few years ago and it literally pained me to go sailing, though my desire for voyaging remained strong as ever.
So we turned to a logical alternative for old sailors: the trawler yacht. It turns out trawlers and sailboats have some things in common. First, as mentioned, they take a leisurely pace in getting places, relishing the journey more than the destination. Second, they are both fuel efficient, at least for boats. A trawler nearly rivals a sailboat for fuel efficiency while motoring, and is laughably better than those planing motor yachts. Finally, blue water models are quite seaworthy with many, many ocean crossings under their belts. These similarities brought us comfort as we climbed aboard trawler after trawler over months of boat shopping. We knew we found our boat when we stepped aboard a Nordhavn. Overbuilt, incredible build quality, redundant systems, a track record of open ocean journeys and a terrific support network of existing Nordhavn owners. Our 43' version is on the small side for Nordhavn, but perfect for our needs. After a little back and forth, a sea trial and survey, we proudly became the owners of this beautiful vessel.
For our maiden voyage, we “steamed” Indiscretion from Elliott Bay in Seattle to our home port here on Vashon Island, getting our first opportunity to experience what trawler life is like. Conditions were superb, temperatures in the eighties and calm seas, hardly a challenge for this go-anywhere vessel. The coastline streamed by faster than when sailing. I’ll admit that making a consistent 7 knots in the direction you actually wanted to go is damn refreshing after years and years of zig-zagging under sail. The boat is 60 thousand pounds with a full displacement keel which makes the ride steady and sure. Hydraulic stabilizer fins work like ducks feet below the water serving to smooth out the side to side roll from passing boat wakes. The low-RPM diesel engine buried deep in the bowels of the ship’s engine room serves up more of a low rumble than the high-pitched roar we suffered on our sailboats.
There have been a few times when I’ve been out in the rain and wind in the cockpit of a sailboat and cursed aloud at these big trawlers as they passed, the captain visible behind the steamed windows in the wheelhouse, perhaps sipping a hot cup of coffee from his high warm perch, maybe taking pity on my miserable wet self. Now that I have held that same perch myself, I marvel at the comfort and ease of passage-making these big trawlers afford. Had I known then what I know now, I would have cursed all the louder out there in my damp misery.
It’s not all downwind sailing though. This boat houses the equivalent of a small municipality’s worth of systems to decipher, operate and maintain. There are three different diesel engines, each with its own peculiarities and needs, a watermaker which can magically turn seawater to pure drinking water if you know how to keep it clean and happy, heating and cooling systems, hydraulics, pumps of all sorts and sizes, electronics spanning two different helm stations … the manuals alone for all these systems take up a good size shelf. In our first weeks of ownership, we have had these manuals out on the pilothouse table, scratching our heads over all the new terminology (what exactly is a galvanic isolator fault?) and trying to inch our way up a very steep ramp of learning. We have already enjoyed the generosity of our fellow Nordhavn owners who actively participate in an online forum to help out rank novices like us. So far, every question or problem we’ve encountered has been addressed before by someone in this treasure trove of online help. I’ve been thinking I needed a new challenge in my life and I think I may have found it with the upkeep of this sophisticated vessel.
We keep the boat at Quartermaster Marina on Vashon. It’s a low-key friendly marina without pretensions. I find myself down on the boat a lot these days, poring over system manuals, contorting my body into strange positions within electrical cabinets or storage lockers, and sometimes just relaxing in the wheelhouse, listening to music or a Mariners game, enjoying the beautiful nautical space. During my time on the boat, many longtime marina friends have stopped by for a tour and a beer. The novelty of a new boat at the marina has a magnetic appeal and I’ve already met a lot more of my fellow boaters here at the marina simply by being aboard and welcoming a tour of the boat and a cold drink. As you should know, boaters are some of the best people on earth and our marina has more than its fair share of these kind souls.
While relaxing and socializing at the dock is fun, it’s the voyaging we truly love. So far, we’ve only taken short shakedown trips around Puget Sound: Blake Island, Elliott Bay, Penrose Point, all within a half day’s motoring. These have been useful trips as we learn the boat and all its intricacies. Last night we anchored off the port of Silverdale in Dyes Inlet for a couple of days of gunkholing. We’ll take more weekend trips like these through the fall and winter as we gain confidence. We’re talking about spending Christmas in Victoria aboard the boat, an absurd idea aboard our sailboat, but warm and inviting on a trawler. Then, next summer we’ll return to the San Juan and Gulf Islands to see what’s changed in our old sailing stomping grounds, with a bucket-list trip up the inside passage to Alaska the following year, and beyond that? We’d love to take this boat down the coast for a winter in Mexico. I know this boat could handle it. We’ll have to see about the captain and crew.
So that’s it, then. We’ve shed our sailing skins and are slowing finding our way in this grand trawler. This morning as I sip my first cup of coffee and look out over the quiet bay with the boat’s mirror image captured in the still water from my perch on the flybridge, it’s hard not to be moved by the amazing vista an anchored boat provides. Sailors, kayakers, fisherman, stinkpotters, 150-foot mega yachters, and us trawler types all share that same passion for water. Perhaps the salt content of our blood is just slightly higher than normal, pulling us back to the ocean of our long ago birth. I count myself a lucky member of that large seafaring tribe.
Friday, June 15, 2018 • 6 min read
When I was starting out in public accounting, nearly thirty years ago, I got the chance to work for a new partner who had just joined our firm. His name was Joe Sambataro, an Italian-American from New Jersey, full of blunt honesty and character, and we hit it off right away. He became an important mentor and eventually recruited me to join a small staffing firm in Tacoma as a financial analyst when he joined as CFO. He would later retire, then come back as CEO. Joe is now the Chairman of the Board of this multi-billion publicly traded staffing firm.
Back when I first began working for Joe, he shared three wishes for me: Marriage, Mortgage, and a Boat. In that order. He figured that an employee with a spouse and a mortgage would stick around longer than a single guy with no ties to anything. The boat, he said, was just for fun. Joe liked boating and especially fishing off a boat.
I took Joe’s advice and in short order got married to my beautiful wife Lisa, and signed a mortgage on our Vashon Island home. I soon began looking for a sailboat.
In 1999 we bought our first boat, Wildfire. She was an Ericson 35 racing sloop that I dreamed of sailing around the world, but she was too much boat for a beginner. We had some crazy adventures, and learned a lot, but we soon downsized to an 18' gaff-rigged Marshall catboat that was much more manageable by a novice sailor, then traded up for a larger 23' model.
After a few more years as our family and boating skills grew, we traded up for a 32' Catalina sloop, a cruising sailboat we named Parlez that we took on month-long trips up to the San Juans and Gulf Islands. We made a lot of memories as a family aboard that boat: crab feasts in the cockpit, game nights around the saloon table, hard-driving sails in pounding waves and rain, and windless days where we barely ghosted along, the boat mirrored perfectly in the calm water all around, the sails gently flapping.
