Refocusing

I seem to be in a constant state of refocusing what I spend my time doing. I think about the kinds of sites that used to occupy the right side of this screen and what is now there and it is quite jarring. The latest changes are the demise of my Facebook and Flickr accounts over the last week. I've not logged into our Flickr account once in 2012, and Facebook just seems to be cluttered up with less signal and more noise from "friends" I've not laid eyes on in 30 years or more, and with whom I have less in common than the illegal immigrants living upstairs. Every attempt to inject some sort of relevance was unsuccessful and when you add in the constant Big-Brother-Is-Watching creepiness that seems coded into all things Facebookian, and the new interface that seems to insure that if anyone posts something truly important, Facebook will make every effort to hide it in favor of someone's bowel movement narrative, and, well, I'm done.

Flickr was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but instead became and endless time suck that really added nothing to my life. Growing up in the 1970's, one of the most dreaded things in existence was the Vacation Slide Show where a host would force his (invariably it was a  male who performed this particular torture) guests to sit in a dark room while he projected blurry, badly composed shots of the family's latest "Ha ha we went someplace awesome while you mortals were stuck here working" brag-cation. As perverse and anti-social as that was, Flickr takes it to a whole new level of pathology by inducing me to inflict the torture on myself through its creepy "someone commented on your photo so the polite thing to is to make them your "friend" and go look at their photos and make comments and you really really REALLY want to do the polite thing" passive-aggressive meme. No thanks.

We spent yesterday (our only day off together in the month of February thanks to stupid library people) visiting with my parents in their snowbird nest over on the other side of Florida. When we first got there, it looked like the weather was going to make it a dreary visit, but the sky cleared, the temp ran up to around 80 degrees, and we ended up getting in a couple bike rides, some music, dinner, Dairy Queen and a movie/how-do-we-work-this-DVD-thing teachable moment. (And people wonder why I don't set my parents up on the internet....)

Well, almost time to leave for another exciting day of shelving books and dealing with stupid people.

"Fire in the Spacecraft!"

I missed this yesterday while messing about with other things. January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 cabin in a fire that started during a plugs-out test. The cause of the fire was never conclusively identified, but was likely caused by a number of construction and design flaws combined with flawed operating procedures. I don't remember the fire, most likely because I was only two years old at the time and would have been shielded from something so horrifying by my parents even if I had been older. I of course have vivid memories of Challenger and Columbia and can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing at the time. But I know Apollo 1 from second hand accounts, books, old news footage, and of course the audio recording. I'm sure copies of that can be easily found on the internet. Personally, I have no desire to listen while three men first struggle for their lives, then asphyxiate, all while on fire. Your tastes may vary....

Kitchen Goddess

I've been spending a lot of time lately in the kitchen. I made a couple stabs at making bread. The first attempt was an Amish white bread recipe I found at allrecipes.com. It was actually edible, much to my surprise. I'd forgotten how dense most homemade bread is; anything we didn't each could have been used as a door stop. In the closeup, you can see I need to work on my mixing and kneading technique.

The scorch marks on the top were due to me trying to bake them in the toaster oven. The bread got too tall and touched the top heating element. Guess I have to use the big oven for bread. We've also been messing around with a pizza dough recipe as well. No photos of that, but it is quick and easy, and reminds me a lot of the pizza dough from one of my college jobs.

Today it was sourdough bread (I cheated and just grabbed a box mix at Walmart) and no-bake cookies from my mom's recipe. The cookies are for a care package that will get sent to Debbie's niece, who is away for her freshman year in college. The cookies turned out good, although they taste different than I remember, but I haven't had my mom's no-bakes in a long time. Maybe the pallet forgets? My bread mixing and kneading were a bit better this time around, but you could still use the stuff as a boat anchor.

But yea; I'm now a Kitchen Goddess. (Can you tell I've had three days off in a row?)

We went out exploring some a couple weeks ago. There is a park very close to us that featured a couple of the tallest trees in Florida. They weren't as impressive as they once were; both were sheared off by a hurricane in the 1920's. Then about a week after we were there, the tallest one named The Senator, caught fire and burned down to a five-foot stump. The forestry people still haven't determined the cause, but are fairly certain it was not arson. Anyway, here is what they looked like:

The Senator

Liberty

There seem to be dozens of little state parks around here, hidden behind strip malls and hemmed in by subdivisions. They can be tough to find sometimes. This one seems to be used mostly as a place for people to dump their vehicle and take off on bikes down the local bike path that goes through the middle of the park. I understand there used to be a gift shop and all the usual tourist-trap stuff before The Mouse sucked all the tourists away from Seminole County. No way a couple trees and a small zoo could compete with Wally World.

I'm still more or less in a holding pattern waiting to hear from the IRS. I ordered up my software and some other materials, but The Tax Geek is still not full blown reality, although I've been trying to keep the blog alive. I moved the blog from GoDaddy to Blogger; GoDaddy was just too primitive and quirky. Maybe it's just that I'm used to Blogger, but I kept running into roadblocks on GoDaddy and finally decided that I'd rather have a tool I can use instead of one that I constantly fight with. Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn't give refunds, so it was a rather costly experiment.

In the meantime, I'm still plugging away at the library. I can already see that this won't last long. I expected the normal sort of bureaucratic idiocy that defines any government operation, but Seminole County has bred some very special idiots indeed. Good thing I can just wander off into the stacks and be forgotten for hours at a time. I do know one thing; if you want to find waste and fraud in government, start with county government. As a percentage of their budget, I'm certain there is more to find at the local level than the federal or even the state, which are under constant scrutiny.

Debbie is in the middle of her busy season. She is never sure from one day to the next when she will be getting out of work. I've been riding both ways to and from the library when I get out at 5pm even though it's still a bit more dusk than I'd like by the time I get home. Now that we're past the winter solstice, I have a bit more light every day, it gives me a chance to have dinner at least mostly ready when Debbie makes it home, and Debbie doesn't have to worry about me being stuck at the library if she has to stay late. At least the payoff for all the crazy is some big checks. Woohoo!

If you have an account at Fidelity and you wonder what all those fees you pay go to, here is the answer:

A bit of background: this was a 401K left over from some previous job. So much of the money had been lost that the balance fell below what was allowed to be left in the account. Somehow in the process of closing the 401K, a penny was left in the account, which Fidelity spent accounting and auditing time, check stock, and postage to send to us. They didn't catch their mistake until after the first of the year, which makes me wonder if they will actually be dumb enough to send another 1099-R for a penny. They have already sent two statements, first showing the $.01 balance in the account, then showing the $.01 being disbursed from the account. In addition to sending us the $.01 check. Holy. Crap.

Flickr and Facebook are still on trial. Oddly, Flickr, which I've had much longer and have been a much more frequent user of, is currently in a more precarious position. I haven't logged onto Flickr in several months and I can't think for the life of me why I would. I'm not uploading new photos, I've stopped following any of my contacts, and I've canceled out of all the groups I was in. The only thing left to do is just close the dang account and be done with it already. Meanwhile, I've been on Facebook a number of times in the last week, keeping up with a tragedy involving some old friends up in northern Michigan, making FB far more valuable to us at the present moment. [Aside: This is one of those times when being a long way away really sucks.] No decisions yet on either, but I'll likely pull the plug on one of them before the end of the month.

That's probably enough for now. I have some work to do on the IRS site and I should make a post over at The Tax Geek. Later.

Blast from the Sun

Our Sun throws itself a little hissy fit:



and we get to see things like this:



Awesome.

