11:00 – Barbara is off to the supermarket and I’m doing laundry. Before we could do that we had to unpack and check in a shipment from one of our vendors in order to clear a path to the washer/dryer and Barbara’s car. This shipment takes us back up to comfortable inventory levels on a lot of components: 200 more boxes of flat microscope slides, 45 dozen 6″ rulers, 30 dozen 100 mL graduated cylinders, 40 dozen test tube brushes, and similar numbers of several other items.
Barbara took her mom out to dinner last night. She said Sankie is doing a bit better. Not a lot, but at least not any worse.
13:36 – You know those stories (many confirmed) about light bulbs that have been burning steadily for 100 years or more? Well, I have a similar situation with one of my calculators. I’ve printed the state and federal tax forms, but before I send them off I always double/triple-check my math. For this final check, I’m using my HP-12C calculator, which I bought in 1983 when I started on my MBA from Wake Forest University’s Babcock School. I used it very heavily then and for some time thereafter, although in recent years it’s mostly sat in a desk drawer. But the odd thing is that the batteries I installed when I bought it 30 years ago are still in there, and still working fine. The original and only set.
I just efiled my federal tax return. I feel like someone kicked me, hard, between the shoulder blades. 31 pages! But I was massively over withheld, my fault, and am getting back a significant amount.
Now to finish my daughter’s tax return. I am a rat and the wheel beckons me.
My tax return is due on 15th May, but there is a complication: my accountant is unwell and has been off work for a while. I can probably get an extension, but would rather not as the tax office owes me a fair bit, I think.
We ain’t done ours yet, but probably in the next week or two; we have us a “special relationship” with the IRS and one of its agents here in the great Green Mountain State. It mainly entails us paying through the nose forever. So we don’t feel any huge critical need to meet deadlines anymore; they’re gonna bleed us dry anyway. And we’re about to get into it with the state collectors again, too. Lynn may be a rat on the wheel but we’re butterflies pinned to a gummint scrapbook.
Ok, the e-file thing is cool. I e-filed both tax returns and both have already been accepted by the IRS computers. I had to write a check for the daughter but that was trivial. Have my computer talk to your computer and we will meet in the middle!
http://citypaper.com/news/comics/lulu-eightball-1.1664563
No state income taxes here in The Great State of Texas for citizens. Just sales taxes and income XXXXXX franchise taxes for corporations.
I think Santa snuck in one Christmas and put new batteries in Mr. Bob’s calculator. You know, when he was trying to kill Rudolph.
I have an HP 15-C, bought around 1988, and it’s on its original batteries. HP did some really good engineering before they became yet another a commodity computer company.
I have a relatively new HP 50 that I depend on for computer science grad school work. Build quality isn’t bad, but it isn’t the same as the quality of the old calculators.
Someone clever figured out that a loophole in the copyright law leaves the firmware in the old HP calculator models unprotected. Build quality on these is strictly “DIY”, but they work just like the originals.
http://www.swissmicros.com/
Ditto on the HP calculators. Had a few when I was working, and still have an HP12C, also with its original three silver cells. If you ever have to replace them, be sure to get the correct kind, as recommended by HP.
Also, I use the free version of Andro12C on my phone. It seems identical to the real thing, but is faster. There are many versions now for phones, with various features. Always with me.
On taxes, I paid quarterly for many years, and usually had a small balance to pay at filing.
Since my income varies, I just started NOT paying quarterly. If I meet certain criteria, there is no underwithholding penalty, and the interest is currently 3%. That is a cheap loan, and I am not giving Uncle the use of my money for free. I can make more than 3% on investments. I will see how well this works. As always, YMMV.
I’ve seen and used a handful of HP nn-C emulators for Windows or Linux, but that’s not really what I want. I want something that’s primarily a calculator with lots of easily-accessible operators, but has better programmability than the 15-C.
A spreadsheet does what I need when I need this sort of thing, but it’s pretty heavyweight in terms of starting up. More importantly, you can’t just tap-tap-tap in a few numbers and operators – you have to write the expressions in a pain-in-the-posterior syntax and you have to remember the name of the operator rather than just click on a button.