After six or seven years of actively sailing and cruising aboard Parlez, I began to think of myself as a real sailor.
As the kids reached their teens, the appeal of long summer trips in the islands lost some appeal; they preferred instead to stay closer to home, their friends and a high-speed internet connection. I found myself spending more time maintaining the boat than sailing, and decided it was time to sell her.
That period of boatlessness lasted about two months. I bought a beautiful 33' daysailor called Red Head that was perfect for summer daysails around Vashon, either alone or with a crowd in her glorious 16' cockpit.
I’ve never felt more alive than at the helm of Red Head sailing into a fresh breeze, tiller in hand, feet braced against the opposite side of the cockpit as the boat heeled in gusts, the water racing by, the mast and rig groaning in protest, a grin on my face as I took in the shape of the sails, the wind anxious to fling my upturned cap into the sea; and something else too: a healthy sense of fear as I pushed myself and the boat maybe a little too far, Adrenalin surging as I caromed through the bay, tack to tack. At those moments I became part of the boat, one hand connected to the tiller and rudder, as if by electric current, my free hand ready to trim the main or the jib, a living thing cavorting through the water, exuberant.
These moments of sailing bliss mostly outweighed the drudgery that goes along with a sailing vessel. The long periods of motoring when the wind has died or is blowing from an inconvenient direction, the cramped quarters below decks, and the exposure to the wind and elements in an open cockpit on a long voyage at just a bit faster than a brisk walking speed.
Over the past couple of years, substantial doubt has plagued me about my future as a sailor. Beautiful sunny days would present themselves only to conclude there was too much wind, or not enough wind, or my back was acting up and I didn’t feel up to the exertion of hoisting or trimming sails. Or worse, I would wish for calm days without so much wind to bother with, enjoying the sense of tranquility of Quartermaster Harbor on a still afternoon. These are not the thoughts of a real sailor.
My desire for adventure afloat hasn’t waned. As we approach that empty nest waypoint in our lives, I dream of voyages up the inside passage to Alaska, a vast section of earth mostly uninhabited and pristine. Or braving open ocean to explore the Pacific coast of Mexico to escape the rains and darkness that pervades the Northwest in winter. I’d relearn my Spanish from high school, and attempt to slow the following seas of time slipping by.
Even before we began a family, Lisa and I dreamed of such voyages. Sometimes the destinations were landlocked - a ranch in Montana or a flat in Madrid - but they always involved a departure from ordinary life, selling up, traveling light, vagabond shoes. Of course, a sailboat would be a logical choice for such an adventure, needing only the power of the wind to push us along, free and easy.
About four months ago on a beautiful February day, Lisa and I were out for a walk along one of Vashon’s country roads. We passed a section of road with a terrific view of Puget Sound, the water blue and ruffled with an afternoon wind on our first perfect day of the year.
“Why don’t you go for a sail this afternoon?” She asked. “There’s wind and the time on the water would do you good.”
It hadn’t even dawned on me that I might sail, and as I considered the water and wind waves, I shook my head. “No, I’m not really up for it today.”
And as I said these words, I realized with certainty that I was no longer a sailor. And for Lisa too, it seemed. We were both ready to put that chapter of our life astern, though neither of us were prepared to move off the water to become normal land people. As we continued our walk, the seeds of a new boating life began to germinate.
“What exactly is a trawler?” She asked.
To be continued…
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 • 3 min read
I’ve taken over 6,000 ferry rides since moving to Vashon Island. Most of these were uneventful passages to work and back. But everyone once in a while, say 1% off the time, or 60 sailings, I’ve been the very first car on the ferry.
Being the first car on the ferry has some unique benefits. Unless an ambulance or police car has priority loading, the first car loads into the first spot of the center lane, perched out on the bow of the boat. The view from this vantage point is unencumbered and fantastic. On summer days, you can roll down the windows and open the sunroof and take in the glory of sun and sea. In winter, you feel the rollers and spray even with the windows up. No reason to go up on deck when you have such a wonderful ringside seat. I almost always put down my book or laptop on these journeys and soak in the raw beauty of the waves usually lost on me back in the bowels of the car deck on other sailings.
But being the first car on the ferry also has its downsides. Earning this spot means you missed the sailing of the previous boat by just one car. You were the lonely vehicle left on the loading dock while all the cars in front of you sailed off, the ferry worker dolefully shaking his head as the traffic divider bar slowly descends, dooming your fate. You’l wait about an hour stewing on this before you get to enjoy your prime viewing position.
In the probability analysis all commuters calculate every morning and night, wondering when is the last possible minute you can leave and still get on the ferry, being this first car is tangible proof that you blew it. That pause over a last sip of coffee in the morning, that last small talk at the elevator at day’s end, the missed traffic light, all these you think about as you wait.
New York commuters rushing to their trains have a distinct advantage. All they have to consider is travel time and a fixed departure. With ferries, you have to also estimate the volume of other commuters, dump trucks, tourists, and delivery vans that fill up the ferry sometimes well before the sailing time. If only it were so easy to plan on time alone.
This is why ferry commuters usually have a diversion with them: a book, a journal, a musical instrument to while away the time. I’ve filled many journal pages with private thoughts over the years during these unplanned delays.
After over twenty years of ferry commuting, I now see this as just another part of life. Normal. Simply driving straight to work with no waiting, no surge of the sea as you make the crossing, no unplanned hour of waiting to read or think, or maybe write… without that, my life would feel diminished. Incomplete. So, I’ll keep this up, practicing my daily probability analysis, and while I’m sure I’ll be frustrated, I’ll deep down relish my perch on the bow of the ferry when I find myself there once again.
Friday, January 26, 2018 • 9 min read
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on journal writing. The first post described the benefits of keeping a journal. Here, I’ll share thoughts on where to keep your journal: paper or digital.
For most of my adult life, I’ve kept a journal. I’ve always felt a calling to record my life, perhaps some homage to my love of books and reading. My earliest journals were blank hardback books, the first of which took nearly a decade of sporadic writing to fill. After I became more convinced of my journal keeping ability, I bought lovely leather-bound books with acid-free paper and a silk ribbon to mark my place. I figured I could splurge on a book that I might carry around with me daily for a year or more. I now have a shelf full of these beautiful books after two decades of near-daily writing.
My journaling habit really took hold when I moved to Vashon 20 years ago. Vashon is an island in the middle of Puget Sound in Washington State, accessible only by ferry, so my daily commute to work each way involved thirty minutes of driving on back country roads and thirty minutes of combined waiting and sailing on a ferry boat to the mainland.
Vashon is known for many odd things, but one demographical fact is that a significant proportion of island inhabitants spend more than an hour each way in commuting to work. According to the 2000 census, only eight other zip codes in the nation have longer commuting times. Vashon shares its unique status with other towns in upstate New York and Connecticut, well known for long train rides into New York City. But Vashon? Weird fact.