Entomophagy

One problem with bicycle commuting is that we have these little teeny tiny bugs that fly in little swarms in random places. They're too small to see until I ride through the swarm with my mouth open and get a bit of protein along the way. I've gotten sort of used to that as it happens once or twice each way. Today on the way home I got a little bigger meal. I didn't see what it was, but my first thought was, "God, I hope that wasn't a fly fresh off some dog's steaming pile."

Yea, that's pretty much all I got.

Beautiful Day Off

This is our last day off together this month --- and we are heading to Disney World!

With the schedules and Ric being sick around the holidays, we did not make it to DW during the Christmas season to take pictures. :-( This year -- no matter what -- we are going after the decorations are up and checking out each park and some of the hotels.

Cool this morning -- but suppose to warm up to the upper 70's -- great day for trekking around at Disney World.

Medical Misadventures

I went to the local ghetto clinic a couple weeks ago for two reasons: one, I had picked up some sort of nasty sinus/upper respiratory infection that I just couldn't shake, and two, my ghetto "doctor" isn't capable of doing simple math and had screwed up one of my prescriptions. This is nothing new, of course. The ghetto clinic has a history with us of screwing up prescriptions, ignoring the main reason for a visit in favor of focusing on trivialities, losing things, and just generally being incompetent.

But my latest visit really takes the cake. It may be my last visit if I can find an actual doctor somewhere in the area that is taking new, uninsured patients. I expect that to be an impossible quest, but that is a whole 'nother post.

The ghetto clinic has been in the process of a major, multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded, remodel since we moved here. The remodel is now complete. It is a disaster. The lobby is completely nonfunctional, not to mention a HIPAA nightmare. My visit starts at 8:45am (appointment time is 9:00am) standing in a queue to sign in. There is no place for the queue that doesn't block the entrance, the door to the ghetto pharmacy, the hallway back to the waiting area or all of the above when everyone without a previous appointment bum-rushes the front counter when the ghetto clinic first opens. Arguments over who's next are common and it is impossible to have the HIPAA-mandated privacy when speaking with the person at the front counter.

Once I had run that little gauntlet (it is now 9:15am), I was told to have a seat in one of the dozen chairs in the lobby, which are already filled up and in any case would mean putting my face at ass-level with the mob at the front counter. So I stand leaning against the wall where I have an unobstructed view of the computer monitors displaying other patients' medical and financial information, and listening in on the conversations regarding patients' medical history and finances. Whoever designed the space needs to be beaten to death with a copy of the HIPAA law. I watch as several employees walk away from their computer terminals without locking them or blanking the screen. It's also obvious that there are massive computer system problems with a lone IT guy running around putting out fires.

At 9:40am, a woman who must have formerly been employed in a fish market screams out my name indicating it's now my turn to have my medical history and financial information on display for the benefit of everyone in the lobby. The only person unable to see the computer screen is me. I sit down then wait for a full five minutes of typing and mouse clicking before the person acknowledges that I exist. The "conversation" goes something like this:

Medical Person: Are you Richard Frost?
Me: Yes.
(Several minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is Debbie still your emergency contact?
Me: Yes.
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is [redacted] still your main phone number?
Me: Yes.
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is [redacted] still your secondary phone number?
Me: Yes
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Today's visit will cost you $20.

I hand over my credit card, she swipes it and hands it back followed by several MORE minutes of typing and mousing. Finally she hands me my receipt and points me to the waiting room. She manages to complete the entire 20-minute process without once making eye contact.

It is now 10:00am; it has taken me an hour and a quarter just to get to the waiting room. Fortunately, my butt didn't even hit the chair before another female ex-fish merchant screams out my name. While she takes my vitals, I get a running commentary about how slow reception is due to the new computer system not working and how the medical staff are all standing around waiting for patients to trickle back. As she leaves the exam room, she practically collides with the "doctor" coming in, making for a novel experience: no secondary wait while sitting in the exam room. The "doctor" takes a quick listen to my lungs and prescribes antibiotics then asks what else I need. I tell him I need my prescriptions fixed because he obviously failed math in college. He responds by pulling up my old lab results and regaling me with how perfect everything is except my blood sugar.

Um, duh? We've already had this discussion. How about rewriting my prescriptions correctly? He goes on about how I need to "take control" of my diabetes. I tell him I would love to except his ghetto pharmacy is withholding my insulin forcing me to ration what little I can get out of them. I then get a lecture about how I have it all wrong and what nice people work in the ghetto pharmacy. He must be thinking of a different ghetto pharmacy than the one in the ghetto clinic, but I just inform him that we will agree to disagree on that point and can he please just correct the prescriptions he screwed up?

Finally, I escape. Sort of. At least that whole thing was the shortest part of my adventure so far at a mere ten minutes. He sent off the corrected scripts for my regular meds to Walgreen's, but I had to get my antibiotic at the ghetto pharmacy to get the Poor Person Price. So I go into the pharmacy to stand in line to turn in my prescription. Why my prescription can be sent electronically to Walgreens ten miles away, but I have to queue to turn in a paper script to the ghetto pharmacy in the same building is not explained. Must be a feature of the new computer system. Anyway. The ghetto pharmacy is another space with no place to queue, so it ends up being a mob blocking the door into the pharmacy. I turn in my script, then sit to wait with my face in the asses of people waiting to turn in their scripts. An hour later (it's now 11:15am), I get called up to the counter to pay $10 for an empty bag with instructions to have a seat because the pharmacist needs to speak to me. Holy frackin' crap. So back to the face-ass position for another 45 minutes. After enduring a five-minute explanation of how a Z-Pack works, I finally make the dash to my car. It is 12:05pm.

But the fun isn't over yet. I go to Walgreens to pick up my other prescriptions only to find out that my asshat "doctor" has yet-again screwed up the same prescription. I ask the pharmacist if she can please call over the ghetto clinic and fix it. She says she'll take care of it. A couple days later, I get an e-mail saying my prescription is in, but the count is still wrong. I head over to Walgreens to see what in bloody hell is up now. The answer: My ghetto "doctor" is holding my prescription hostage because he wants me to come in and do my labs. My labs aren't due until May. But what the hell; it only costs me $15 (the rest being billed to the taxpayers) and it's not like I have anything better to do than spend hours and hours standing in line at the ghetto clinic. I'm just another one of those poors after all.

And the elites wonder why poor people routinely go nuts on "service providers".

Duh!

Friday the 13th is on a Friday this month!

SEE Part III Complete

I completed the third and final section of the SEE. Even as I type this, my application to practice before the IRS is winging its way to the Department of Treasury. With that out of the way, I can finally focus on something other than test prep.

Old Age

I forgot to clear out the Past Reading list at the beginning of the year. Senior Moments (tm) can really sneak up on you. Anyway, we read 129 books in 2011. That was on the low side probably because of the whole tax thing taking time away from my reading. Debbie kept up her end of things, but I've been seriously slacking. But my last test is Friday, so I will be doing some major catch-up with the to-be-read pile.

More Crazy People

Isle of Man TT: motorcycles at 200+ mph:



I love that there are both crazy people and video cameras in our world.

Don't ya?!

I hate when it is my day off and I can't sleep in! It would have been nice today since it is still cold down here in Florida (39 degrees now) to keep snuggled up in a nice warm bed. But no! I woke up around 730a and just couldn't fall back to sleep. After tossing/turning and punching the pillow; I decided to give up and just get up.

Work has been busy since the day after Christmas. With the new rules about no working off the clock and only up to 1hr OT per day, it is kinda hard for me to get caught up. I can only do so much in a day and I am lucky to have several repeat clients and referrals of those clients. I still have some emails from after New Years to research and respond to. Hopefully they all understand this is now busy season and be patient for me.