I guess I could find the source for an existing calculator emulator and then improve it the way I want. The problem with that, aside from not having the time for yet another project, is that I’m not sure of what I want. All I have is a vague dissatisfaction with everything I have.
(I could insert a snide comment about me turning into my wife, but I’m all charitable n nice n stuff.)
It wasn’t too long ago that I had to put a fresh set of size N batteries into my early 80’s model HP 41 CV. But a couple of years ago, one of my college buddies showed a current model HP with an = button. Oh the horror! Apostasy!!
I just checked the wikipedia page for the 12C. It draws 250 µW. No wonder my original battery is still working. Essentially, the calculator draws zero power, so it’s only a question of shelf-life. Mine uses three hearing-aid cells, although the article says more recent ones use a single 3V battery.
Looks like Brother Al has been playing the old pump and dump game with alternative energy:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11727215/1/al-gore-walks-away-from-green-energy.html
I actually like much of his current portfolio now.
But a couple of years ago, one of my college buddies showed a current model HP with an = button.
I have an HP 27S, one of the few algebraic calculators produced by HP. It allows entry of formulas and will solve for unknowns. I understood and used RPN but like using the regular entry system on the 27S.
I have owned an HP-45, HP-25, HP-27, HP-27s, HP-11C, HP-16C, HP-48G. Only two I have left are the 27S and the 48G. I may try and sell the 48G but will keep the 27S. Of all the calculators the one with the best build quality was the HP-45.
Friend of mine acquired an HP-67. I was really envious of that model. But from what I understand the card drive rollers did not last long and rendered the card mechanism worthless.
I also had a Pulsar digital watch when they first came out. Went to see the James Bond movie “Live and Let Die”. Opening scene Bond wakes up and looks at his watch. It is a Pulsar, silver model, mine was gold. Anyway when he activated his watch the audience went oooooh, Naturally I had to activate my watch and hold my arm up for all to see. Geek nirvana is having a James Bond gadget that really works that you can show others.
Of course most of these items were purchased before I was married. I have no idea what happened to most of the calculators. Probably got stolen from work. I did sell the HP-45, the rest just vanished.
Ok, the e-file thing is cool. I e-filed both tax returns and both have already been accepted by the IRS computers.
I e-filed my taxes late February on a Friday night. Accepted the next day. Money was in my account the following Thursday. Less than a week to get my refund. One thing the IRS did right with one exception. Since e-filing saves them the hassle of manual entry the IRS should be paying for all e-filing, not the filer. Quicken gives me e-file as part of the software, which I also think that IRS should subsidize the cost since the tax laws are so damn complicated.
No state income taxes here in The Great State of Texas for citizens.
No income tax for Tennessee for regular wages. There is that nasty Hall Tax that penalizes people who save money, have investments and are using those investments for retirement. Credit Union dividends are except as are online only banks. But investments and earnings in the stock market get taxed. Totally stupid.
I am a math idiot, and my son a math genius with more than one advanced degree in the subject. How that ever happened, I will never know. I did well in high school math, but it was strictly rote — I did not understand a thing about why things worked as they did. Physics was different, as I realized early on that physics was merely choosing the right formula and plugging in numbers. Teachers and prof.’s mistook this for true physics aptitude. After high school I avoided all math from there on.
As I have said repeatedly, had I known TV was mostly non-base 10 math, I would have paid more attention in math class, as adding and subtracting time in base 60 and frames in either base 24 or base 30 was a daily ritual. Fortunately, from my second major TV job onwards, I had an assistant, who did all the math — and very well, they did it, I might add.
I can read and understand all kinds of accounting statements and ratings books with no problems, but more than a standard accounting calculator (had a Royal accountant’s calculator for eons, but it disappeared at the move to Germany) is lost on me. Son, on the other hand, does practically nothing but math and statistics all day long. Taxes are math-taxing to me. Fortunately, there is H&R Block software.
We used the Windows calculator but now do it in conjunction with TurboTax; was thinking about trying H&R Block, though, as there are several offices in the area here if we got jammed up and that might facilitate matters bettuh.