With a two-hour daily commute, I had time each day to read and write. I listened to audiobooks during the driving part and turned to journal writing for the rest. With aspirations to be a writer, I figured keeping a journal would be a safe way to practice my craft. Plus, I felt compelled to record what was going on in my life, having just started a young family, moving from Seattle to a somewhat odd island, and scheming someday to leave my corporate job for a life aboard a sailboat with my family bound for unknown shores.
So I took pen to paper and kept a regular journal during this daily commute. Very soon after, my dreams of writing a great novel were dashed, having to accept that just about everything I wrote in my journal was awful. No one would want to read any part of it. After picking myself up and dusting myself off, I discovered something wonderful: it didn’t matter. The process of writing down my thoughts was helping me in other more important ways. I was soon hooked on daily journal writing.
Keeping a paper journal has its charm in today’s digital world. The feel of a real book in my hands as I prepared to write seemed to elevate my thinking, knowing whatever I wrote down would be permanent, everlasting. Before beginning to write, I would scan back over the prior entries, reacquainting myself with the recent past. This review promoted more continuity in my journal writing. My handwriting is not great, but my personality comes across better in cursive, from the emphasis I add or the hurriedness of my strokes, a sign that the words are racing out of me. I also enjoy deciphering the scratched out sections (what was I hiding from myself?) and my quirky little drawings and illustrations.
Paper journals do have their downsides. Once you fill one, access to those words is locked away. I have a dozen of these volumes stored in a box somewhere, collecting dust (more on how I solved this in a future post). Security is also lacking unless you’re careful to protect your journal from prying eyes. I once came home to my upset spouse after she found an old journal of mine which described an event which occurred long, long before we were married. She was too mad to be embarrassed at reading someone else’s journal and we quickly made up. The lesson remains. Finally, the types of things you can put in a journal are pretty limited: your handwriting, perhaps a drawing, a taped in picture or memento. It’s not practical to transcribe special emails, social media posts, or all the photos we now take with the ubiquitous smartphone cameras in our pockets.
As a technology fan, I always felt that a computer-based journal would make sense for me. I tried many different solutions over the past 15 years, from simple word processing tools to dedicated journaling software. None of these stuck for two main reasons: first, these solutions required a computer for the writing, and even a smallish laptop is still a lot less portable and convenient than a small journal. Paper and pen are hard to beat as a proven technology. And second, I found my writing style at a keyboard was too business-like from years of professional writing, and I got stymied by a blank screen and blinking cursor. None could replace my precious journal, trusted blue pen and the lap desk that I stowed away in my truck during my ferry commute.
The iPhone, the iPad, and one beautifully designed writing app changed all that.
About six years ago, I switched over to a digital journaling platform called Day One. I started with this app on the Mac, but my electronic journaling flourished once I began using iPad. Here was a device that I carried with me everywhere, and when paired with a keyboard, was a terrific writing tool, small yet powerful, and for me, omnipresent. Day One deserves a dedicated post, but I’ll summarize why this app is so fabulous here:
There are a few drawbacks with Day One. First, it’s only available on the Mac, though both iOS and Android app are available on mobile devices. Second, an annual subscription is required to take advantage of its power and functionality. A lot of folks grumbled about this, but I was delighted when Day One made the switch to a subscription platform. I will gladly pay the $35 per year for software I use every day, knowing the company is now on solid financial footing in the crazy and non-sustainable app development world. Third, with all my journals in the cloud, there is a chance someone could hack into my account and gain access, despite the fancy encryption and passwords, to every personal word I’ve ever written. This is the new world we live in, and I grudgingly accept this risk.
I can share now after five full years of daily journal writing in Day One that I am a complete convert. I think better now at a keyboard and write without hesitation, even with a blinking cursor to taunt me. I believe my writing quality has increased without losing the intimacy and honesty of my pen and paper journal writing. I’ve lost the rhythm and practice of writing by hand, though I’ll admit I sometimes miss the tangible benefits of writing in a real book - the heft of the book, the personality of the pen strokes, the perceived longevity of text on paper.
With three decades of constant journaling behind me, I relish the ability to look back on private musings I wrote so many years ago, all from my iPhone. In fact, one of my morning rituals is to open Day One and read over the half-dozen or more entries I wrote on that day over the past decades. What an incredible gift it is to re-ignite those memories each morning. I can’t think of a better way to reflect on this amazing journey we’re all taking.
The answer depends on which format best supports your writing habit. For me, the transition from keeping a paper journal to typing on a keyboard took years before it finally clicked. It was definitely a journey. Now I can’t imagine going back to a paper journal. But the best journal format is the one that keeps you writing, or at the very minimum, doesn’t stop you from writing. Find one you feel comfortable confiding in and write. And write again. Simple advice, maybe hard to implement.
If you’ve found your journal muse, what do you use, book or digital? I would love to read your feedback in the comment section below.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018 • 12 min read
You should keep a journal and ideally write in it every day. You’ve likely heard that advice already. The internet is full of articles and research on why journaling is good for you. I’ve read a lot of these myself.
One memorable take on journaling came from the Asian Efficiency Podcast last year. While I agreed with most of the points made by the hosts and was thankful to learn some new tips to improve my journal process, I chuckled at their youthful exuberance, and frankly, inexperience with journaling. Neither had kept a journal beyond a few short years, so they couldn’t speak with much conviction about the tangible benefits of journaling.
Creating and sustaining a habit of keeping a journal can be difficult, regardless of the benefits, so I thought I might share some tips from someone with more than 30 years of constant journaling.
This is the first of a multi-part series on journal-keeping. Subsequent articles will address more advanced topics, but today let’s focus on the benefits of keeping a journal. Why dedicate the time to keep a journal? Let me describe five key benefits that matter to me.
Life is short. Time does seem to speed up as you age. For me, keeping a journal slows down the race of time. Spending a few minutes to review thoughts on events or feelings from a year ago, five years ago, or even twenty years ago, brings the memories to life so vividly. Photographs do this too, but reading your own words, reliving the emotion you felt, the happiness or sadness, reminding you of something you thought so essential but had forgotten is like a time machine that helps connect the individual days into a more extensive mosaic of my life. Once reminded of that time, our super-computer brains start to fill in other forgotten details, and before you know it, you’re back in that time and place again. I love this feeling of connectedness to my past from the present.
In its most basic form, a journal is a record of your life; a natural place to write down significant life events: births, deaths, marriages, etc. But for me, I prize those past entries that record the small things in life that I would have most certainly forgotten, like this passage from fourteen years ago when my now college/high school age kids were four and one:
"I took Mallory and Connor to Dockton Park on Saturday. The day was chilly, so we all bundled up and piled into the van. Mallory and Connor sit side-by-side in car seats, close enough for Mallory to give Connor food or toys, etc. When we arrived at the park, I found the two of them holding hands. Very precious. I set Connor in one of the baby swings and swung him to his utter chagrin. He seemed genuinely afraid so I slowed him down to a mere sway and he settled down a bit. Mallory knows how to swing, of course, and she did so with gusto until her hands got too cold. We moved to the play structure. A few minutes there and then a stroller ride down to the docks. The ramp down to the dock was very steep because of the tide, so I carried Mallory in one arm and held on for dear life to the stroller with the other and slowly wobbled down the ramp. Walking along the dock, Connor peered out quietly from under his fleece. From above (my angle), it look like the cap was pressed down over his eyes, but because of his angle of repose, he could see through a small gap between cap and cheek. Mallory jumped from one side of the dock to the other, picking up shells, pointing out bird poop, admiring a bucket full of freshly caught crabs. After a while, we headed back for the car and home. When I went to unbuckle them from their car seats, I found them holding hands again."
I am glad I captured these memories of my children now that they are mostly adults and share few of these tender behaviors. Reading about times long ago with dear family members who have now passed on, just little anecdotes really, pack an emotional punch today. All sorts of notes and worries litter my journals, but every once in a while I run across an entry like this, and I thank my former self for keeping these journals.
Reducing stress is one of the most immediate, tangible benefits of writing in a journal. When I was younger, I would get painful headaches in the afternoon and early evening, pulsing in a particular spot on the back of my head. These pains occurred on weekdays, and almost never on the weekends which pointed to work stress as the culprit. I began using my journal time as therapy for these headaches and discovered that just 15 minutes of reflective writing would do better than three Advil could, and faster (and healthier!). The trick for me was to forget about the headache and focus my writing on what I was feeling that day, what was bothering me. That simple mindfulness exercise became such a blessing that I learned how to perform it eventually in the moment and eradicated the awful headaches from my life.
One theory I have for why work can create physical stress symptoms in me has to do with two things: introversion and something I call the Input/Output Balance. Introverts make up nearly half the population, but some small fraction of the everyday chatter in the workplace. Extroverts get energy from sharing their thoughts verbally, often preliminary and sometimes contradictory ideas as a way to refine their thinking. I can share from personal experience that Introverts prefer time to process before openly sharing ideas. Couple all that talking with the avalanche of digital information that we absorb in the course of a workday: email, social media, reports, spreadsheets, etc. By the end of the day, the typical introvert can be overwhelmed by all this input and may feel out of balance. Keeping a journal, particularly at the end of the workday, is an excellent escape valve to process all that input and balance out the scales with considered output.
A popular way to use a journal to boost your happiness is through a gratitude journal, also called the “Five-minute Journal.” Author Tim Ferriss of the Four-Hour Workweek explores the method: every morning, you list three things for which you’re grateful, three things that would make the coming day great, and one or two affirmations about yourself (“I am a good listener”, “I have good ideas”, etc.). Doing this first thing in the morning helps create a success-oriented mindset. At the end of the day, you finish the entry with a description of three amazing things that happened that day and any notes on what could have made the day better. This process should take no longer than five minutes with practice. Keeping a gratitude journal for thirty consecutive days could change your brain and make you feel happier. I’ve practiced this gratitude approach in my journal at various times in my life when I believed I could use a lift in spirits. Being thankful for the good things in your life does indeed change your mood, and prepping your subconscious with thoughts on what could make today a great day really does work. Starting a gratitude journal would be an excellent way to get going with your journal keeping habit.
A personal journal is an excellent place to think through big decisions in your life. I’m a finance guy, and for a lot of choices, I have an Excel spreadsheet that helps me articulate the decision process, financial ramifications, pros and cons scored and weighted, etc. And for black and white decisions, that’s usually enough. But many decisions aren’t so easy, and I would find myself staring at the spreadsheet in indecision, or worse, gaming the inputs to get to the decision my emotional side wanted. My elaborate spreadsheet on whether to buy a sailboat is a terrific example of this.
That’s where my journal comes in.
I have debated many, many decisions in the pages of my journal over the years. My journal is a safe place to explore an uncertain future without anyone but my subconscious looking over my shoulder. I will usually try to articulate what would be the worst thing that could happen if I take a particular path. In my case, I have a healthy fear of failure which can hold me back in making decisions. Facing this fear and putting into a broader context has helped keep me balanced in my decision-making.
Deciding to go back to school to earn my master’s degree while working full-time is a good example of a decision I wrestled with in my journal. At the time I had a brutal work schedule and two small children at home. The idea of taking on another 20 - 30 hours of class work and study each week seemed impossible, maybe even suicidal. But I knew that my career advancement would stall without the degree, and I would probably come to regret not going for it later in life. I must have written dozens of journal entries on this one decision over the course of a year, weighing the pros and cons, facing the fear of letting down my family or performing poorly on the job, or burning myself out. In the end, I convinced myself to do it, and while it was incredibly challenging, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
There’s a cumulative benefit of recording your thoughts about pivotal decisions over a longer span of years and even decades. Steve Jobs once said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
It is helpful to me now to look back over twenty years of life decisions, some small and some tremendous, and retrace my train of thought on how I was dealing with the uncertainty surrounding the decision. With hindsight, I now see where I was over-emphasizing particular risks or downplaying others. I can critique my decision-making style to seek out blind spots and biases. Of course, this doesn’t allow me to see the future any better, but it does help me better understand myself, and I believe, help me make better decisions as a result of the insight my journals provide me.
You hear it all the time. If you want to change your life, you need to set goals on how and where you want to improve. And to make them stick, you need to write them down.
Early in my career, I read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. One of these habits is to begin with the end in mind, and Mr. Covey suggests a goal-setting process centered around the most critical roles in your life. For example, father, friend, spouse, community leader, team leader, etc. This advice helped me stay balanced in my priorities and goals, and I think without it, I may have over-emphasized some areas of my life (i.e., work) over others.
I set my goals for each role in my life every year during the end of year holiday season. I use this quiet time to reflect back on how I fared last year with my goals and give myself letter grades on my performance. I am a pretty tough grader within the safety of my journal, and I believe this self-assessment helps create stronger commitment and accountability to the goal-setting process. Once I’m done looking back, I write out what I hope to accomplish in the coming year for the major roles in my life. These goal setting journal entries are time-consuming to write. I may take a whole week to reflect and prioritize, to soul-search, before committing. During the year I will frequently look back on this goal-setting journal entry to check my progress and make sure I’m dedicating the right level of energy and time to each role and goal.
I’ve used my journal for goal setting for a long time. Again, I’ll share how gratifying it is to look back over the years to see my progress, achieving things that my younger-self worried might be difficult if not impossible.
Over time and with practice, your journal can be a blank canvas to address life’s big questions. I’ve found that getting at these universal mysteries is a bit tricky. A blank page or blinking cursor still strikes terror in me when I force myself to write about anything serious. Instead, I might start an entry about some small event, and many end up just that, but a few of these start to tackle some deeply rooted belief once my subconscious mind loosens up enough to unlock. When I write without any agenda – free writing – I sometimes indirectly land on a universal question:
What is important to me? Where do we go from here? Why are we here?