Ric is still sick --- sinus infection and coughing (hacking up his lung) since Christmas. He finally has a Dr's appt tomorrow am -- we will see what the "ghetto clinic" has to say and give him to help. I know he has not been sleeping good for awhile. Most nights he is sleeping upright on the reclining loveseat --- or, at least dozing on and off between coughing fits.

Well---time to find something for breakfast and decide what I want to do today at home. Maybe start making some birthday/anniversary cards or go shopping to spend my Christmas money or clean the bathroom (probably not this one!) or book our flights home to Michigan for the Wiklanski family reunion. (Yep, we are coming to Michigan twice in 2012 -- Vargason and Wiklanski family reunion times)

Happy New Year!!

It's 2012 and I'm actually sitting in the exact same spot as last year. It feels kind of good to be able to say that. As expected when you don't relocate to another part of the country, it doesn't seem like we really did all that much over the last year other than work and keep our heads down. The year didn't totally suck like the last couple; staying in one place has at least allowed us to catch our breath financially. We know we don't want to make this place permanent, but it will serve its purpose in spite of the drug dealers, human traffickers, incompetent office people, and whichever of our neighbors has really noisy sex every night with their bedroom window open.

The 2011 tax season for me ended up going pretty much as one would expect working in a ghetto tax office. I won't be back even if they call, and I seriously doubt they will. I had planned on becoming an Enrolled Agent and opening my own office when lightening struck and I ended up with a paying job at the library where I've been volunteering. I love the pretty colors Plans make when they explode on contact with Reality. I'm still working on the Enrolled Agent thing with my final test scheduled for Friday the 13th (yes, I enjoy tempting fate), but for now, renting office space is off the table. While part time, at least the library job is predictable and as permanent as any job can be considered these days; something I haven't had in over five years.

Debbie is still working at the same job, for now at least. The owners' actions over the last year smell like desperation to me; the business model is a pure race to the bottom similar to what happened with car dealerships a decade or so ago. The internet removes middle men by reducing what they can add to the price of whatever they are selling to zero. The days when you can simply wet your beak without adding perceivable value are long gone. I just hope these guys figure that out, for their sake and for ours.

I've stopped following news and markets (highly recommended, by the way), so I don't have any deep insights into the world. In general terms, the US stock market ended 2011 almost exactly where it ended 2010. I'm sure people made money, especially the brokers who get a cut of every transaction regardless, but retail investors made nothing, just like anyone with money in the bank. The places where one can earn the requisite 8% yield that will allow us all to retire at 55 into a life of golf and 4pm dining grow fewer by the day. The rest of the economy still seems stuck at slow idle with no movement in real unemployment, housing, retail. Early reports are that Christmas shopping was up over 4%, but that seems to be the case every year. I'm not convinced that any increase, assuming it isn't a complete fabrication, isn't being more than offset by decreases at other times of the year, just like increases in online shopping are coming at the expense of physical stores. And if that figure isn't adjusted for inflation, Christmas sales were either flat or down 2% or so (depending which inflation figures you believe).

The real story of 2011, which will continue into 2012, is the slow-motion train wreck formerly known as the European Union. If nothing else, we'll get to see how long the politicians there and here in the United States can keep the plates spinning before it all comes crashing down. While hardly the Mayan Apocalypse, it will prove interesting from a number of perspectives, not least of which is the complete evaporation of whatever confidence is left in governments. I seem to recall the US getting sucked into some sort of kerfuffle in Europe the last time the people there lost faith in their leaders.

2011 will also be noted for what didn't happen: no one is yet in prison for the massive fraud engineered at the nation's too-big-to-fail banks and investment houses. Matt Taibbi is about the only person to keep hammering home that, contrary to what our president insists, much of the grift that lead up to the financial crisis was not legal. Certainly, many of the dirty deals that put multi-million dollar bonuses into the pockets of Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, et al were legal (the primary reason no one in the middle class should be in the stock market), but many were old-school pump-and-dump scams that have been illegal for decades. Maybe someone should check in on the Obama Justice Department and make sure they haven't committed mass suicide and gone off to live with the Space Brothers.

2011 also saw the last launch of Americans from American soil. Like the loss of the Saturn V, the capability will never be recovered. In the meantime, we hitch rides from our former sworn enemies to a destination that serves no real purpose. On the upside, Cassini is still returning drop-dead gorgeous images from the Saturn system, Opportunity is still chugging away doing science, and an all-new probe, Curiosity, is on its way to Mars.

I won't make any predictions for 2012 other than these: The economy in general will continue to sputter along making a small number of people wealthier than anyone ever in the history of the human race. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't have politicians on our personal payroll will watch the slow erosion of our standard of living. And speaking of the Mayan Apocalypse, John Michael Greer has suggested that we call December 21, 2012 Nothing Happened Day. I think it's pretty safe to assume that the day everyone expects the world to end on will be the most extraordinarily ordinary day anyone can remember. The universe has a sick sense of humor.

I think I'm going to cut this off here and watch the House marathon. Everyone have a happy/productive/sexually satisfying (that's mostly for our noisy neighbors)/whatever-kind-of-year-you-want 2012!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my family and friends!

Make it a great year!

It's Not Christmas Without...

Porky Pig doing Elvis! With all the traveling over the weekend, I completely forgot.



And new this year (to me, at least): Jim Carrey slaughtering White Christmas!



Merry Belated Christmas!

Christmas Pics

A selection of our Christmases (plural because we had more than one celebration, not because I built a time machine so I could relive December 25, 2011) in pictures. We did more this year than we normally do, which isn't saying much as we almost never do anything. Beyond monkey bread and the NCIS Christmas Marathon, that is. We started with early Christmas at my parents' snowbird nest:

And because she's a mom, we had a formal table setting with real plates and everything! It took me a minute to remember how to sit at a table and eat after years of eating on the couch in front of the TV. And yes, the knobbly knees are mine.

Here's Mum slaving away in her travel trailer kitchen. I'd really like to help, but I'm not sure where I would stand.

Christmas at our place was the usual simple affair. Our only Christmas decoration was Herman sporting a rather festive bow.

Because we both had a few days off around Christmas day, we decided that we would drive over to Mobile for Christmas with my niece and her family. We got into Mobile on Friday evening after a 10-hour drive to find that we had scored a sweet suite:

We were completely whacked out, so we made our excuses to my niece and went to bed around 7pm. Ten hours in a car made a very plush bed with a big stack of fluffy pillows irresistible. We are seriously getting old.

Christmas Eve day was spent with my niece, her husband, and the cutest kids in Alabama. I may be slightly biased.

So that was pretty much our month of December other than working and sitting around our ghetto apartment.

Speaking of photos, I'm putting Flickr on probation along with Facebook. I no longer use Flickr for anything other than off-site photo backup. There is certainly value in that, and at $20/year it's cheap. But Flickr is getting nearly as creepy as Facebook, getting all bossy about how I can use my own frackin' photos. According to my Flickr stats, only two people ever look at them anyway; for $20/year, I can zip of all the year's photos onto a couple USB drives and mail them to my two viewers and not have to deal with Flickr's crazy EULA. Like Facebook, I haven't made any decision, but I won't be posting the full set of December pictures just yet. We'll see.

Well, I need to go empty the big green gobs infecting my sinuses. Thank the gods for my sinus pump. The last time I used it, something the size of a hamster popped out.

And yes. You needed to know that.

...And We're Back

We just arrived back at our apartment after a quick jog up to Mobile, AL to visit with some of my family for Christmas. We're also back in the sense that our internet and telephone crapped out Thursday evening around 7pm, but is now working. I called the help desk, but they were pretty far into the Christmas eggnog when I called Thursday around 11pm. They couldn't fix it remotely (hardly surprising given their obvious inebriation), so I set up an appointment for Monday 8-10am. When we got home tonight, there was a Sorry We Missed You card hanging on the door and the phone and internet seem to be working fine. The card says they came out Christmas day at 9:30am. I guess when you're half in the bag, "Monday" sounds a lot like "Sunday" especially when several of your office mates are merry-making in your cubicle.

