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In the inbox today: mail from the Quicken Financial Life for Mac development team. Bad news for me, I'm afraid:

Dear Quicken Customer,

Thank you for your interest in the new Quicken Financial Life for Mac product we're developing. We wanted to provide an update on where we're at with this new offering.

We started a small, private beta earlier this year to get customer feedback. Interest in this beta has been extremely high; we've had five times the number of sign-ups we had anticipated. We're very happy to see this high level of passion among our loyal Mac users.

Due to overwhelming interest in the beta, at this time we cannot accommodate your request to participate. We're sorry that we are not able to accommodate everyone who was interested in joining.

We expect to release Quicken Financial Life for Mac in summer 2009. If you have an immediate need for a Quicken product for the Mac, we would encourage you to check out our current Mac offering, Quicken for Mac 2007.

Thanks again for your interest.

Sincerely,

The Quicken Financial Life for Mac Team

It's a bit disappointing that they won't let me in on the beta, and it's more than a bit frustrating that they've slipped their release date another year. But perhaps adding a year to the development effort means that the OS X version of Quicken 2008 - er, Quicken 2009...er, Quicken Financial Life for Mac, 2010 edition...whatever they end up calling it - will actually implement all the functionality of its predecessor.

Once the chimps manage that, they can start working on feature parity with the Windows version of Quicken....

The nice people at delicious.com rolled out a mobile version of their site the other day: http://m.delicious.com/. I'm thinking that makes delicious.com a better place to keep the bookmarks I use on my phone.

It'll be easier to add new bookmarks. Currently, the only way to get bookmarks into my phone is to manually enter them, on the phone itself; the Sidekick's otherwise nice desktop interface provides no web browser access. (This is a curious omission. I wonder why it's missing.)

On the other hand, Danger's web proxy service can't always access m.delicious.com, which is rather irksome. (It has similar problems accessing wap.cumtd.com, which is beyond irksome and well into really annoying territory.)

Plan B: keep the master list of bookmarks on delicious.com, tagged with 'mobile' for ease of retrieval; then (manually) synchronize with the device as the unreliable Danger service allows.

(Random observation: a sufficiently-advanced web browser on one's phone obviates the need for any other applications. Perhaps by the time my T-Mobile contract expires - in 2010 - the too-expensive iPhone will have come down in price, or the incompletely-baked Google phone will have been spiffed up a bit, and an upgrade will be in order.)

A year ago, I signed up for an account on Pownce. I neglected it for a while, then deleted it, then - after a few months - created a new account and neglected it, too

My pownce account saw a burst of activity when I was messing about with ping.fm, but went dormant again when I lost interest in ping.fm.

News today is that the Pownce folks are pulling the plug on their baby, and jumping ship to Six Apart. I won't miss it; it never was very useful.

I suppose I'll delete my Pownce bookmarks, and forget I ever had an account there. (And wonder, perhaps, how many more of my nine-and-ninety useless online accounts will go poof in the next few months, as the economy worsens and tech startups have to worry about actually making money.)

I've listened to all the podcasts on the iPod. I have two dozen new ones on the iMac, but there's a problem: ever since I upgraded the iMac to iTunes 8, docking the iPod has been a crap shoot. Maybe it'll synchronize, maybe it'll just hang.

Maybe this is Steve Jobs' way of telling me to buy a new iPod. Sure thing, Steve - show me one that costs $10, and I'll buy it.

Earlier this evening, there was an iTunes update: 8.0.2, I think. Perhaps that means my docking woes are over. (No, I don't believe it, either.)

This evening, I uninstalled Spanning Sync from the iMac. It was whatever 1.x version I installed last summer (or was it last spring?); I never did bother with installing version 2, which was released a few weeks ago.

The original idea was to use Spanning Sync to keep iCal on the iMac synchronized with Google Calendar, so that I could make changes on either and have them automatically propagate to the other. But as it turns out, I don't make calendar changes on the iMac, and iCal's subscription mechanism is quite sufficient to keep iCal up-to-date with changes from Google Calendar.

So I don't need synchronization software - which, despite years of claims to the contrary from vendor after vendor, has never worked very well. Having persuaded Jennifer to use Google Calendar (instead of a paper calendar, hanging on the kitchen wall), the last thing I want is for the iMac to take a giant [censored] all over it.

(It's amazing how much stuff is on the family calendar. We're a busy bunch, it seems.)

Last month, I said I wouldn't be signing up for an account on Twine.

This morning, I heard that Twine was out of private beta, and - having long since forgotten my promise - I rushed over to claim my favorite username.

Somehow, I'd gotten the notion that Twine was a bookmarking site, sort of like del.icio.us or Zigtag; but it isn't. It's more of a note-taking site, like EverNote (or OnFolio), plus a commenting / discussion system.