Rereading journal entries that made this detour remind me a little of a Ouija board - for the author of the banal part of the entry sounds a lot different than the soul-searching part. Who’s indeed penning these words? But I love these heart-felt honest missives. I apply a unique “insights” tag to these entries in Day One (more on this software in a future article), so I can see how my questions (and some answers) have evolved over the decades I’ve kept a journal. Patterns have emerged that paint a pretty complete picture of who I am and what I believe. Having this sense about myself, who I am, gives me a pretty solid footing and compass as I approach the chaos and contrary winds of everyday life. I think this self-awareness that my journals have taught me has made me a better human being, one more capable of helping others. Like we’re told every time we fly: “please secure your mask before assisting others.” Knowing who I am and what I stand for is the oxygen that I need to serve others.
Yes! After thirty years, thousands of entries, and countless hours, I heartily endorse keeping a private journal. I can’t think of a better tool I’ve used to help me stay happy, healthy and successful over the course of the past thirty years. Wherever you are in life, there’s no time like now to start. If you’re lucky enough to heed this advice in your twenties or thirties and commit to a regular habit of journal writing, I believe it can change your life.
Getting started is easy. Sticking with it is harder. I’ll share my tips on how I was able to start and keep a regular journal habit spanning three decades in the next post. Stay tuned.
Are you keeping a journal now? What has been your experience? Leave your feedback and questions in the comment section below.
Friday, January 5, 2018 • 13 min read
An update to this review for Quicken 2019 for Mac is available here.
Personal financial management is important to me. I’ve always tried to be disciplined when it comes to money, and as a CPA and business planner as my chosen vocation, managing my own money comes pretty naturally. Applying finance strategies I’ve used in managing businesses to my personal finances has paid dividends. Like an accounting system at the office, a well-managed home needs its own financial record keeping. In my case, that system has been the venerable software tool Quicken. What follows is a history of how I’ve used Quicken and reactions to the most recent version of Quicken 2018 for Mac.
I’ve been a user of Quicken personal finance software since 1989. Back then I used a Mac SE, painstakingly capturing every transaction with the proper income or spending category on a nine-inch black and white screen. The discipline of tracking my expenses and using a budget helped me control my spending and keep my focus on long-term financial goals. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would not be in the financial position I am today without the discipline this software cultivates.
In the 1990s as Microsoft Windows took hold and the days of the Mac waned, I switched over to the PC version of Quicken. My data file had grown so large it no longer fit on a 3 1/2" floppy drive. I couldn’t find an easy way to transfer the data file. Quicken offered a “feature” back then to archive (i.e. erase) your financial history, so in a keystroke, I lost all that meticulous bookkeeping of the previous decade. I’m sad about that now as I would have liked to revisit the financial transactions supporting both by frugality and spending extravagance of my twenties. And remind myself of how little I had back then. Oh well.
I switched back to a Mac at home in 2003. It was fun to return to Apple with a beautiful new iMac at home while I used a Dell laptop for work. Quicken wasn’t available on the Mac at that time, so I kept my financial records on the Dell. This was OK because I had compartmentalized the Mac and PC this way: the Mac was for creative work: movies and photos, writing, games, family time. The PC was all business.
Fast forward another ten years. By 2013 everyone in my family was using a Mac, plus iPhones and iPads. I turned in my work laptop in favor of a MacBook Pro, using a virtual PC software program called Parallels to get access to the short list of PC software titles I still needed: an arcane business intelligence tool for work and … Quicken. A Mac version of Quicken was available, but it lacked many of the features that the PC version, like investment tracking and budgets.
New Mac versions of Quicken would come out every year and I would read reviews by unhappy customers lamenting the awfulness of the software. Buggy, lacked many important features, basically a shell of the PC version. And so I kept using Quicken for Windows along with updates to the VM software and waited.
By last summer, the only PC software I still needed to run on a virtual machine was Quicken. Everything else was native Mac.
Last fall Quicken 2017 for Mac was released. And guess what? The early reviews were positive for a change. I spent about an hour reading up on the new software and decided to try it. I might waste $75, but if there’s a chance it can work for me, I would be able to leave the PC software world for good.
Installation was uneventful in my case. You can either start from scratch or import an existing Quicken file. I was coming from Quicken 2014 for Windows so I chose that option, found my Quicken data file and clicked proceed. I was worried that this process would somehow corrupt my existing Quicken for Windows data file, so I made to sure to make a complete backup before proceeding with this import, but I needn’t have worried. The process created a new data file for the Mac software while leaving the original unchanged and still usable by its Windows counterpart.
During the import process, I watched the progress bar with some trepidation. Fourteen years of some pretty complicated financial transactions made me think this couldn’t really work. The process took about five minutes during which the familiar account bar on the left-hand portion of the screen progressed from a meaningless gobble of positive and negative balances to finally the exact balances I had in the Windows version. That was a nice way to start.
There were a couple problems. A new mystery credit card account appeared with my name followed by the word TEMP, but it had a zero balance so I didn’t worry about it. Later I found that this was a doubling of an actual credit card account that I had opened and closed in the past five years which resulted in a double-posting of the transactions for that account. Once discovered, it was easy to go back and delete the temporary account transactions, but it took some time to discover and I received no warning messages during the import process that this had happened.
My financial institution account logins and passwords did not carry over from the PC version and it was a little confusing at first to figure that out. Setting up online downloading of transactions was pretty straightforward, and once you get the hang of it, maybe easier than on Windows.
Any budgets I had created in Windows did not carry over to the Mac version. It took about 30 minutes to recreate my budget for this year. The budget creation and edit process are a little clunky but no worse than Windows.
With my accounts fully connected to their respective financial institutions and my budget created, I was able to better evaluate the new user interface and capabilities of the Mac version.
My initial impressions were mostly positive. Gone was the incredible bloat of 20 years of features added to the legacy Windows product. I don’t need a built-in credit score checker, college/retirement plan, or a maze of menu options to navigate even the simplest thing.
The Mac version is simpler and has most all the essential features intuitively organized and easy to find. Investment tracking is simple but accurate. The register and data entry tools are far better and fit the retina display capabilities of the Mac whereas the PC version ported through Parallels always needed tweaking just to see your transactions.
Reporting is much more basic and less customizable, but I found I was able to get the information I needed from existing reports and from an onscreen analysis that didn’t exist in Windows. Still, It feels like reporting is a work in progress. There’s also no way that I could find to schedule a loan/mortgage payment based on an amortization table which is a weird omission for a personal finance program (more on this in the next Quicken 2018 for Mac section).
I continued my trial of using the Mac version of Quicken over the course of the last year, choosing the simplicity of a native application. I learned a lot more about the software’s feature set and a growing list of things I missed from the PC version. I let my Quicken for Windows file languish. After 12 months and a lot of financial transactions later, it would take a tremendous effort to reconstruct my financial world in that PC software, so I resigned myself to deal with the good and the bad of the Mac version of the software.