My Christmas gift was a raging sinus infection. Thanks Santa; right back at 'cha. So I'm off to self-medicate and probably pass out on the couch.

Oh yea; Happy Whatever Makes You Tingly.

Bah Humbug

I'm waiting for Debbie to get home from work so we can get ready for our Christmas weekend. She is making a quick stop for gas at Sam's Club. Unfortunately, the line starts about three miles down the road. I think I hate Christmas a little more each year. We need to start saving up money for a vacation on a desert island during the last two weeks of December.

Having said that, now I want Christmas 2012 to get here NOW!



Awesome.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Looking like Christmas in Florida mostly means plastic wreaths on palm trees and overnight lows in the 50's. At this moment, I'm sitting in the living room in shorts and a t-shirt thinking I should close the windows because my toes are getting a bit cold.

Our Christmas plans are still up in the air; we should have a plan after we do Christmas with my parents over the weekend. Then we can decide whether we sit here and have Christmas in front of the TV or drive up to Alabama for Christmas with some of my family.

As usual for us, not a lot going on other than work and (for me, at least) studying tax code. I scheduled my last test, but due to limited seating and a bum-rush by everyone trying to get their Enrolled Agent testing completed before tax season, the first available day was January 13th. Not ideal, but I'll still get the thing done and move on to the next step. The hardest part will be to keep up on what I need to know for the test. I'm ready now, so I'm stuck forcing myself to review the same material over and over for the next month to keep it in my head. It would suck dead bunnies if I have to make multiple attempts at the easiest of the three tests.

We made a quick road trip over to Tampa on Sunday to do an NCL ship inspection. This is my second encounter with NCL and I'm still not impressed. Part of the deal was free lunch which, like our NCL cruise we did in September, was nothing to write home about. The ship itself is nice enough, although there were bits of it that looked... well... shabby is probably the right word. Maybe they need fewer staff dancing around squirting people with hand sanitizer, and a few more polishing the brass. There are some impressive suites if you have the spare cash, and we loved the Villa, with three full suites, a living area big enough for two seating areas and a baby grand piano, a full kitchen for the butler who brings up your meals, and a private outdoor area with a hot tub, eating area, Japanese koi pond (sans koi; maybe you're supposed to bring your own?), and seating areas in and out of the sun. You could basically pretend you were on a private yacht and never leave your Villa. But even as nice as it was, surely with a price tag to match, there were things like woodwork that needed a good sanding and refinishing that threw the whole thing off for me.

Because it's Christmas:

For nearly four decades, Star Trek and Star Wars fans have been at each other's throats. George Takei is calling for Star Peace so we can all focus on the real threat:



I always suspected Sparkle Tits was a threat to humanity.

More (barely) controlled falling off a cliff, otherwise known as skiing:



Given my hatred of cold and snow, you will never see me on a pair of skis, but it's nice that there are insane people willing to kill themselves for my entertainment.

One for all the doomers that think the world is ending because of the recent spate of earthquakes:



Even the Tohoku, Japan earthquake, as horrifying as it and the resulting tsunami was, is small beans when compared to the 1960's earthquakes in Chile and Alaska. Which can happen again, by the way. Something to consider given the massive increase in population in both areas.

And finally, something that people should be thinking about instead of worrying about the Mayan-Calendar-is-ending non-event (there is nothing in Mayan mythology that gives the last day of it's calendar any more significance than December 31 on the Gregorian calendar holds for us):

The mismatch between the economy we’ve got and the economy we can afford has many implications, but one of the largest is precisely the issue I raised earlier in this post: across the industrial world, there are very few bankable projects to be found, even at a time when there are millions of people who need work, and who would happily buy products if they had the chance to earn the money to do so. Our economy is burdened with an unproductive superstructure it can no longer support. The globalization fad of the 1990s, which arbitraged the difference in wage costs between Third World sweatshops and industrial-world factories, was in effect an attempt to evade the resulting difficulties by throwing the industrial nations’ working classes under the bus, and it only worked for a decade or so; as so often happens in the declining years of a civilization, a short term fix was treated as a long term solution, and a brief remission of symptoms allowed the underlying crisis to worsen steadily.

While I greatly appreciate the bags of shiny rocks I was given as a COBOL programmer, I thought at the time that I could have done more for the accounting departments I wrote code for with a box of Blackfoot #2 pencils and a stack of 13-column paper than I ever did with 10's of thousands of lines of COBOL code, not to mention the millions of dollars in hardware and infrastructure, including (pre-internet) the launching of a communications satellite. Our motto at one job was, "[Name of proprietary software package redacted]: Turning user input into error messages at the speed of light!"

And that's probably enough for now. I need to wrap some Christmas gifts.

Brrrr!

Well a cold front finally hit us in Florida. It got down to 47 last night and right now it is only 49. Today's high is suppose to reach 65. The past few days it has been in the high 70's/low 80's.

Another SWAT Shooting

A Pima County, Arizona SWAT team gunned down an ex-Marine in his home with his wife and 4-year-old son in the house. Some random thoughts in no particular order.

Once again, in a repeat of the Branch Davidian mess at Waco, Texas, military-style tactics that were unnecessary and inappropriate were used instead of police tactics. Instead of a simple arrest outside the home, lets pull out all this cool storm trooper gear we got here in the back room and go make a big media splash. Operation Showtime Part II.

Five supposedly highly-trained officers fired over 70 rounds in a matter of seconds with less than a third of them hitting their intended target located a few feet away. Spray and Pray. With a four-year-old in the house. Ye flippin' gods. Maybe next time they should put their storm trooper helmets on backwards; it may improve their accuracy.

The family lawyer called SWAT "an overly excited group of poorly trained law enforcement agents." I hate to agree with a lawyer, but I have to go with him on this one. The cop retort of "We're not a bunch of country bumpkins... with big bellies and cowboy hats" may or may not be true, but doesn't address the point: You provably are a bunch of "overly excited", "poorly trained" bumpkins in storm trooper gear. As evidence, see above.

All it takes to be a drug kingpin is to be related to someone who knows someone who at some point had been in still-another person's house where marijuana was delivered. And ride in the truck of someone who owns a large roll of plastic wrap. Which is sold at U-Haul. For packing furniture. I have two sizes of the stuff in my closet left over from our last move. I'm also most likely related to someone who knows someone who at some point had been in still-another person's house where marijuana was delivered. I guess SWAT will be smashing in my door at any time now.

The fact that the suspect is a Marine is irrelevant. Plenty of Marines and ex-Marines engage in illegal activity. Being a Marine doesn't remove you from the human race. Especially when you're an ex-Marine trying to raise a family in one of the most economically depressed areas of the country.

The fact that the suspect had a crappy job is irrelevant. In fact, having a crappy job with long hours is just the sort of motivation needed to ask a drug-dealing relative's twice-removed friend if they need a hand with the family business.

The fact that "everyone" says the suspect is a great guy is irrelevant. That's what everyone says about the nice guy next door who coaches Little League. Right up to the moment the cops find the videos he made of himself banging the center-fielder.

I'm not sure what "problems with his vision" would allow the suspect to serve in the Marine Corp, but would disqualify him from any kind of job in the Border Patrol. Unless the vision problem was caused by over-ingestion of his brother's twice-removed friend's product. Maybe he should have signed up for Pima County SWAT; they seem to prefer people with vision problems.

Anyway.