I'm not terribly interested in that sort of thing. I already have plenty of ways to share with the world any web sites I've found & commentary I may have on them. So that's a big never mind on my shiny new Twine account.

Sorry, Twine.

Looking at online personal financial-management sites:

• Buxfer: No forecasting. Tracking IOUs to other Bufxer users is a curious gimmick, but not terribly useful.
• Expensr: No forecasting. And the whole dropped penultimate e business has been done to death: Flickr, Blippr, Expensr, etc., etc.
• Geezeo: Very pretty. Haven't looked at it much.
• Green Sherpa: Trapped in an unending private beta. Might be interesting, if I'm ever allowed into the clubhouse.
• Mint: Interesting.
• Rudder: Has forecasting, which is the #1 feature I want from financial management software.
• Wesabe: No forecasting. Strange emphasis on community, as if my chief reason for managing our money were to chat with other people about it.
• Zero: Amusing slogan - Here the bloody hell we are - but they're an Australian business bookkeeping service. As we are neither Australian nor a business, Xero is of limited value to us.

Things I want from financial management software, either desktop or online:

• Automatic downloading of transactions. I hate data entry, if only because I keep making mistakes. I'd much rather let the software handle the grunt work of fetching transaction data from the bank.
• Sensible categorization. Every package I've used has its own slightly-different set of categories. I'd rather use my own set, laboriously worked out over years of using MS Money and/or Quicken. (It would be really cool if I could export my categories from Quicken, then upload them to the online service. Alas, I don't think any online service supports this.)
• Forecasting. The single most important question any financial management service has to answer is: Do we have enough money? If I hit the grocery-store salad bar this week, will the mortgage payment bounce next week? MS Money was pretty good at forecasting; Quicken is barely adequate. Only Rudder has anything similar.

I've been experimenting with Mint, but not really getting into it. The transaction downloading is slow & unreliable, the automatic categorization doesn't work very well (and the categories themselves aren't what I'd prefer), and there's no forecasting.

I might poke around a bit with Rudder, if I get sufficiently motivated.

Mentioned recently by the ubiquitous Scoble: Twine. The Twine folks have this to say about themselves:

Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information around your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine individually, with friends, or with groups, teams and communities.

Powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about interests and makes recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it gets to know you and the more useful it becomes.

I won't be joining.

I keep my bookmarks on delicious.com. I tried Zigtag, but kept running into problems. (And Zigtag's browser plugin wanted way too much screen space for what it did.)

I've joined too many social-networking sites over the last few months, and most of them have been half-baked and not terribly useful. I'm a little burned out on the whole idea of social networking. (I suppose I never was very sociable to begin with.)

I think from now on it's going to be a little harder for new sites to persude me to sign up.

For a while now, I've been messing around with a Python + MySQL web thingy to keep track of my pedometer data. (Yes, I could use Excel. It would probably be easier, and Excel certainly has fancier data-analysis tools than anything I could hope to create for myself. But half the reason behind doing this is to learn how to write a model-view-controller web application. And it's fun.)

This morning, I patched in some code to save new records in the database: fill out the form, hit the Save button, and - presto! - new record.

But it didn't work. No errors, no warnings, no messages of any kind - but also no new record.

Executing the REPLACE statement manually - by pasting it into a MySQL command-line session - worked just fine. But executing it from a Python script refused to create the new record.

I thought maybe the problem was my table design. Maybe using a date column as the primary key isn't allowed, or maybe there are bugs in MySQL / MySQLdb. So I added a numeric column and made it the primary key. No improvement.

I changed the table definition from the InnoDB engine to the MyISAM engine, and - surprise! - suddenly it worked. But why won't it work with InnoDB?

A bit of searching turned up somebody out in the world who had the same problem: his code seemed to work, but never actually modified the database. The very first reply to his cry for help:

InnoDB tables are transactional. Are you committing your transactions after inserts and deletes?

Um. I knew that.

One commit statement later, I can save records into my database.

Long enough ago that I don't remember exactly when it was, Scoble mentioned http://www.strands.com/: so of course I requested an invite to the beta.

Today, my invite arrived.

I don't know anybody on Strands, so there's nobody for me to follow. Even Scoble seems to be staying away.

Within ten minutes of activating my account, I had two people following me. That's just a little creepy. (Maybe they work for Strands? Just about all my 'friends' over on Zigtag are people who work for Zigtag.)

Strands has filters: you can ask to see books people liked, movies people disliked, that sort of thing. But apparently nobody's been clicking the thumbs-up / thumbs-down icons, because filtering by liked / disliked doesn't filter anything.

I imagine I'll poke around a bit more in Strands, looking for a reason to stick around. But at present I am not hopeful of finding one.