In November, Quicken released a new version for the Mac, Quicken 2018. I waited four weeks to purchase a subscription (more on this later) after reading many, many negative reviews of the update, mostly about the outrage customers felt about being forced to pay each year for a substandard piece of software.
Quicken’s decision to move to a subscription service, alongside so many other software developers this year, didn’t surprise me. In fact, I already considered Quicken a subscription service after having to upgrade every two to three years just to keep bank and credit card downloads working properly. I bought a 27-month subscription from Amazon.com during a Black Friday sale which worked out to be roughly $35 per year for the Premium edition of Quicken. I now have a license for both Mac and PC if I choose to somehow migrate back. That’s like buying the software every two years which is about what I have done over the past decade. I’m OK with this, though I know many, many other customers are upset. In my view, the developers of Quicken have an opportunity to use this steady income from subscriptions to finally make the necessary improvements to the Mac version after so many years. However, if they fail to make improvements and continue to hobble the product after now forcing customers to pay annually, this will hasten their demise, at least on the Mac platform. Quicken developers: you better get to work!
The Premier subscription of Quicken includes free BillPay services and premium telephone support. I made use of this support service after discovering that Quicken was charging me $9.95 per month for BillPay while it should have been free. My phone call was answered promptly and helpfully, and while they couldn’t solve me BillPay issue (I had to call another number and waited 45 minutes on hold), I was pleased to know I can pick up the phone and quickly speak to a technician when I next encounter a Quicken problem.
Once Quicken 2018 for Mac was installed, I had a hard time finding many changes. Loan amortizations are now supported, along with some small changes to investment tracking and bill paying. No improvements to reporting though which I consider to be the biggest drawback of using the Mac.
Take, for example, the common actual vs. budget report that I’ve used to manage my finances for decades. It’s a pretty simple layout: actual, budget and a variance for the current month and year to date. For business or for personal finance, this is the most basic way of measuring whether you’re on plan or not. In Quicken for Windows, this is one of the default reports. Not so in the Mac version. In lieu of a budget report, you get either a grid view of your monthly budget interlaced with actual results, useful if you want to update your budget or a graphical display of one particular month vs. budget which takes up a whole lot of space without conveying much information. Not very useful. As a workaround, I export actual and budget figures out of Quicken to create a proper actual vs. budget report in Excel. I’ve automated this the best I can, but still takes a time each month to update references and labels, and once in Excel, loses its interactivity and drill-down capability.
Another example of reporting shortfalls came to light when I prepared my taxes earlier this year. Quicken tracks all my expenses by category and I needed a simple report of all my charitable contributions for the previous year broken down by payee. Simple, right? In Quicken for Windows, it would have been automatically provided for me by simply drilling down from my summary budget report for the year. In the Mac version, it’s not so easy. After a lot of tweaking, I was able to create a summary report summarized by payee for a particular category, but the report, understood only by a non-finance developer, did not include a total. So, if you flipped through my tax return support for last year, you’d see totals added in pencil for every supporting schedule on my tax return. So basic, and yet still unresolved on the Mac these many years.
Or, how about suppressing zero balance rows in reports? So basic, yet missing. Reporting in Quicken for Mac remains a big disappointment to me in using the software.
Another pet peeve is Quicken’s amnesia when it comes to auto-assigning categories to downloaded banking transactions. I pay the same utility company every month, yet inexplicably, Quicken fails to categorize the transaction. I have to go in and update the transaction with the proper category. This happens with a half-dozen routine expenses, yet many other transactions, particularly from credit cards, are categorized correctly. Perhaps all the bloat of 14 years of financial history in my situation has complicated things, but still … this is such a basic feature in Quicken for Windows that I scratch my head in wonder with the Mac version.
Quicken for Mac has an auto-backup feature, similar to Windows, but is much more intrusive to the user. Every time you quit the program, it launches a dialog box with a spinning gear while it backs up, taking over your system while it works, visible even if you move to another application. In Windows, this was completely invisible. Sloppy programming on the Mac.
Performance is OK, even with a fairly large data file of financial history, but any transaction searches will result in a beach ball delay for a few seconds. Just slightly annoying vs. the zero delay in the Windows counter-part. I’m running Quicken on a new souped-up iMac, so others with older computer hardware might find that performance suffers much more on the Mac.
Perhaps the biggest reservation I have with the Mac version of Quicken relates its file export limitations. As I described earlier, the process of exporting a Quicken to Windows file to the Mac worked pretty well. However, the reverse process of going from the Mac to Windows, considered now an industry file standard for personal finance software, has serious limitations. Investment accounts, for example, simply won’t transfer. In my test to go from Quicken 2018 for Mac to Quicken 2018 for Windows, I had an astounding 26,000 errors which resulted in a Quicken data file that was completely unusable. This limitation affects not only your ability to move back to the more robust Windows version of Quicken should you grow tired of the Mac’s limitations, but also impacts your ability to switch to other personal finance software products on the Mac if you decide to give up on Quicken altogether. The lack of this common export function feels intentional to me to keep customers from leaving the product.
If you are using the Windows version of Quicken and you have investment accounts, you should be very cautious before migrating to the Mac version. You’ll likely be able to move everything over to the Mac, but you’ll be stuck with limited choices of ever leaving. This is probably the biggest disappointment I have with Quicken 2018. Shame on Quicken for taking your financial data hostage.
So, after all these years, where do I stand with Quicken for Mac? I’d summarize my current feeling as grudging acceptance. Quicken for Mac is good enough that I’m not willing to go through all the work to revert back to the Windows version and deal with running a virtual PC on my Mac. I’m disappointed that my Mac data file can’t export to other software programs. I hope with a subscription revenue stream that future Quicken versions will finally improve enough to be on par with Windows, though past experience makes me very skeptical. If you find yourself a guest in this Hotel California, stop by and say hello.
Wednesday, December 20, 2017 • 5 min read
While reading books might be waning in today’s mobile phone obsessed, Facebook generation, the tools and technology for reading and remembering books have never been better. I’d call it a Golden Age for those lucky souls willing to invest the time to read.
This is difficult for me to admit, coming from a long history of reading real books. I have a personal library of more than 2,000 books that line the shelves of a small reading place that I consider a sanctuary.
But for the past ten years I’ve read more and more books electronically on my Kindle than I have in paper format. Other than cookbooks or art books, all my reading is now digital. And that isn’t quite true either, since I use the marvelous Paprika app to house all my recipes, with an iPad in the kitchen as I cook. If I find a recipe I like in one of my books, I can’t use it properly until I successfully track it down online to import into my cooking system.