Oh gee whiz, lookee here; only three more days until the Dreadline. I am so nervous and stressed I can’t stand myself, LOL. Fuck them. We’ll get to it when we get to it. When we feel like it.
Had to replace the batteries in my 16C, but then I used it a bunch converting between BCD and 1s complement 64-bit floating point. Started with an HP-45, early enough you could get the stop-watch hack. Loved my HP-41s (C and CX, loaded to the max with PPC ROM, the expansion pack that furnished a good half dozen more ports, HP-IL, card reader, XMMs, DevROM and a bunch more I’ve forgotten). Yes, I was a loyal PPC/CHHU member, and my 41C was early enough it had BUG9 for syntehtic programming. I even made the goose fly backwards. Alas, outgassing over the years from the NiCD batttery packs killed off my ’45 and ’41s. But I moved on to the 48SX, then GX and 50. My ’48GXes are still going strong, having taken over from my ’41s as PDAs (address book, calendar, memos, the usual, all hand-coded in RPN, then RPL with assists from synthetic programming). Corvallis knew how to design and build stuff (including the Omnibooks through the 800 and the Jornadas). When HP sent the small device business to Australia, and went with the newly-acquired Compaq iPaqs instead of the Jornadas it was the end of HP as a computer company with value. They shoulda sued Carly for malfeasance. She did more to ruin the company than anyone before or since (not that her successors have exactly been geniuses).
I had an HP-35 and later an HP-45, both of which disappeared many years ago, and the HP-12C, which I’ve somehow kept.
I think the rot at HP started long before Carly, although she certainly did everything she could to destroy what the company had originally been, engineers building equipment for engineers. Same thing happened with Compaq. Their early computers were gorgeous inside. Some of them were actually milspec (I remember looking at one of their TEMPEST units), and all of them were over-engineered for extremely high reliability.
In 1974 when I was in Year 11 one of the class nerds had a very low end HP calculator. It had +-*/ and square root, and that was it. The rest of us made do with slide rules and log books. He was treated like a minor deity, everyone wanted to borrow his wonderful calculator in physics labs.
By the next year I got a decent brand, non-HP, calculator which did everything. In 1976 I looked longingly at the HP-65, but it was about $700 so I couldn’t justify that, plus I never liked the tactile response of the keyboard or the RPN.
In 1998 I did a chemistry class and my lab partner had an old HP calculator. I asked to borrow it, he didn’t mind but told me I wouldn’t know how to use it. He said an uncle had given it to him. Of course, I surprised him by using it correctly and just said I knew about RPN, which he thought was pretty neat.
Last ever US tax return coming up for me, for the partial year last year up until my expatriation in April. Due by June 15th, so I still have a bit of time.
Yeah, I’m still thinking about moving to Canada, qualifying for permanent residency, becoming a citizen, and giving up our US citizenship. Barbara and I easily meet the immigration requirements, even given our ages and without learning to speak French. I’m just not sure that Canada is far enough away, and I’m concerned that it’s becoming more and more like the US.
Or vice-versa, with the increasing US fear of eeeevil guns, the coming socialized medicine, and the encouragement of a substantial non-English-speaking minority with a grievance.
“Same thing happened with Compaq.”
And with Prime, Data General, and DEC, unfortunately; the MBA suits and women-on-business rolled in and the engineers were marginalized. That was the end. Of course, at DEC you had two of their biggest stars, Gordon Bell and Dave Cutler leave, and Ken Olsen pontificating that there would never be computers in anyone’s homes.
“…I’m still thinking about moving to Canada…”
If you think the government here is intrusive, wait’ll you get a load of theirs. Check with our Canadian friends on that, maybe it’s a case of YMMV and being different out in the western provinces, I dunno. From “talking” with mine on other internet venues, it’s actually a state of mind there; no one questions it. And they think this country is totally wack and outta control. Particularly with regard to gun rights; I see stuff like “Well, yeah, the hunters around here have guns, nothing wrong with that, eh?” “Nobody needs all them assault rifles, whacha need all that for, eh?”
