I'll think of a good title later

I needed a project to help me learn php & the result so far is: My Budget a site where you can record your income & outgoings. I started work on it in mid February & I've been extremely anal in using it to track every penny from the first of January onwards. I've got to the point where I've been using it without having to make any changes to the code for a number of weeks now so I am now going to declare it, "ready for use".

I'm sure a lot of people are feeling the pinch & I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "keep track of your budget" more than once. Up until last year I was totally oblivious about money, I had no idea about the cost of anything. I started keeping a track of my spending on a spreadsheet & found it really useful & I think it is a very worthwhile exercise. Just being aware of something is the first step to keeping it under control, you can't make an informed choice if you are not informed.

It's pretty simple so I haven't bothered with any instructions yet, but I will if anyone needs the help. Quite simply you record transactions: a date, an amount, notes if you want to & whether it is an income or an outgoing. Each transaction can be tagged (I've shamelessly duplicated the functionality of the tagging system used here at MyOpera), you can then view your total spending habits by month or by tag.

You can also set up regular transactions so you don't need to manually record the bills that are the same every month. I really struggled to come up with a form to easily specify the regularity of such payments but I believe I have come up with a pretty good solution.

It's been a fun project & it has certainly increased my respect for the Opera community devs who have a far more complex beast to deal with.

Really fascinating article all about the rise & fall of Iceland's banking industry. Lots of interesting stuff about the social dynamics in Iceland too, many observations that I would have never have expected given the little knowledge I have about the country.

It's often difficult to put into words what good design is. I've heard a lot of designers descend into meaningless emotional babble far removed from any original concept.

But Dieter Rams has a really good stab at it.

As further evidence to my claim that as a society we simply don't understand numbers I heard this on the radio:

The cost of living is decreasing as inflation falls to 3%

You may have heard the saying:

Humanity's greatest weakness is its inability to understand an exponential

I think this statement gives us too much credit. I think our weakness is that we simply don't understand numbers, specifically big numbers.

News bulletins & articles are peppered with *llion words these days but most people have little comprehension of just how big these numbers are or what they represent. I recently came across this useful thought exercise:

Without doing any calculations

Guess how long a million seconds is.

Now guess how long a billion seconds is (queue countdown music)...

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1,000,000 seconds = 11.57047 days
1,000,000,000 seconds = 31.709792 years

Slight difference.

The US National debt is somewhere around $13 trillion & the UK is at $10 trillion (see how other countries stack up here) everyone usually points & laughs at America for the size of their debt, but relatively speaking us little Brits absolutely dwarf our friends over the pond.

To pay off their debt the US's 300 million people would each have to contribute $100 dollars every week for 8.3 years. Would anyone miss $100 every week?

We in the UK would take 32 years to pay off our burden.

& that's without taking into account the interest on the current debt, or our inability to understand an exponential.

The US National Debt Clock in New York is soon to run out of digits & will be replaced by a new clock able to display up to a quadrillion dollars of debt.

A quadrillion seconds is 31709.792 millenia.