I’m currently involved in a project at work that involves a lot of hurry up and wait. One minute I’m running around putting out a dozen fires, the next I’m stashed in my office waiting for the next Most Important Thing In The Worldâ„¢.

During one of my “wait” moments, I found myself going through some old project notes I’d kept in MacJournal. Since I use Journler now, I looked at exporting from the former and importing to the latter.

Unfortunately, MacJournal doesn’t set the the date created and date modifed on the exported files (it puts the info into the content of the file instead). So I looked at scripting it, and came up with a brain-dead AppleScript to do the deed. This is one of those scripts you write for one-time use, just because you can:

tell application "MacJournal"
  
  set theJournal to the journal named "_Archived"
  
  repeat with entryNumber from 1 to (count of journal entries of theJournal)
    
    set theEntry to journal entry entryNumber of theJournal
    set {entryName, entryCreatedDate, entryModifiedDate, entryContent} to {name, date, modification date, plain text content} of theEntry
    
    if entryContent is missing value then
      set entryContent to " "
    end if
    
    tell application "Journler"
      make new entry with properties {name:entryName, date created:entryCreatedDate, date modified:entryModifiedDate, contents:entryContent, category:"Imported From MacJournal"}
    end tell
    
  end repeat
end tell

Pretty straightforward. The only curiosity was I had was that an empty MacJournal entry (that is, one without any content) would be reported either as contents:missing value or contents:"", but it wasn’t clear to me when each happened, nor the actual difference. Journler doesn’t apparently know what “contents:missing value” means, so I had to turn it into something Journler did understand, thus this code:

    if entryContent is missing value then
      set entryContent to " "
    end if

In early testing, I replaced contents:missing value with contents:" " (a space) because using an empty string (contents:"") generated an error. Later testing (with different content) didn’t have this error. I didn’t spend the time to  figure it out. After all, this was a one-off script to solve a one-time problem. In fact, I’ve probably spent more time writing about the script than I did writing the script itself.

Sigh. Looks like I’ve managed to confuse the folks over at Fidelity. They responded to Tuesday’s email, saying

When a bill is paid with a check (which your bill for $223.85 was), the amount will not be deducted from your account history until the check is paid, so that is why you see it in the billpay “Recent Payments” and not the “Recent History” in your mySmart Cash account.

If you take your current available to withdraw balance ($322.98) and subtract the uncleared check $223.85, you get $99.13, which is $.03 off from your expected total of $99.10. The extra $.03 is from your interest payment on January 30, 2009.

Totally reasonable, makes perfect sense.

Except….

It doesn’t quite match with what the Bill Pay system says:

<Vendor> received your payment electronically on 02/24/2009. Your payment was posted to your <vendor> account on 02/24/2009

Additionally, when I check my <Vendor>  statement online, it says:

$223.85 – paid on 2/24/2009

Clearly there is a disconnect here. So I called up Fidelity, explained the situation, and got transfered to a very nice Bill Pay specialist named Amber. After going through my account, and putting me on hold a few times, Amber came back and basically said

I’m sorry, I don’t know why it’s not showing up.

Awesome.

It appears that one Fidelity system shows the bill was “paid electronically”; another system shows it was “paid by check”, which won’t show up as a debit on my account until that check is “cashed”.

I logged into my vendor’s website, which, of course, shows the account as “paid on 2/24/2009”

Amber asked me to check again tomorrow or Friday, as it may take time as “it’s making its way through the system” (even though another bill, paid on the same day, shows up correctly).

The saga continues. Ain’t technology grand?