Celeste's Breadbox

Library Horse

A great shot of one of the Horse Project ponies, in front of the Multnomah County Central Library.

Jacques Dutronc - 60s French Fab

I'm making an effort to post more, even if it's just random snippets and links.

Today - some fabulous Jacques Dutronc videos. Thanks to Suzie for the original introduction.

Useful website plugs

It's not often I find sites that actually fill a real need, but I've found a couple of very useful sites over the last couple of weeks that I feel compelled to plug.

Harvest is an online time-tracking, estimating and invoicing system that does almost everything I need it to do. I've been keeping track of my hours in iCal and invoicing from Excel for way, way too long. It works, but it's time-consuming and generally pretty annoying. I've tried a lot of systems, and they all either sucked (QuickBooks), or forced me to work in different ways, which I'm not keen on. Harvest fits right into my scheme, and even has a Widget extension for time tracking. The invoicing isn't as customizable as I would like, but I can live with that. At $20/month for a single user it's a tad spendy, but considering the time I would spend building my own system in FileMaker (which was to be my next step), it's probably a good deal. The developers also responded quickly to a question and feature request while I was still using the demo.

My Folia is brilliant site for keeping track of your garden. I'm a pretty casual gardener, but I've always felt I should be better about tracking when I planted stuff, where it went, when it died, bloomed, etc. I've tried keeping a journal, but that usually lasts about one season before I get sidetracked. Folia is not just a journal, though, it's also a bit of a social network. You can see who else has the same plants and where they're located, ask questions, provide advice, and even swap plants and seeds. It's hooked into Flickr, which makes it really easy to add photos, but it does mean that my Flickr space is going to get kind of clogged up with a lot of pretty boring photos of plants. I cleaned out my garden shed this weekend and found a bunch of my old plant tags, so at least I have cultivar info on some of my plants. I have also come to realize that I have a lot of plants in my small urban space.