My younger self would be aghast to hear me say this, but my Kindle is a far better book than any on my shelves. Here’s why:
There is one lesser known benefit of Kindle e-books. With a finger, you can highlight sections of the book that are memorable to you, that you’d like to be able to find again quickly. You can even see the passages of the book you’re reading that others also highlighted (I think there’s a way to see what other famous people highlighted in the book you’re reading too, but I think that’s creepy). In “real” books, these highlights can be found if you’re brave enough to mark up a book to begin with, by flipping haphazardly through the pages until flashes of yellow or pen scribbles catches your eye. I once searched in vain for a scribble in a massive poetry anthology that I knew I marked, but could not find. With a Kindle, these highlights are more readily available as a nested menu option from within the book itself.
But there’s hidden power in this simple digital highlight feature. Did you know that you can access a special Amazon web page housing all the highlights and notes from your Kindle library? And that with a couple of clicks, you can email yourself the sections of every book you’ve highlighted, complete with MLA style reference header and locations within the book?
Think about that: the text from every highlight you’ve applied from every book you’ve read, all available digitally.
Over my life of reading, I have haphazardly captured quotes that were meaningful to me. Some in books with yellow highlighting, more important ones I would transcribe into a notebook or journal and sometimes commit it to memory. I can still rattle off passages from Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Melville which is amazing to me because it was 30 years ago that these words were planted in my mind. In later years, I would capture these in Day One, my daily journal app. More times than not, when I read something beautiful, I would simply appreciate it in the moment, savoring it like a sip of fine wine, recognizing that any attempt to save it for later was impractical.
With a Kindle, highlighting is so easy, but only really important passages got the finger swipe from me because - why bother? It’s all just digital ether and I’ll never take the time to review these like I would in a hardbound book on my shelves. How wrong I was.
I took the time recently to email myself the highlights I’ve captured in books over the past ten years. I use Ulysses for most of my writing and thought it would be nice to have these quotes in my writing tool as reference. It was dead simple to import all my highlights, usually a “sheet” for each book. With a few clicks I applied tags to each quote; things like Strategy, Love, Meaning of Life, Family, etc. I then scoured my digital journals and files for any stored quotes and brought them in too. The whole process took a few hours because I had long lost highlights from a decade of reading.
And now I have a way to see the most precious highlights of everything I’ve read over the past ten years that I can quickly filter down to just those dealing with leadership. Or mortality. Or forecasting. Oh my. As a writer this is an incredible gift, allowing connections and new breakthroughs in thinking and writing that just wouldn’t be possible with this external brain I’ve created. And now I have a logical place to capture quotes I read from books I haven’t read that still move me - straight into Ulysses with a quick tag for later reference when I’m writing and need some inspiration on the topic I’m tackling.
If my younger self understood the power of these current digital reading tools housed in a humble Kindle Paperwhite, I’d like to think I would have changed my tune before now.
Friday, July 14, 2017 • 1 min read
Batman has his cave; Ironman has his lab; but for me, this place and my books provide such a great comfort - a salve from the trials of life and the boost of energy I need to keep pushing forward. I’ve read so many great books here, and dreamed up hundreds of plans, some limited few of which came to be. The dreaming was the best part. Everyone needs their special place to think and dream; I am so grateful that mine is here in my own home, among my dear bookish friends.
Sunday, January 8, 2017 • 7 min read
Back in my early thirties, my uncle Jim died unexpectedly. He had a lifelong passion of sailing, particularly the sell-everything-and-sail-off-across the-horizon variety. He had years and years of Cruising World magazines stacked up next to the toilet in his bathroom. I remember him waxing on about his plans to cast off, the destinations he’d visit, the freedom he would feel. He bought a sailboat, a very seaworthy vessel, capable of sailing anywhere in the world, and spent years in the boatyard getting her ready for sea. The conversations changed from if he would go, to when. And then, out of the blue, he passed away. To my knowledge, her keel never floated while Jim lived. He never achieved his dream of casting off and chasing the horizon.
I vividly recall the day I learned of his death. I was shocked. His was the first close death in my life. He was still a young man and I struggled to comprehend the awful fact that he was gone. Living near Puget Sound afforded access to many marinas. I drove to the nearest one and walked the docks thinking of my uncle Jim. I looked at each boat on the dock, most of the boats sadly forlorn, and was miserable at my loss. And then something happened to me, literally on that dock. I was struck by an idea that I must carry on his passion for sailing.
Me, a guy who’d never once given sailing or even boating a passing thought, despite living my whole life around water. In less than three months, I had completed sailing lessons and owned my own 35 foot sailboat. Now going on 20 years and four sailboats later, I owe my uncle Jim for bringing me to this wonderful passion of sailing. Ten years ago, while sailing alone and falling out of the boat on a riptide, I was fished out of the sea by a passing boater who, after careful reflection could not have possibly been there to save me. If there truly are visiting angels, I believe that my uncle Jim saved me that winter day. And now, like uncle Jim, I often toy with the idea of buying a boat in the Caribbean, sailing from island to island, relishing the freedom and adventure of exploring ports unknown. Casting off.
A few years ago, I began losing my mom day by day, month by month, to Alzheimer’s disease. For the nearly thirty years since I moved away from my small home town, my mom was that person I would call or visit for comfort, to help me through tough times, and to celebrate life’s victories. In other words, she was a wonderful and caring mom. If you have first hand experience with Alzheimer’s, you know the course this brutal disease takes. About five years ago, I realized that my mom was slipping away. Our weekly phone calls took a similar form. Me repeating what I had just said, over and over again, my mom putting on a good face, trying to hide her memory problems, and failing. She was diagnosed with breast cancer around this same time and I was able to spend some quality time with her as she recovered. There were times when she was her old self, and I cherished those hours, or sometimes just minutes.
Throughout my life, my mom had always loved birds. We had an incredibly talented parakeet when I was young that could talk and do tricks, and there were always some kind of birds around my mom - chickens, geese, ducklings. As a teenager I witnessed my mom adopt a goose as a pet, Lucy, bringing the big bird into our home when it got too cold, shitting everywhere. My mom didn’t care. I worried then a little for her sanity. But she was a caring soul, and always just thinking of her birds. I remember her telling me that she encountered a playful wild bird that visited her time and again after her dad passed away. She was sure that this bird, always perching in a spot in a workshop that my grandfather used before he died, was her reincarnated father. After that, she always had bird feeders outside for the wild birds and hummingbirds. In her last years of her life, she would dump birdseed on a picnic table outside her living room window and spent hours marveling at their frenetic and swooping activity. One blessing of Alzheimer’s is the newness of every moment. She would spend happy hours in front of that window, watching her birds.
I started noticing birds here on Vashon as I was losing my mom. I bought a few field guides to get to know the birds on our island. But that wasn’t quite enough, so I put up a single feeder off the porch. The squirrels quickly taught me what kind of feeder would actually allow the birds to eat, and after a year or so, I added a second feeder. I still don’t know all the different kinds of birds that visit my feeders, though I do recognize the glorious goldfinches in summer and have spent many hours watching them spat with one another over a perch on the feeder. Later I added a hummingbird feeder, only to be expanded to a full fleet of feeders across the north side of the porch, with a whole process of making hummingbird food to keep up with these thirsty and beautiful birds. I marvel as I refill the feeders at the audacity of these small creatures to buzz my head and squawk their complaints at my tardiness. I always smile and think of my mom who so loved these birds. For a while after my mom passed, I spent some time watching the birds, wondering if one of these might have taken on the life spirit of my mom. I think I realized that no one bird could do that, but all these birds together did a fine job of capturing her essence. And I know I’ll keep feeding these birds for the rest of my life.
A few weeks ago, my dear Pop passed away. He was ill a long time and suffered from dementia in his later years, also a horrible, horrible disease. My pop was many things, a boxer, a fisherman, a carpenter, a politician, a great grandpa, and a sometimes crook. But he was also a fantastic cook. He was happiest in the kitchen, making up one of his signature dishes, a frittata, an Italian goulash, a polenta pizza, or big pot of Mexican chili. He was always experimenting with different cooking styles and ingredients, sometimes making wonderful dishes he could never recreate because he never followed a recipe, or sometimes making horribly inedible meals. He once made something he called Goong-Ga which was truly awful. I remember gagging when I tried to eat it. My mom scolded me, but had the same reaction when she tried it and forgave me. We laughed about this for many years. But usually, my Pop was a fantastic cook. When he and my mom moved in to our cottage here on Vashon with the hope of spending their remaining golden years on the island, I was excited to have him in the kitchen. Maybe I could finally learn some cooking skills from this old man. But alas, the years were cruel and Pop had forgotten most all of what he knew of his freewheeling kitchen style. He tried to make his famous goulash, a dish he must have made a hundred times, but could not muster it, burning it and cussing himself for forgetting such simple things.
These past few weeks have been tough for me. I miss my Pop and I miss my Mom. So, imagine my surprise today in realizing that my life had changed once again, in a simple comfortable way. I’ve found myself focused inexplicably on the kitchen and pantry of our Vashon Island home. I reorganized our pantry to make spices, oils and baking goods more accessible. I’ve spent time putting our pots, pans, bowls and utensils in order, resolving a year or more of clutter. And I’ve been cooking more, but now disregarding the recipe books for more creative cooking, like my Pop would have appreciated. This is not like me at all, always wanting to follow directions for repeatability, but I’ve been throwing caution aside, making meals like Pop would, and laughing a lot more at the stove top.
I’ve lost a lot of dear souls these past years. But I am comforted to know they are still with us, in various forms, to carry on this gift of life.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 • 2 min read
I’ve always been a big reader and dreamed of having my own private library for as long as I can remember. One of the things that drew me to our house here on Vashon was the book-lined room with views out to the water. We’ve expanded the shelves over the years and now have all my books in easy reach from two antique leather wingback chairs. I’ve spent many a quiet evening reading from one of these chairs in perfect peace, feeling very fortunate to have such a sanctuary.
And then … we got a puppy. Not just any puppy, but a Puggle (mostly Beagle), and my private space quickly became his playground. First, he chewed through a half dozen rare leather-bound books I spent a small fortune to acquire. He then tore through the leather cushion on the starboard wing chair. Later he gnawed through the ancient leather base of the port chair. The kids would avoid me on the nights I would come home to discover another puppy atrocity in the library. I am on a first-name basis with an antique furniture repair place in Tacoma.
We ended up covering the chairs and putting baby gates across all the bookcases to prevent further damage from the little fella. Since then, the damage has stopped, though the charm of the place has lost some of its magic. Yet tonight, as the two of us sit together ruminating on the day, I think it’s become a good place to share after all…
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 • 4 min read
When I was a boy, younger than twelve-year-old Connor is now, I believed all the stories my dear Pop told me. He sailed across oceans, traveled down the Nile, jumped out of planes in the 82nd Airborne, drank with Hemingway, conspired with Castro, along with many other misdeeds and adventures. While my kids are constant skeptics of any tales I tell, even the true ones, I didn’t question the stories I was told. Pop was a great story teller. He would get this gleam in his eye while he drew you in and threw in such vivid details of the surroundings and the things that happened to him that you couldn’t help but believe.
One of Pop’s favorite tales was about his time in Valencia, Spain. I don’t recall why he was there. Maybe the army? It didn’t matter. All I knew is he loved Valencia. Its beaches, women, wine and music. Its history and machismo and bullfighting. This was captivating stuff for a ten year old.
He liked to whistle and sing the Valencia song, originally done by Jose Padilla in the 1920s, but made popular again in 1950 by crooner Tony Martin when my Pop was himself a young man. He whistled this song most every morning as he started his day. I would find myself whistling and singing it too through my early teens until our tastes in music diverged for thirty or so years. I smile as I see this happening with Connor now as he sings Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds when he’s in the shower or making himself a sandwich. Or finding old Bruce Springsteen songs on Mallory’s iTunes playlists.
So, when we were planning our trip to Spain, I knew we had to visit Valencia.
In the car as we approached the city, I found myself whistling the song, just like Pop did so many years ago, to the dismay of the kids. “What’s up with Dad? Why is he grinning like that? And what is that horrible song he’s trying to whistle?!” Even Lisa grew concerned, and she knows the back story.
We spent two days here in Valencia and Pop was right to admire the city. In contrast to the crowds of Barcelona, this place is tranquil, even languid. The charm and authenticity of the old quarter is refreshing compared to the more tourist-minded areas of some of the other parts of Spain we’ve visited.
And it’s warmer here. Today it was nearly 90 degrees. The wine is good and the women are indeed very beautiful. Lisa and Mallory have hinted that the men here aren’t bad looking either. Connor is non-committal, though he turned beet red when I asked him what he thought of seeing so many topless sunbathers at the beach.
We rented bicycles and explored the old part of town, the many tree-lined parks, the new science and technology center, the port with its Americas Cup headquarters, and the beach. The water is warm and the sand is perfect. I’m writing this while the rest of the family dozes on beach chairs under an umbrella. The sea beckons with a half-dozen white sails dotting the blue horizon, making me wish I were out there sailing on a broad reach, feeling the angle of the warm wind on my cheek.
And as I take in the beauty of this place, I wonder if Pop ever came here himself, or if his Valencia was just another of his tall tales. I could ask him, but most of me doesn’t really want to know. I’d like to believe he walked these streets as I did today and breathed in this orange-scented air; that he left some part of himself here long ago, a strand or two woven into the fabric of this beautiful place.
I wonder if any of my own tales have found purchase with my kids, strong enough that they might some day go out and experience it for themselves, to see what their crazy old Pop was always going on about …. maybe sailing off to a remote Caribbean island, singing three little birds with big dreamy grins, every sight and sound and smell unlocking childhood memories long tucked away, relishing the swell of the sea under their feet.
A nice thought. Maybe this is how dreams are meant to pass down the line after all.