Here's what will happen now: there will be an "investigation" in which SWAT will be found to have acted bravely while defending the innocent citizens of Tucson, and will be given medals and promotions. The investigation into this alleged drug cartel, which may very well exist, will be forgotten. The media will get distracted by Snooki's tits or the next fake Kardashian sister's wedding or bashing whoever the current Republican not-Romney front-runner is, and forget all about our dead ex-Marine and his family. No one will question why we need military units patrolling our streets and gunning down anyone with the misfortune of being related someone with a twice-removed friend in the drug trade.

And I need to go make the donuts....

Another One Bites the... Hey!!

Thanks for stealing my post title, Debbie!

Anyway, as someone has already mentioned, I passed the second part of the SEE. By all accounts, the third section is the easiest of the three. I started going through the material last night and it does look to be way more straight-forward than part two. If all goes well, I may yet complete the testing by the end of the year. Then it's just paperwork and waiting on the IRS.

We're trying to make holiday plans, but I still don't have my December schedule, meaning as of Wednesday, I don't know whether or not I'm working this coming Sunday. Of course, I also don't know if I'll be getting paid as the time card system appears to be broken, as is the system I'm supposed to use to request time off. Once again, some half-wit computer programmer using the latest in software development tools has made a simple task impossible. Back in the dark ages when we wrote software in such archaic languages as COBOL and RPG, this sort of screw-up would get you fired. Now everyone simply accepts it as business as usual. I've yet to figure out how this is progress.

Anyway, we are planning on doing a ship inspection in Tampa Sunday the 11th and maybe visit the aquarium, but as I mentioned, no word yet on whether we will be able to. We're also planning on doing Christmas with my parents the weekend after that, but, well, ya know. Christmas itself* will be spent as usual; in our apartment watching an NCIS marathon. Anyway, that's the big holiday plans. We are planning to be good little consumers this year and buy at least token gifts for people. I figure as long as I'm sucking at the government teat, we may as well use some of that money to boost the GDP of China.

[*And not to be a Grammar Nazi or anything, but what is up with "it's self" instead of "itself"? I'm seeing this everywhere and not just in blog posts that are done in haste and where no one expects perfect grammar or spelling or punctuation. I'm talking about published books! How is it possible to be functionally literate and not instantly recognize how wrong that is?]

And for no particular reason other than an arbitrary date on an arbitrary calendar:



Well, I need to go de-stress the ol' noggin' with something mindless.

Another one bites the dust!

Ric passed his second of three tests to become an enrolled agent!

Animal Kingdom

The photos from our latest trip to Animal Kingdom are finally on Flickr. I'd forgotten that we had already visited there this year, so the two trips ended up combined in one set. The latest photos start with the picture of Goofy and some people we don't know.

Still Cramming

I'm down to two days until my SEE Part 2 test; I think I'll do OK as long as I don't get a brain aneurysm from trying to squeeze in yet-one-more obscure fact about partnership liquidations or IRC Sec 357. Today's agenda is property basis. Woo. hoo.

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents and had a potluck dinner at their clubhouse. Not surprisingly, we were the youngest of the group by a couple decades. In proper Thanksgiving tradition, we ate way too much, then headed over to one of my parents' friend's mother's house (got that?) so we could eat some more. We came back home Thursday night because Debbie had to work the Black Friday cruise sales, which, for the second year in a row, were a complete bust. But next year for sure!!

Meanwhile, the once-proud nation known as these united States spent Thursday night and Friday in what has become an annual orgy of violence and mayhem, featuring fist fights, shootings, pepper spraying's, muggings and other assorted stupidity in order to "save" money on Chinese-made crap that no one really needs. We saved money by staying home and not spending money. What a concept. I'm sure in the tens of thousands of new diagnostic codes in the updated DSM, one of them describes this annual decent into mass insanity.

The internet is still buzzing over UC Davis campus police hosing down protesters with pepper spray. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. Of course, I'm ambivalent about the whole Occupy Everything protests in the first place. But one thing is certain; this is a PR nightmare for the college administration and the campus police. In the age of instant, globally-broadcast video from anyone with a cell phone, the people with the guns are going to have to get a lot smarter. First, lose the storm trooper gear. Like the original Star Wars storm troopers, I can't decide if you look menacing or ridiculous. Second, why after weeks of protest did this particular group have to be removed RIGHT NOW?!? Isolate them from all outside assistance and wait. The protesters will eventually have to pee. Maybe even provide bottled water to hurry along the process while making the campus police (dressed in their standard uniforms, of course) look compassionate. If they are dedicated enough to sit in their own urine, keep waiting and handing out bottles of water while reminding them that all it takes for it to be over is to stand up and walk away. They will eventually get bored or hungry or cold or fall asleep or have to take a dump. Most importantly, it would all make for some incredibly boring video.

From a student perspective, college has become a complete waste of time and money for most of them. Kids, with no understanding of what they are signing up for, are being pushed by the so-called adults in their life to take on ruinous amounts of debt while learning nothing that will enable them to earn enough to ever pay it back. In other words, anyone currently in, or recently graduated from, college has every right to be pissed off. I'm not sure how pitching tents on the quad or volunteering to be hosed down with pepper spray fixes that, but it likely feels more satisfying than writing a strongly-worded essay for the college newspaper. Either way, it certainly helps make the case for the protesters when the cops can be counted on to play the part of heartless storm troopers to the students' wide-eyed and virtuous Princess Leia/Luke Skywalker.

Not that any of it matters much in the big pictures. The United States has been in decline since the mid-1970's and no amount of tent pitching or pepper spraying is going to change that.

And now, property basis. w00t.

Crunch Time

I have exactly one week to cram as much corporate tax information into my head as I can before I attempt to set another $100 on fire... er... pass the SEE Part Two test. There are still some parts that I'm a little shaky on; either I get them down in the next seven days, or hope whatever software algorithm selects which 100 questions I draw from the pool goes light on the parts I'm weak in. Fingers crossed.

We spent a Friday and Saturday visiting my parents' snowbird home. Last winter, my mother asked us to bring our bicycles next time we came to visit so we could all go for a bike ride around their park. I figured my parents' idea of a bike ride would involve a slower pace than what I usually do, but nothing could have prepared either of us for the creeper-gear pace combined with random stops in the middle of the road. Debbie actually went down trying not to ram the back of my mom's adult-sized tricycle when my mom made a sudden stop to snoop on a neighbor. When we started out, my dad had told us that he had switched from two to three wheels several years ago out of self-defense; now I understand what he meant.

Friday night, we took them out to Carrabbas for my birthday (yeah; we take my parents out for our bithdays... long story). My dad is generally not a big Italian food fan, but they had spaghetti and meatballs without "stinky cheese", so he was happy. My seafood cannelloni and my mom's manicotti were both good. Debbie's BBQ ribs were a bit of a disappointment; instead of sauce, they were cooked with a spice rub. They were OK, but not something we are likely to get again. As the Birthday Boy, I got a hunk of free tiramisu more than large enough for myself and my parents. Debbie, not being a big tiramisu fan, snagged one of the dessert shots. We rolled ourselves out to the car and went back to the parental units' trailer for Chicken Little. Saturday was more eating, visiting with some family I hadn't seen since middle school, another bike ride, UP!, and the drive home. It was a nice two-day break from the ghetto.

Finally. A political party I can get behind: The Futility Party:

The best thing — the brilliant thing — is that in the end, the Occupy movement will fail to make any lasting changes in politics, thereby proving its own point.

Follow along. If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence. It’d be like trying to get the Pope to let someone else be infallible once in a while. So if the protests end in any status other than quo, then the 1 percent is a myth, normal people have plenty of influence, and the protestors were just wasting everyone’s time.

