Kedinger.com

Exquisite Carmel Latte

Sometimes a great cup of coffee can make a morning! I stumbled into the office this morning and walked straight to the expresso maker. Jason’s spanking new espresso maker takes some effort, as it is an all manual machine, but it can turn out a shot of espresso that tops anything you can get in town.

A Brand New Christian

Anna and I had the pleasure of going to our dear friend’s son’s baptism on Sunday. They asked me to be the official paparazzi for the event and I gladly obliged. I have learned that I really enjoy looking at the works of the Lord thru a lens. Photography for me is always a chance to see in a frame what I would normally miss with the eye. So here are a few of my favorites from his Baptism.

I spend much of my day weeding through lines and lines of PHP and CSS while working on crafting a custom Wordpress template for my clients. It can be very boring staring at thousands of lines of text. I use a text editor for the mac called TextMate and it is phenominal. Even has a built in Wordpress bundle that saves me countless keystrokes by auto-text combination for common Wordpress tags. Anyway…I have their tips window popup when I load up the program to discover little features that I never knew about. Well the other day this popped up!

Of course this doesn’t make any sense at all unless you are a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! A very awesome book and a pretty darn good movie too! I love when people really love what they do and put a piece of themselves into their projects. The guys who worked on this must be fans…and I appreciate that!

Snapped this a while back but forgot to post it. Found it just very ironic. Not only was one angel knocked over but the darker one at that.

I don’t know how many times I have heard some of these same phrases. My favorite is “I am not really making any money off of this either.” It is always amazing how people are willing to pay the price on the sign at McDonald’s but when it comes to service industries they try and get it for free. Enjoy!

Last weekend I was asked by my local parish priest to do photography for the Mass celebrating his 20th anniversary of ordination to the priesthood. Fr. Russo is a really powerful preacher and a man who really cares for his flock. I had the pleasure of serving with him in his parish when I was still a seminarian so we have a interesting bond. Here are a few of my favorites from the day.

Support your local priests. As much as people give them flak they offer up their lives in total service to us. 20 years of being present to the people of God is laudable!

Besides the fact that your face will be melted off by radiation…sounds cool! Sad that this is the only “contingency” for a global killer.

George Dyson - Orion Project

If you know me, you know that I hate math. I hate anything having to deal with numbers! So financial management software is not a happy fun priority on my list, but as a small business owner I can’t live without something! Well unfortunately I haven’t found a solution that I like yet. I have tried alot of different things out there and nothing quite fits the bill. Maybe I have to high of a goal for my software!

A perfect picture of financial management software for me would need to include the following:

1. Intuitive and looks like a Mac app (I won’t hold my breath on this one)
2. Seamless integration with OS X and my other tools (iCal, Address Book, Spotlight, Mail)
3. Invoicing (specifically to estimate, invoice portions of the estimate, and have custom designed invoices)
4. Billing (track accounts receivable and accounts payable)
5. Bank Reconciliation and Register (preferably something my account can take and work with)
6. Reasonably priced

I know, I know Brains and Beauty in a financial app…in your dreams! But I have scoured the internet and tried quite a few  different things that do one or two of the jobs but not everything. Here are my quick reviews of the best, at least what I think, are out there.

• Billings 3: Great invoicing, slick templates and easy to customize; sucks on invoicing before work is complete so deposits are a pain
• iBank: Simple register, iPhone and MobileMe integration is awesome!; won’t export to my accountant, not easy to see snapshot of my business
• MYOB: powerful, full featured; pricey, complicated (feels like my accountant would have a hard time using it)
• Quickbooks: Full featured, solid invoicing and banking integration; Intuit doesn’t think Mac (see screenshot of Safari, and they don’t support anything except IE for online), the software still feels like a port, they make the comment when you ask them for support, “if you want that run the PC version in Parallels or VMWare.”
• LessAccounting.com: completely in the cloud, awesome banking, great invoicing; sucks for invoice customization, pricey when you look at the cost for more than a year.

So anybody have a good idea of what to do? What do you use? What works and what doesn’t!

UPDATE: I caved in and got Quickbooks for Mac 2009. After searching and searching it became my only all-in-one solution. Intuit is taking strives to reach out to Mac users. I am also beta testing their online version.

(image courtesy of: Michael Witthaus: localrhythms.wordpress.com)

This year’s festival was tons of fun! It was beautiful weather and the music was solid. I plan on posting more images later…but here is one of them that shows the chilled out nature of Festival.