I don’t know what we’ll do. I suspect we’ll end up buying a place up in the mountains near the Tennessee/North Carolina border. Perhaps we’ll also buy a vacation home up in Alberta, establish residency, and then rent the place out most of the year.
Become a reclusive mountain man. You’ve already got the beard for it.
Just don’t start mailing explosives to people. It’s been done, and I’m sure you don’t want to be derivative.
Amusing thread on Slashdot, relevant to a recurring topic here: Are you apocalypse-useful.
Fiorina drove the stake in HP and is not paying for it. An engineer friend who worked a couple of decades for them, said they were drifting towards wider fields, but Carly got rid of the engineers (including him) and killed that focus cold. She hated engineers, he claims. One of the worst corporate destructions ever.
But matched by the guy at the top of the Steak ‘n’ Shake chain of restaurants in the Midwest and Florida, who ever so desperately wants to be managing an investment company and not restaurants. He idolizes Warren Buffet, but has used the restaurant to acquire fast-failing Maxim magazine. Earlier, he tried to buy an insurance company in Michigan, but the deal failed. Based on the declining taste of food at Steak ‘n’ Shake, he had better get serious about the original Steak ‘n’ Shake culture, or people like me will not eat there anymore. I used to eat there several times a month, but have not been there in over a year.
BTW, there is no advantage to using H&R Block home software, if you are going to use an H&R Block office. The software they use in the office is entirely different from the home stuff. They won’t even accept the saved data file of your home software, because of “potential virus issues”, which I find in the same class of offensive as killing babies. Geez, have the expert IT folks at headquarters set up a single computer for every branch that can convert the file to something useful, or devise a way I can send my file to their central IT office for virus checking and conversion. When I had a recent problem and had to use their brick and mortar office, it felt like a kick in the butt when they said they will only accept printouts of my H&R Block home software worksheet, as info from the home software is useless to them. Basically, they enter all the data over again, by hand — charging for doing that, of course.
I forget why I chose H&R Block from all the options, but I left TurboTax because they screwed me badly some years ago, locking me out of my own data at tax time, with customer service closed over the weekend. They also screwed my dad, back when they were only a professional tax preparer company writing software only for Unix machines. TurboTax is on my forever shit list, along with the Ford motor car company.
Bob, I’m preoccupied with other things this morning, and I need to consider my reply, but I suggest going into your kitchen and getting hold of your salt supply, not the shaker but the container that you use to fill the shaker with, and holding it firmly in your hand while considering OFD’s opinion of Canada.
I will state this, according to recent studies our murder rate is a third of the USA’s. We have an average of 14,000. That’s 1.6 per 100,000 vs. 4.6. And our crime rate is 36.29 vs. 50.15 for the US. So, watcha need assault rifles for, eh?
One of my regular checks is of the TV/Radio scene in Chicago, by visiting the website of longtime Chicago media critic Rob Feder. Of course, the comments on his site through Facebook is not necessarily a representative sample of anything, but I was surprised to see how the responders to weatherman John Coleman’s retirement at 79 from San Diego TV, overwhelmingly believe global warming has been scientifically proven beyond a doubt. Coleman was a vocal doubter.
http://www.robertfeder.com/2014/04/11/coleman-ready-to-weather-retirement/
You probably remember Coleman on The Weather Channel after a stint with ABC’s Good Morning America (done from Chicago for a long while). He was one of the founders of The Weather Channel, and certainly the most visible.
Coleman today looks pretty scary from that picture topping Feder’s column. He could do with a visit to MJ and Oprah’s plastic surgeon. No resemblance whatsoever to his earlier years at WLS in Chicago, shown below the first picture. If you had shown me the current pic and asked who it was, I would never in a million years have guessed Coleman. I worked in Chicago during the ‘happy talk’ days of ABC O&O news. All anchors wore the blue blazers with the Circle 7 logo (ABC owned and operated stations were, at one time, all channel 7, and the circle 7 logo was their visual identity). In Chicago, that was Fahey Flynn for news, Bill Frink for sports, and Coleman for weather. Highest-rated newscast in town at the time, although not journalistically the best, IMO. Coleman never wore long-sleeved shirts, even in winter (that’s his watch peeking out of the right jacket sleeve), while the other two guys always did. A mis-match that always bothered my anal side. Read down the comments to at least the point where Feder tells who Barry Jagoda — the first commenter — is. Jagoda was a producer at the CBS station in Chicago when I was working over at PBS.
