[wplug] application/framework to record heterogeneous personal information

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Jason Jerome wrote:

> I can not help with the medical tracking, but as far as financial I 
> can't recommend a product like Quicken enough.  It allows me to be 
> pretty lazy when I want (just import and forget), and will get into as 
> much detail with things as I want to dish out.  I've been using it for 
> 12 years now (after taking a class).  Embarrassingly enough, I've based 
> a lot of my financial decisions on whether the data can be directly 
> imported into Quicken, but the payoff has been huge.
>

Gnucash is a mature OSS alternative to Quicken which I've been using ever 
since I abandoned M$... Quicken helped by refusing to allow me to continue 
to operate with Quicken 98, demanding instead that I buy an upgrade (which 
I did not do).

It claims to have the ability to import any data Quicken can import (I 
even used Quicken Interchange Format to export my old data from quicken 
into Gnucash) so it should be able to talk to online banks.  Plus it uses 
bayesian filtering to sort transactions.

-Brandon

>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Michael H. Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com>
> To: General user list <wplug at wplug.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 7:48:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [wplug] application/framework to record heterogeneous personal information
>
> I read a book called 'The Long Walk', which was the story of a Polish officer after WWII who was sent to a prison camp in Siberia.  Before heading to Siberia, he was held for a few years in tight confinement at a prison, and beaten and tortured with the aim of coercing him into signing a confession.  He held out, refusing to confess to anything, and was sentenced to 20 years in a Siberian work camp.  All evidence indicates that everyone who signed confessions was more or less promptly executed.
>
> What's interesting about this is that one of the most brutal regimes in history, which killed tens of millions of citizens, wouldn't do anything if the paper work weren't in order.
>
> Anecdotally, I've heard similar things about other totalitarian regimes -- the record keeping and bureaucracy is second to none.  The idea behind this, I believe, is to discourage independent action and accumulate power in the upper levels of the bureaucracy.
>
> I only bring this up because I too have thought quite a bit about an inclusive personal record keeping and information tracking application.  My gut feeling is that it would be quite a bit of work to keep everything up to date in this database, and if it wasn't kept up to date, and wasn't entirely inclusive, what's the point?  (Also, I worry that I would turn into a totalitarian dictator, or worse, a creepy person.)
>
> But, if I were doing this, I would want the data stored off-site, simply because it would probably be a relatively small dataset, and it would be most useful if I lost everything, such as if there were a fire or robbery.  Therefore, I'd probably try to build it on top of Amazon's S3,  rsync.net, or a hosted webserver.
>
> Mike
>
> On 3/22/07, Alexandros Papadopoulos < apapadop at alumni.cmu.edu> wrote:Dear all
>
> Inspired by the unbelievable bureaucracy that hunts my daily personal and
> professional life, I'm beginning to feel the need for a software application
> that will make it easier to record anything that might be of use for future
> reference.
>
> Let me explain it by example: These days I'm fighting some physiological
> challenges. In order to reclaim some of the money I'm spending on doctors,
> hospitals, prescription drugs, physiotherapy etc, I need to have absolute
> proof of everything I spent and when, how, for what.
>
> The need also arises to trace back to some examinations from a previous life
> (10 or more years ago) that someone has stored somewhere, but noone is
> exactly sure...
>
> Wouldn't it be great if an application existed to be able to track all that
> jazz? It would be able to perform string searches and look up anything from
> anytime. All drugs, prescriptions, diagnoses, examination results would be on
> its database. It would be easy to link one doctor's visit and the resulting
> diagnosis to future paperwork/X-rays etc.
>
> Is anyone aware of anything that could remotely satisfy this need? I recently
> read on the MyLifeBits project
> http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx that has
> some aspects of what I'm looking for but no working prototype.
>
> This doesn't have to be medical only. I'd love to have the financial angle too
> and be able to track my expenses in accordance to other events.
>
> The closest I can think of is a wiki, but it's too static in terms of data
> presentation... Any ideas?
>
> Cheers
>
> -A
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