...I’m officially founding a new political party, the Futility Party. Our main platform will be a commitment, once elected, to ending the corruption and cronyism that keeps us out of office. We will reject any funding that might help us get the word out, avoid coalitions and compromises that will turn us into a viable political entity, and make sure our candidates and backers lack the influence to disrupt even the closest election.

Our slogan will be “Unimpeachable. Unassailable. Unelectable.”....

That should be made into a bumper sticker. It could double as the slogan for the Libertarian Party.

[Aside: The brilliant coders behind Blogger have now managed to screw up block quoting. Yes, block quoting. If I have to hand-code all the HTML for this thing, I may as well go back to a straight-up hosting service and writing my posts in Notepad. Is it really that hard to not break things that work?]

I haven't made any recent posts about how uniformly horrible the public schools in the United States are, but there may be a bright spot:

For all I complain about public schools and NCLB, there are occasional success stories. For example, the Dallas News reports on the stunningly good math and reading test scores achieved by third-grade pupils at Field Elementary school. There was a minor downside, though. They achieved those high math and reading test scores by devoting essentially all of their effort to teaching these kids math and reading, which of course meant they had to skip science and other subjects almost entirely. Not to worry, though. The kids still got grades in those other subjects. Of course, those grades were faked, sometimes assigned by teachers who’d never even taught the subjects in question. If I had school-age children, I’d do whatever it took to either homeschool them or get them into private schools. I don’t believe public schools–any public schools–can any longer be trusted to educate kids.

OK; maybe "bright spot" isn't the term I'm looking for.

While I've been a fan of renewable energy in all its various forms since I was a kid, largely because I take issue with running an uncontrolled experiment on the only inhabitable planet we have access to, I also understand that no renewable source or sources of energy will provide us with anything like the amount of energy we currently obtain from fossil fuel. In the past, I've done entire posts showing the absurdity of, say, running our cars on bacterial poo. Another darling of the renewables-will-let-us-keep-business-as-usual crowd is pumped storage. I've been saved the trouble of doing the math by some professor dude who writes a blog called Do the Math. As you can probably guess, pumped storage at the scale needed to replace all fossil fuel is as absurd as every other renewable. But setting all that aside, his closing paragraph is the most important:

Let’s be clear that I am not making any claim that large scale storage at the level we need is impossible. But it’s far more daunting than almost anyone realizes. It’s not a matter of “just” building up when the time comes. We could easily find ourselves ill-prepared and suffering insufficient energy supplies, intermittency, and a long, slow economic slide because we collectively did not anticipate the scale of the challenges ahead.

A nation that cannot contemplate a plan to reduce currently-legislated increases in federal spending from 7% to 6% without going into paroxysms most certainly cannot contemplate the sacrifices that would be needed to undertake a multi-decade engineering feat the likes of which humanity has never seen. Sorry professor; this is impossible for the USA. We cannot even accomplish that which humanity has already accomplished, like flying humans to low earth orbit. And we've been in a "long, slow economic slide" for four decades.

I've been thinking of ways to free up time. I feel like everything is universally neglected: I'm not spending enough time preparing for my SEE test, not writing enough here or at The Tax Geek, not doing enough to make The Tax Geek into something other than a lame website, not reading enough, not getting enough exercise, not getting enough sleep.... I could go on for pages. I started by looking at what I spend my time on and immediately went on a purge of the Hulu queue. Some good stuff likely ended up in the dumpster, but "good" is no longer good enough to make the cut. Flickr is now what I originally used it for: on-line backup of, and internet access to, our digital photos. All the Contacts and Groups and all that social crap is gone. I also need to take a hard look at the list of sites I routinely visit. Just what is it that I get out of them? Do I even enjoy going to them or does it feel more like a chore or obligation to go there and skim through their posts? If so, why do I continue to have them on the list? Expect some of them to disappear. I'm also cutting out Yahoo Finance's Breakout and The Daily Ticker, another hour every day I cannot afford just to listen to people make excuses for why the market isn't doing what economic theory said it ought to be doing.

But the big one is Facebook. Even though I'm not on it anywhere as much as the average Facecrack addict, it's still an hour or so every couple days, plus dealing with the flood of e-mail notifications clogging up my Yahoo account. Not to mention Facebook's assumption that everything you do on the internet is somehow theirs to pull into the Facebook Profiling Engine and sell to the highest bidder. Is it worth it? Is it worth the time and aggravation, the constant threat to my personal data from malicious game designers and Facebook itself, just to know that someone I barely know is going shopping with someone I've never met? Probably not. I don't get the whole social media thing anyway. Sure it was fun connecting with people I hadn't seen in years or decades. At first. Then I realized that other than reliving the Glory Days (Thanks, Bruce!), we have absolutely nothing to talk about. Again, given what I could be doing instead, is it really worth it? I'll be making the decision sometime this week. It's not looking good for Facebook.

Back to corporate taxes.

Happy Birthday to Me

I can't sleep, so instead I'm blogging. It's not quite my birthday yet, but it will be by the time I finish this, hence the title. We're heading over to my parents' winter place in Zephyrhills in the morning to spend a couple days with them. No real big plans other than dinner at either Carrabba's or Charlies Steakhouse and maybe a movie or two. We're taking Chicken Little and Up! with us, so it certainly won't be an intellectual weekend, but at the very least, we'll get out of the house.

The library job continues. Not really anything else to report other than I don't think I've ever worked a job where the managers seem so terrified to tell me what to do. It's usually obvious what needs doing, but I always ask in case some other part of the library is short-handed and needs some help. The answer is nearly always the same: "Whatever you want to do." Huh? But other than that little quirk, it remains the perfect job; no stress and no responsibility other than just showing up. Sweet.

I stumbled across a couple videos shot from the International Space Station. The first is a series of time-lapse videos taken from August to October when the Northern Lights were really going at it. If you thought the view from the ground was impressive, well...



Unfortunately, you have to go to Vimeo to view it in HD. You'll want to do that. And view it full screen of course.

The second video is older and doesn't have any Northern Lights, but there are a couple very impressive thunderstorms that can be seen:



It continues to be relatively quiet for us just keeping our heads down, working, and (in my case) getting ready for my second SEE exam currently scheduled for November 29th. I don't feel like I'm prepared, but maybe a serious cram session over the Thanksgiving weekend will fix that. I'll be really pissed if I just end up wasting $100.

Duqu, the bastard son of Stuxnet, is still out there floating around the internet. Who is behind it and to what purpose is still not known, but Microsoft is putting defenses in place to stop it. Yet another means for people to break things. As if one more were needed.

Occupy Wall Street has been cleared out with surprisingly few arrests and no real violence. The eviction was only to be expected, especially once diseases started sweeping through various Occupy camps as a result of people living in close quarters and crapping on the ground. I'm unclear why a movement with a half-million dollars in the bank couldn't use a bit of it for porta-johns. I guess I don't understand modern protest movements. With winter on the way, the camp was likely to be breaking up anyway. What happens in the spring could be interesting, especially when some police departments seem to be spoiling for an all-out fight in the streets. What other reason could there be for an Oakland cop to shoot a photographer with a rubber bullet seemingly for kicks? If you want a possible preview of 2012, check out a timeline of 1968.

Enough. Maybe I can get some sleep now that it's after 1 am.

Pale Blue Dot

I missed posting this on his actual birthday by a couple days, but it's always worth a watch:

Where Does the Time Go?

I just realized I haven't posted anything for over a week. Time flies when you are having fun.

