Zhanga: February 2009
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Friday, February 27, 2009 (5 comments)
Read the fine print before you start filling out one of those online tax return thingies. I used TurboTax last year and it was pretty thorough about everything and worked well. It was also free...
This year, it still yelled FREE!! in big letters all over the site, but I guess somewhere in the fine print it said "*Not actually free." It actually cost $19.95 per state return and I had three of those to file, so I ended up paying $59.85.
Why didn't I just file the state taxes manually? Well, TurboTax was really sneaky about this. Only after I had filed the (free) federal tax return did they bust out the pricing for state taxes, and you don't have to pay until you actually submit. So I thought ok, well I'll just enter all my information, and then maybe I'll file some of this manually and some using the software ($19.95 is still worth paying to not have to learn e.g. VA taxes). Well, it turns out they don't let you do that. It's either file everything or file nothing, and you don't find out until the end.
So it was either go to some other site and re-do everything, saving a little bit of cash but wasting more than its time equivalent, or just pay. So I paid.
That means I paid $19.95 to file my North Carolina taxes. Actually, no, I spent $19.95, 42 cents on postage, and 10 cents on an envelope, so I could pay the taxes I owe to NC. All $1.00 of it. ONE DOLLAR!!! (My entire 2008 NC tax bill was $25, of which $24 was already withheld during the year. Why do they even bother? It's going to cost them $10 in overhead to process my $1 check!)
TurboTax also claimed that I owe $3 of penalties to GA because I didn't pay enough tax last year. Well gee thanks, I used your stupid software to calculate my taxes! Whores.
11:11PM
Friday, February 20, 2009 (5 comments)
Do you play online word games that require you to make anagrams from a collection of letters (e.g. Text Twist)? Then you, too, can become an anagram android/cyborg. I made a page for generating anagrams which outputs words of length 3-6 that can be formed from letters that you give it.
I learned a lot of Javascript along the way, which means I can now make my site look and act like Eva's Xanga page five years ago, but I won't do so because I value my sanity. jQuery makes writing Javascript and AJAX amazingly easy... I don't know why I ever bothered to try learning straight Javascript.
3:25PM
Monday, February 16, 2009 (0 comments)
I've been too busy to entertain you, so enjoy listening to Obama this week. The last one on that page ("You ain't my bitch nigga. Buy yo own damn fries.") cracked me up so hard.
12:42AM
Saturday, February 7, 2009 (6 comments)
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have an early class and an afternoon class in the same building, so I often just take a nap in that building after eating lunch. Two days ago, as I was waking up I overheard the following:
Henry: I've never seen somebody sleep like that
before... I mean, they usually at least look like they're breathing. He just
looks dead. How can that possibly be comfortable?
Me: ....hey... what... hey I'm awake now
Henry: Hey he's awake! That was the most
uncomfortable-looking sleep position I've ever seen...
Apparently he had been talking about me for five minutes before I woke up. I guess it must have been pretty comfortable...? Or I guess I could have been dead.
After class I went to the most nerdy thing I've ever been to in my life. The mangitude of nerdiness might blow some of your minds, so try not to think too hard about it. It was an Open Source University Meetup sponsored by Sun. The notice for the event called it an "OpenSolaris Installfest" and said something about a "tech talk," so I assumed they would talk about the operating system, why it's good, cool things about it, etc. Stuff that would interest me. (OpenSolaris is like a more hardcore nerd form of Linux, made by Sun.)
When I got to the event, I was the third person to show up. There was a sign-in list with a column for "major" -- the two names above me were political science and public policy. Wtf? Eventually, about 30 people showed up and over half of them were Chinese girls. (Already one thing OpenSolaris beats Linux at.) I think there were two white people present, and of the Chinese people, I heard exactly one of them speak any English -- the presenter. I felt like I was in a grad students' Chinese Students Association meeting. Every time the presenter hovered her mouse over a word, a Chinese translation would pop up.
The actual meeting was the most boring thing on the planet. All she did was talk about Sun and joining the Sun group on campus and, literally, show how to install OpenSolaris. It involves hitting enter twice, waiting, clicking next, waiting more, clicking next, waiting and waiting and waiting, etc. And the pizza was an hour late. Bah.
Aside from trying to decode fobtalk (the presenter could have just spoken in Chinese since 95% of the audience would have understood her better) and watching a progress bar slowly crawl, one other thing happened. The girl sitting next to me asked me how this operating system was any different from plain Linux, which is a major milestone in my (and/or Linux's) life because it marked the first and last time any female will ever speak to me about Linux. Well, until my sister realizes what's on her computer...
4:28PM
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 (1 comment)
I think the gods are trying to tell me something... something bad. I guess this is what I get for selling out again.
Go search Microsoft's Live image search for the term I Love Microsoft. In case their rankings have changed by the time you read this, I have captured the first few results for posterity (the first image has a border because my mouse is over it):
That's right, when Microsoft's search engine thinks about who loves Microsoft, apparently it thinks of me first. (The picture can be found on this page.)
3:41PM
Monday, February 2, 2009 (0 comments)
Apparently, during almost the entire month of January, the dukeconsultingclub.com domain has pointed to the desktop machine in my dorm. I have no idea why, since I don't have anything to do with them and I don't know anybody in the club. So for a while, here's what the site looked like (except the image has been scaled down here):
What?
Which genius decided to point dukeconsultingclub.com to my server? I could be much more evil, but I will just leave you with this link and this picture:
Anyways, whoever decided I would own the DCC site may want to change the DNS settings.
It's since been changed to point to some spam/parking page.
7:59PM
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