Statistically, your chance of being murdered or being the victim of a serious crime is about the same as mine. Most murders and other serious crimes in the US and Canada occur in the inner cities. The differential overall rate between the US and Canada is an artifact of us having more, larger, and more dangerous inner cities than Canada does. Canada is also more homegeneous than the US, although that’s changing. In either country, the probability of a middle-aged, middle-class, white suburban/exurban/rural dweller being murdered or falling victim to a serious crime is nearly nil.
Gee, I guess I’m pretty apocalypse-useful. I not only know how to make sulfa and other synthetic antibiotics, aspirin, natural and semi-synthetic opioids from poppy plants, explosives, biofuel, etc. etc., but I know how to make precursors from readily-available stuff.
That thread was mostly moronic, but they did get one thing right. The useful people would be scientists, engineers, physicians, farmers, and others who know how to make and/or fix useful things.
So, on the tax thing, there is no advantage to using either Turbo or H&R Block; that pretty much means us continuing to do it by hand with the Windows or Linux calculators or a handheld one, I hear HP made some good ones.
We need “assault rifles” here to match what the thuggish robocops and soldiers have for starters, in line with our Second Amendment; we also need them to counter the zombie hordes from the megalopolis cities when they flee their obvious death-traps. Also for neighbors who try to steal our gasoline and sacks of rice and flour. Plus they’re fun to shoot!
We already have a place in Canada, northern New Brunswick, on the ocean. Our tentative plan is to eventually spend six months a year up there during the summers and warm weather, and the holiday season and winter here for six months. But national and international events may bollix this up for us, who knows.
I’m working on making myself useful during the Apocalypse but I’m also over sixty, so I dunno how useful that will be; engineers, scientists and the like will also have to know English so I can certainly teach that. Also OFD’s version of Murkan history.
Well, yah. Par for the course for Slashdot. That’s why I descibed it as amusing rather than as useful.
I did like the selection from McGuffey’s reader.
Well, as I’ve said, I don’t expect any of this to happen. Just a slow slide into dystopia as the government continues to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.
You can get a kick outta the McGuffey’s if you’re me by noting all the standard-issue English names from back then, and the notion that they can just haul off to somewhere and fire up a new colony.
The slow slide into dystopia would be preferable to a sudden conflagration, but the latter can still occur, depending on any number of natural, supernatural (LOL?), or otherwise mundane social, economic and political events. A huge crash of all the international markets at once; the Grid going down for whatever reason; a major and unprecedented killer storm or earthquake or volcanic eruption; and then this one, of which I’ve only heard recently: a methane overrun of the planet and consequent huge increase in temperatures worldwide, with overwhelming mass die-offs.
Don’t forget a gigantic asteroid or a virus that makes the Black Death look like the common cold.
I’m holding out for space aliens who look vaguely reptilian and have an inexplicable urge to ravish human women. Because if you can’t get your science from 1930s pulps, where can you get it from?
Aside from doing chores, I’m spending the day on the computer (no surprise there). My day-job contract ends soon, so I need to find another. And I should be working on either of two novellas for sale or my next martial arts book or a couple songs for sale, but I have a song title stuck in my head and it’s blocked up all creativity until I can write at least a first pass of the lyrics. It’s like an ice jam on a river, with all the flooding and weeping and wailing. Not pretty.
(The song title? “Can’t Get Your Smell Out of My Sheets”. I’ve got a concept and the first verse and a melody, but it’s not coming together. And I know from experience that nothing else will come out until I crack this one. I hate my brain sometimes.) (And unlike most of my songs, it’s intended as a love song, not a “don’t let the door hit you in the ass” song.
“…space aliens who look vaguely reptilian and have an inexplicable urge to ravish human women.”
Them particular aliens have pretty good taste, too; the wimmenz they ravish down here are always young and voluptuous knockouts.
The country song titles and themes all boil down to about a half-dozen; see David Allen Coe on that.
Understood, on the limited themes in country songs. Same goes for fiction, the list of 8 (or 6 or 12 or 22) plots that “all” stories fall into. Not that I agree with the thesis. There are plenty of plots that don’t have more than a passing similarity to any on the list. However, the lists do seem to be a good indicator of what the big publishers will buy: if your story won’t slot neatly into one of their categories, they aren’t interested.
(Note that this hasn’t had any particular impact on me. My stories were always rejected because I don’t write novels and the publishers aren’t (or weren’t) interested in shorts and novellas from authors who don’t already have a fan base. No problem: as above, self-publishing to the rescue.)
Agreed on the tax software vs. doing it yourself assessment, unless you have unusual tax issues — like inheriting money from close family deaths (I have had that in spades during the last decade, but would rather have the people back, instead of their small amounts of money in my pocket). Big tax problems caused by a forced sell-off of investments my folks had, drove me to H&R Block from just filling in the IRS PDF’s. Even then, there was a mistake made that the HRB software did not catch, but the IRS did, and cost me $900 down the line. I have loss carryovers for another 2 years, so I will not be abandoning the HRB software until that is all depleted.
Most of my friends have pro tax preparers doing their taxes. Fees for simple returns have been $300 to $500 this year for them. But none of them have ever had any follow-up by the IRS. Having a tax pro or attorney doing your taxes is pretty much a guarantee the IRS will not touch you. Too expensive for them to fight with the accountants/lawyers, so they do not consider them low-hanging fruit.
I’ve had tax specialist CPAs do my taxes, both personal and business, for twenty years or more with just a few exceptions. It’s worth it, from the revenuer hassle point of view, but I resent the hell out of yet another tax for the privilege of living in this nation. Just like the lawyer tax. Sure, in theory you can go into court and represent yourself in a civil or criminal matter. In practice, I’ve had judges tell me that unless I hired a lawyer they would find it almost impossible to rule in my favor. (Conceded, all of these judges were in NYS, always a strong candidate for most corrupt state in the nation.)
Unfortunately, my knowledge confirms that. I have known a couple of people with legal understanding enough to pass the bar in any state, but who were not actually lawyers, who represented themselves, and the judges and other lawyers made misery of their cases. If they had just hired local counsel to sit at the table, the outcome would probably have been better.
If you ever attended a college campus that was so small, it relied on fraternities and sororities to solve their housing situation, you learn pretty quickly that the organized students run the campus, to the exclusion of the wants and needs of the independents. They intentionally make life more difficult for anyone who is not organized. Same with the brotherhood of attorneys, and judges ARE attorneys first. But, as my dad always maintained, judges were the worst attorneys, because they could not make it in legal practice, and had to get a government job to make a go of life. I have not run into any lawyer who will dispute that when pressed about it; they just deal with it.
After being around my dad at work as a lawyer, I will never represent myself. Part of that is because our family lived off my dad’s lawyer earnings, so I have no problem with that expense. But I do agree that life in America is such a hassle. Far, far more on every front (not just legal or government) than I ever experienced in Germany. Living in Berlin was a relaxing, safe, and easy place to live life and enjoy it. Tomorrow, I will spend the day in the Social Security office trying to get the SSA-1099 that I never received by mail. If that does not work, then I will have the hassle of filing an extension and revisiting the whole tax situation again at a later date. Did I already mention that when I tried to purchase the H&R Block software online recently, they charged my card, but never took me to the download? Two hours of waiting on the phone in queue, and another hour while they explored it, and I did finally get what I was after, but oh, the hassle. I spend sooo much time on hold with landline businesses, that I recently had to increase the landline minutes on my cellphone service from 500 min/mo to 1,000. Living life in the US of A is nothing but hassles during all waking hours.