One reason for not spending much time here is that I started working at the library on Monday. As jobs go, it's OK; I show up, I do my list, I barely talk to anyone, I go home, I get a check every other Thursday, and I'm not stuck in a cubicle staring at a computer. It's the perfect job, as far as I can tell. Like any government entity, there is plenty of things that make you go, "Huh?!?!", but I'm so far down the food chain that it really doesn't matter. It's only part-time, but at least it's permanent (or at least as permanent as anything these days).

I'm still working on the Tax Geek thing, mostly trying to cram enough tax code into my head to get past the testing. I'm scheduling the second test for the first Friday in December, which is about a month later than I had hoped, but I'd prefer to take it later than planned and pass, rather than rush things and waste $100. The downside is that I'm unlikely to have my Enrolled Agent status solid for tax season. In any case, my hours at the library are very unsettled at this point and will likely remain so for the next few months, so we decided that instead of spending $6,000 or so on rent plus another $3,000 for furnishings, computer, etc. so I can have an office that is empty most of the time, we will hold off for a tax season. By next year, we will be in a better financial position plus I will have a more predictable schedule (or no schedule given how long most of my jobs last...). So that's the plan for now. It may be different next week.

We didn't bother going down to Animal Kingdom last Friday because it rained the entire day. So we sat around the apartment getting caught up on the bookkeeping, clearing out the Hulu queue, doing some reading, etc. Sunday, the weather was perfect, so we made a run down there and got what we went for:

His name is Jabali ("strong as a rock" in Swahili) and he was born on August 24 and weighed 311 pounds at birth. We had to do the safari ride three times to get that shot. The first time, Jabali was playing hide-and-seek:

The little dude went bookin' behind that rock as soon as our vehicle came around the curve. This was only a few minutes after the park opened and most of the animals were still eating breakfast, so he may have been heading for some food. Our second time through, he was standing in a group with strong back-lighting, so you can't really see him:

Anyway, that was what we did all day Sunday. I have more photos that I'm still sorting and touching up, then I'll toss them up on Flickr. I also had the chance to play with the camera in low light. I've never used the higher ISO settings, so while we were watching the Lion King show, I cranked the ISO up to 3200 and gave it a go. Most didn't turn out because of the wide range and rapid changes in light intensity, but these weren't bad for hand-held shots with our glorified point-and-shoot:

Those are straight from the camera with no processing. I normally don't do much low-light photography other than sunsets (and I have a preset for that), mainly because I've not been impressed with the results I've seen from point-and-shoot digital cameras. But I may have to invest some time playing with our current camera and see what I can get out of it.

And the federal tax code is calling me.

7 Days Without Firefox Makes One Week

I've been using Chrome exclusively for a week. It works well enough, although the zoom thing is still annoying. Setting the page zoom to 144% for all pages works well enough for most sites, but I still miss each domain having its own zoom. It's not a deal breaker, especially given the alternative of trying to use a browser that crashes five times a day. I'll stay put for now.

There has been a lot going on in the tech world recently. Dennis Ritchie died a couple weeks ago. Not that the news media noticed nor are they even aware of who he was. In many ways, he was far more important to the IT world than even the biggest fanboy can make Steve Jobs out to be. But Dennis wasn't in the habit of parading on stage in black turtlenecks, so his passing doesn't unleash a spasm of national mourning.

Speaking of Steve Jobs, it looks like the reality distortion field that enveloped him immediately after his death has began to lessen as of late. Stories of his smelly hippy days when he convinced himself for a couple years that he didn't need to bathe, his violent temper and his autocratic management style are beginning to circulate. Not that any of that diminishes what he accomplished, but it does serve as a useful counterweight to the Saint Steve movement.

Probably the biggest irony of the whole Apple/Steve Jobs story is how by creating the walled garden of "i" products and the Apple Store, he became the very thing he/it were supposed to be against:



Apple right now has the second-highest market cap of all companies in the world and more cash in the bank than almost any country you care to name. Apple has out-IBM'ed IBM.

While we're on the subject of Apple, why is it that every innovation for the iPhone makes people act in ways that are indistinguishable from schizophrenics? Introducing Apple's latest method for pretentious douche bags to annoy us normal people. Gods help us.

Remember the Stuxnet worm? Remember how a number of people mentioned that it might be a bad idea to give everyone on the internet a road map for how to shut down another countries infrastructure? Well, guess what:

The new malware, dubbed “Duqu” [dü-kyü], contains parts that are nearly identical to Stuxnet and appears to have been written by the same authors behind Stuxnet, or at least by someone who had direct access to the Stuxnet source code...

Someone is following the map. Who and to what end is not known. I assume we will find out sooner rather than later. Joy.

Matt Taibbi cuts through the BS about the OWS'ers:

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

I have issues with the OWS thing, but portraying people who are pissed off that so-called private businesses are having their losses back-stopped by taxpayers while keeping their profits as anti-capitalists is propaganda aimed at the ignorant. Here is a list of charts that spells out what some people have been saying for a long time: The bottom 80% of America has been in steady decline since the 1970's. That's what has people worked up. Not that some people make more money than other people, but that the 20% get to live by a different set of rules than the 80%; rules that benefit the 20% enormously while killing the 80%.

Because of that, we can probably expect more of this:

The group surrounded the 21-year-old woman's car and began beating on it with an object that shattered her driver's side window. One of the boys involved in the attack also pointed a handgun in the direction of a passenger in the car, but didn't make any threats or attempt to open the door.

The title of the article is Teen Mobs Harass Motorists. Whoever came up with that needs to look up the meaning of the words "harass" and "assault" and see which fits the facts better. Notice also the down-playing of the race angle; if a mob of white teens "harassed" a black woman by blocking the street, smashing her window and pointing a gun at her, it would be all over the national media, the FBI would be investigating the "hate crimes", the victim would be on every news network, the local schools would cancel classes and force the entire student body into sensitivity training... well... I could go on for pages. Instead we have this tepid article in the local paper. But what is really interesting is the action down in the comments. It's still mostly words with maybe a minor scuffle here and there, but it won't take much to blow things into something seriously ugly.

Well, it's late and we're supposed to get up early for a trip down to Animal Kingdom to see the baby elephant! We'll try to get some good pictures!

Buh Bye, Mozilla

I've been running Mozilla Firefox pretty much since the first day it was released. At the time, the only other options on Windows had major issues of compatibility, speed, security, etc. Since then, Microsoft seems to have mostly gotten it together with IE and Google Chrome came on the scene. I have all three browsers pinned to my taskbar, but I still used Firefox almost exclusively. Part of that was inertia; the devil you know and all that. Part of it was annoyances with the other two options: Chrome's zoom feature doesn't remember what you zoomed a page to from one visit to the next, and IE is still noticeably slower than either Chrome or Firefox. So I stayed with Firefox in spite of its recent problems with releases, speed, memory leaks and whatnot.

About a month ago, Firefox and Adobe seem to have gotten into a pissing match, at least on my computer. Freezes, hangs, crashes (both Adobe and Firefox) became a routine part of my web browsing. I've put up with it mostly because I've been up to my eyeballs in tax code and just didn't want to deal with it. Today, I decided to take a break from all things IRS and try to fix the problem. Adobe has a separate uninstaller app that is supposed to remove all traces of Flash from a PC. I ran that, then did a clean install of the latest version of Flash (11.something). As soon as I started Firefox, I knew there was a problem; Firefox informed me that I was missing a plugin. Specifically Flash 10.something "or higher." Now I'm not a math genius, but I'm pretty sure 11 is "higher" than 10. I tried to play some videos; some would play, but fullscreen still showed the Firefox window and the taskbar, or the video would randomly freeze. Others would refuse to play at all saying I needed at least Flash 10.something to play this video. Again, did I miss the memo that made 10 greater than 11?

