Author: cosmo

I live in Denver, so I’m required by law to say Go Broncos!

But, well…

Funny because it’s true.

In what may be a new record for me, I’ve almost finished my personal taxes. And it’s only February 1!

Yesterday I spent the bulk of the day working on my corporate taxes. Usually it’s an exercise in frustration, figuring out where all of the numbers go, but since I took the time to organize all of the income and expenses to the penny, I knew I had all of the data I needed. Then it was a matter of finding the fields in the tax software. Unlike years past, once I found them I took notes so I can repeat the process next year without so much headache. (Why didn’t I do that ten years ago?)

With my corporate returns in hand, it was pretty straightforward to enter everything for my personal return today. I’m still sad that the IRS has tax rules so complex that an entire industry has risen to support them, but H&R Block’s Taxcut software helps tremendously by asking the right questions and walking me through the gazillions of forms and numbers.

I’m waiting for a few documents from various places so I can plug in mortgage interest and dividends and IRA contributions and whatnot, but I feel like I’m close… and it’s not April. Even better, it looks like Uncle Sam might owe me some money. For a change.

My main data drive failed a few weeks ago (fortunately I have backups) so I wanted not only to get rid of it, but to make sure all of the personal data was unrecoverable. That meant, of course, cracking open the hard drive casing and trashing the disks.

For some reason I find the guts of hard drives to be fascinating. Terabytes of data stored on silvery magnetic platters, delicate motors and read heads that can position themselves to micrometer accuracy, the ability to stream hundreds of millions of bits of data per second… cool stuff.

Permit me a few macro shots.

After I had everything out, I took the platters outside, set them on the sidewalk, and smashed them with a hammer. Laralee pointed out that in the movies, all data seems to be recoverable no matter how bad the fire/explosion/chemical spill was. But I’m pretty sure I took care of this stuff…

We woke up this morning to find about 10″ of snow on the ground. The kids were disappointed that school hadn’t been cancelled (the roads were pretty slick) but after all of the days that were cancelled due to the September floods, I suspect it would take a snowpocalypse to get out of school now. Or a polar vortex, whatever that is.

Anyway, I walked Zack to school and it was pretty cool to see everything in quiet white. I took a few pictures on the way.

I had to pay my state employment taxes today so I went to the State of Colorado’s home page at www.colorado.gov. I don’t know who they have handling their graphic design, but…

Wow. Stay classy, