09:58 – With the taxes done and off, at least I can get back to my real work. Or I could, if the USPS Click-and-Ship website would let me print postage labels. I have kits sitting here ready to go, if only I could print postage for them. What is it about government websites? One would think that the disastrous roll-out of the Obamacare website would have made USPS think twice about the website “upgrade” they did earlier this year, but apparently not. I have this mental image of rooms full of government website developers, all wearing kamikaze headbands.
Kit sales are extremely slow. In fact, kit revenues for the month to date are less than half the amount of the purchase orders I’ve issued this month. I’m beginning to feel like the Maytag repairman. I suspect kit sales will pick up now that tax day has passed. They did in 2012 and 2013.
Any idea what has happened to HardwareGuys2? It goes to a domain expired page. Checked the link on the page and it goes to a site blacklisted by Malwarebytes and Avast. Highjacked?
No clue. Jim Cooley runs that domain. I have nothing at all to do with it.
My father was a realtor (second career after the USAF) and they don’t withhold taxes from commission checks, so he was supposed to do the same thing and never did. He just filed (and paid) once per year.
He had some realtor buddies that got audit notices and they all basically told the IRS, “No, I will not voluntarily consent to an audit. If you want to audit me then you’re going to have to take me to court and force it.” They repeatedly called the IRS’s bluff as none of them ever ended up in court. Many people don’t realize that IRS audits are not mandatory and they can refuse to participate. The IRS needs a court order to make them mandatory.
Many people don’t realize that IRS audits are not mandatory and they can refuse to participate. The IRS needs a court order to make them mandatory.
I did not know that. I always figured if you did not consent the IRS would make your life miserable. Such as losing your return, making up bogus income items, etc. Government workers don’t get mad, they get even and vindictive.
I wish I had known that little tidbit of information for the three times I have been audited. One audit I told the agent she was wrong and I was not paying what she said I owed. I never heard back from that audit, never an acknowledgement they were wrong.
I have been sent notices saying I declared too much SS withholding when in fact the IRS was wrong. They never admitted their mistake. Got a tax lien notice that my house was being put up for auction. They had the right name, wrong SSN. I immediately filed a dispute with the local office and demanded a letter indicating I was correct and that my property was not up for seizure. Never got a response. In all the cases I have dealt with the IRS the IRS has been wrong and in all cases the IRS never admitted their mistake. All I basically got was a letter saying they would accept my return but reserved the right to audit the return again in the future.
Yes, I realize that Jim Cooley to over Hardware Guys, but I was hoping Jim or RB Morse(?) would see my question or you may have an inside line.
Sorry for being OT, but your contribution and legacy to Building the Perfect PC is a piece of history.
On the inoperative USPS website issue — try another browser. My bank has told me that many functions on their website stopped working with FF 26.0. Their site works up through v25 but not above. They recommended I use IE or Chrome. I am not in a hurry to change to something else, so I will just keep calling them and making them do my transactions via phone. Hopefully, that will get them to be compliant with FF 28.0.
IRS really does not want to do audits. They are high overhead. The main reason tax forms have gotten so complicated, is so the IRS can more-or-less ‘audit’ you using their own software algorithms without ever leaving the office. I did have a definite mistake on my return of a couple of years ago. Like Mrs. OFD, the sender of a 1099 (big company that should have known better) had put down erroneous information, telling me to check a box that what they were paying me was not subject to taxation. It was. I confirmed that with a lawyer and an accountant. No audit involved. Just a letter informing me I owed them more money, what the error was, and telling me how to pay or dispute.
Most of the recent actual audits around me that I know about, involve issues of criminal wrongdoing in one way or another.
Mrs. OFD just fired off a note to her employer about the faulty 1099-MISC they sent her; meanwhile we’re going ahead with the return anyway and knocking off a host of deductions; also filed for an extension via the net; should know within a day or two if it was accepted but don’t really give a shit. They have us over a barrel for multiple tens of thousands for the next year or two regardless.
22 here right now and a winter wonderland; coupla inches of snow topped by freezing rain, gorgeous over all the newly budded trees and shrubs out there.
First extension is automatic — all you have to do is notify them, although I do not know about how an electronic extension affects that. If you do it via USPS, no reasons are needed; it is totally automatic. The return itself is considered legally received by the IRS on the date it is presented to the USPS. That is in either Title XXII or XIV, I can never remember. I see that wording in various IRS instructions accept that for quarterly estimated payments, but I have not yet seen that in reference to the return itself.
Thought I was going to have to file an extension, as I was missing some materials, and was told it would take a couple of weeks to receive “copies”. It is disturbing to be treated as if missing documents are my fault, because if it arrived here, it got filed properly, — and it was not here. Kind of like kids who call you by a nickname you do not like, but you cannot stop them from doing it, aside from punching them in the mouth. Strangely, when I was a kid, girls were the ones who did that, not boys. I would have gotten whipped at home, if I ever punched a girl, so they got away with it.
Anyway I received everything in time and was at USPS by noon, getting my certificate of mailing receipt, proving I mailed it on the 15th.
I wound up filing an extension for my mom’s taxes as I have all the paperwork here on my desk. I need to adopt Chuck’s habit of filing things in folders in a filing cabinet rather that
stackingpiling them on my desk. Every relevant paper from the last few months, except the estate related documents are piled on my desk.I have always been the most organized person in the family, but the trick I found early in life, was to file it immediately when it came in through the transom. That includes even if I think I might work on it yet that day — file it. Work from a clean desk and retrieve what is needed from the files for only as long as it takes to do the work. I have a to-do list and if something like paying a bill or responding to a letter is necessary, it goes on the TBD list, so I don’t forget it. I have used lists from my earliest work years, when I was sent to a lot of time management courses by my employers. ALL of those courses said studies showed that the most effective people work from lists. A couple even demonstrated how you cannot properly prioritize work in your brain, whereas you can do that from a list by seeing everything at once.
I had the lawyer do the taxes for both my parents’ deceases. Just too many one-time exceptions that they know well, and would take too much of my productive time to research. He threw the taxes in with a lump-sum charge, so I don’t really know how much he was charging, but the overall fee was well within line for estate legal work. My dad actually charged more.
Had a weird thing happen late Monday. The router in the transmitter shack at the radio project died. I have never seen a dead router before. It was protected by a major spike protector that is common for transmitter locations at the entrance to the building for everyone occupying the space, then another spike protector of our own, followed by commercial line conditioning and UPS unit ($10k, capable of delivering 2.5kw for 30 minutes), then another home/office type UPS, and another spike protector in the distribution from the UPS. So WTF? It has no wireless; just a router — DLink, I think.
Anyway, we are on backup programming that kicks in automatically when the Internet Studio to Transmitter link (STL) fails. Our chief tech ordered a rebuilt unit that is exactly the same model as what we have, because there are a ton of configurations necessary, and that stuff is saved for the old router on the computer at the shack. When he gets the replacement router installed today, it should be a matter of just restoring the settings, and all the port openings, closings, and forwardings will be done.
None of us have ever seen a router failure before.
Arachnids have returned for summer tenancy from wherever they go for the cold months. They do not get to stay inside unless they are out of my reach. Either they get taken outside, flushed, or vacuumed. Big one drinking at the kitchen sink this morning. Too cold for me to take him outside; vacuum was in another room; so he got flushed. Vacuuming is certain death, I’m sure, so I try to do the first 2 unless they give me trouble. Spiders and fruit gnats are the only things I cannot completely exterminate.
Extension was accepted by IRS late last night and we were notified via email accordingly. We only need another day or two to wrap this up anyway. The thing that really messed us up was not filing previously for 2004 and that came back to haunt us and it was a bitch of a year to do. Took many months and many failed returns before one was finally accepted and a payback schedule approved here. (house sale that year, one kid in college, unemployment, changed jobs, missing paperwork, and incorrect paperwork filed by house sale lawyers, one of whom was the buyer of our house. Plus previous stock sales by Mrs. OFD that were never filed. What a friggin’ nightmare!)
Working on setting up Chuck’s method of filing here; I had it going in spurts but it gets sabotaged regularly.
It was not the router at the transmitter. It was its wall-wart power supply. Weird thing is that there was enough power to light the lights, but not enough to make the router work. Plugged in the substitute router (exact same model) and it did not pass traffic. I was not there, so a lot of head scratching went on, and the routers were taken to our wireless Internet provider, who is less than a mile away, and the chief tech there found nothing wrong with either of them — using the new power supply. A brain light finally went on, and they realized it was the power supply. I always doubt power supplies in the initial stages of troubleshooting. Biggest source of failure — even back in the tube days. But the fact it lit up the router while not passing traffic was the confusing factor.
It seems crazy to me that they’d design the router so it prioritises blinking those lights over… routing.
It seems crazy to me that they’d design the router so it prioritises blinking those lights over… routing.
It may be a voltage issue and not so much a router design. Enough voltage to light the lights but not enough to run the other circuits.
I guess what I mean is that I’m surprised there’s nothing in the router to ensure lights can only blink in that way when the router is functioning properly. After all, you need to pass through information about the routing in order to determine *how* the lights are blinked.
Yeah, the strange thing is that the lights were FLASHING, even though — as nearly as we can tell — it was not passing any traffic at all. That should not happen, and makes me wonder if what those blinking lights are really showing is actually traffic being passed.
The router probably thought it was passing traffic and it was indeed passing traffic to the final output drivers. But there was not enough voltage for the driver circuits to actually load the output lines. The output drivers may have required higher voltage than what was available. What was available was enough for the control circuits and those are what was flashing the lights, not the output drivers.
I have seen stranger things when a power supply goes wonkers.