I still had no idea if the problem was Firefox, Flash, or the combination of the two. I fired up Chrome and... well, long story short, the problem is almost certainly not Flash, unless the folks at Adobe have declared war on Firefox and added code to Flash that borks Firefox. (There is precedence for such a thing; Microsoft's software team's unofficial slogan in the late 80's and early 90's was, "Word's not done until Lotus won't run.") So Chrome it is, annoying zoom malfunctions and all. Maybe Firefox will fix the problem, but by then I may be over my anti-Chrome pissyness and won't bother switching back.

Freaky

So while I'm taking a break from taxes this morning, I'm over at The West Virginia Surf Report reading Jeff Kay's latest blog post. He used the line from the song Ironic as part of his post that goes, "Like rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you’ve already paid." Whenever I'm reading, the little voice in my head is usually what I imagine (or in rare cases, know) the author's voice sounds like, but when I got to that line of Jeff's post, it didn't "sound" right. Some other part of my brain said, "Huh?" and cocked its head to one side like a dog trying to track down the source of a noise. Yet some other part of my brain told the head-cocking part, "Shadup already; we're trying to read in here," made a mental note to check my meds, and kept reading. I made it about two sentences further when the Jeff voice in my head gets interrupted by someone repeating, "Like rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you’ve already paid." What the...?!?!

At the exact instant I was reading "Like rain on your wedding day..." Songbird was playing that exact line over the computer speakers. It was so closely synch'ed that I didn't realize what was going on until the line came up again in the song. I must have stared at the computer screen for a good five minutes muttering, "How the....  What the....  Holy crap!"

I'm not sure whether this means I should set the apartment on fire and run naked and screaming out into the middle of the street or buy a Powerball ticket.

Five Years Ago Today...

...we began this weird little journey we've been on after leaving behind everything (and everyone) we've ever known. Thanks to technology, we still have contact with all those friends and family, unlike my great-great-grandfather who left everything and everyone behind to (eventually) homestead in northern Michigan. But in spite of that, life has been very different on a day-to-day basis since walking away from our support structure. For one, we now depend on each other a great deal more instead of always looking to others. There are times when working without a net can be terrifying, but I'm glad we did what we did.

What sent me down Memory Lane was a Facebook conversation yesterday with someone I hadn't talked to in 25 years or so asking what I've been up to lately. I realized that October 2006 was five years ago and I wondered just when in October we headed out to Arcosanti via Florida (the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a line in the opposite direction). After digging around in the blog archives, it turns out that October 15th was the day. In some ways, it seems like Michigan was an eternity ago. Yet it seems impossible that it was five years ago when we crammed the back of the Durango with everything we thought we might need for the next year or so and rolled out.

That conversation ended like most similar Facebook conversations I have with long-lost acquaintances: "Sorry to hear things didn't turn out how you planned." While I appreciate the sentiment, it misses an important point; Like the secret ingredient in the secret ingredient soup, there was no plan. We didn't have the first clue what we were doing or where we were going beyond the Arcosanti workshop, which was merely an excuse for me to go back to Arizona. We went and did stuff, until we wanted to do something else somewhere else, then went somewhere else and did something else. Rinse and repeat. Now we're here. Doing this. For now. And our plans always turn out exactly how we didn't plan them. Don't think that isn't a horrifying way for a couple OCD list-makers and planners to try to live, but the longer we do it, the better we get at it. I still make all sorts of to-do lists and time lines, but I now forget about them almost as soon as I write them. When I stumble across one, sometimes months or years later, I note that everything on the list is still not done and all the deadlines made a really cool whooshing sound as they flew by, and yet the universe didn't end in some titanic matter/anti-matter explosion. We're both still standing, together, with a roof over our heads, food on the table and a family-sized bag of crunchy Cheetos on the top of the refrigerator.

At the end of the day, what more is there?

Full Week

The last week or so has been rather full of news. The most obvious is the death of Steve Jobs. I find all the gushing over him to be a bit creepy. Jobs was good, no doubt about that. But the equal of Einstein? Sorry; don't think so. He was a glorified Billy Mays in a black turtleneck who managed to convince 10's of millions of people that they couldn't draw their next breath without an electronic doohickey glued to their hand that didn't even exist five years ago. That was his real genius. And ripping off the Xerox Alto, but then everyone did that eventually, making it hard to find fault with Jobs simply for being the first. It will be interesting to see what happens at Apple over the next five years or so. I don't envy the guy who gets to replace him as the face of Apple.

In her last post, Debbie mentioned us trying and failing to get down to see La Nouba last weekend. Because it was dead at her work on Friday, she came home early. We jumped on line and were able to find two seats together. They weren't the best seats, but they ended up being good enough. So we made a run to Downtown Disney to wander around a bit then see the show. La Nouba was good (I put it not quite as good as O, but much better than Ka), although we saw something not normally seen in a Cirque du Soleil show: a hard crash. One of the acts was four little girls (looked to be maybe 8 at the most) doing acrobatics while working diabolos. The last trick involved one girl throwing her spool 20 feet or so in the air and a second girl jumping up onto the first girl's shoulders to catch it. On the first try, the toss was off, so they made a second attempt. That time she kinda sorta caught it but took a hard fall and was a bit slow getting up. The third try was successful with a great deal of wobbling around, but they held it together long enough to call it good. Of course, they got the biggest applause of the night.

Other big news is that I finally got a job. Sort of. Since we moved down here, I've been volunteering at the library one or two days a week as a page (shelving books, pulling holds, etc.). They had a part-time page job open up, so I went ahead and applied for it not expecting to get it. Typical for central Florida, there were over 160 applications for the part-time job including large numbers of people with freshly-minted graduate degrees in library science. Why would they hire someone who makes all sorts of grandpa-noises when he has to shelve on the bottom shelf when they could have 20-somethings with college degrees? Then I was called for an interview. I went and was my usual charming self during the interview, followed by their standard library page test, which involves alphabetizing six groups of four words, six groups of four authors, and most challenging of all, putting six groups of four Dewey decimal numbers in numeric order. I still didn't expect to get the job. I got a call on Friday just as we were leaving for Disney that I got the job. When I was at the library on Sunday, I found out I was offered the job because I was the only person that managed to get a perfect score on the test. Wow. Knowing the ABC Song and how to count pays off big time. If you can call a part-time job the big time. At least it's permanent.

So now I need to see what my schedule there is going to look like and decide what to do about the whole Tax Geek thing. I'm hoping I can do both, but we'll just have to wait and see. I don't start the library job until the last day of October, so that gives me time to get through the second section of my SEE tests. I figure I've gone this far so why not finish up the Enrolled Agent thing? I can use the library job to backstop the first few years of The Tax Geek and see which one turns into a full-time job first. Or something like that. It's all a bit squishy right now.

The bicycle riding is going much better now that I have a back wheel that turns. My average speed is way up (12.8 mph), so tomorrow I'm getting back to adding miles. Other than three straight days of rain over the weekend, the weather has been much more pleasant as well; 20 degrees cooler and about half the humidity. I may hit my 15-miles-in-an-hour-or-less goal by the end of the year after all.

Well, it's late so I should try to get some sleep. I can't keep my eyes open during the day, then I'm suddenly all perky and awake at 11pm. Grrr.

Beautiful Day

It is suppose to be a beautiful day today -- bit cooler (in the low/mid 80's) and no rain. Last nite I told Ric I wanted to do "something" today -- get out of the apartment and outside.

I didn't join him for his bike ride this morning though and we just finished up going through old posts on FB and seeing the comments on his new Tax Geek caricature. Now, time for him to jump in the shower and then we are heading down to Disney World for the rest of the day. I tried to get tickets for the Cirque show (La Nouba), but they did not have two seats together for either show tonite. Maybe another nite this month while they are running some specials.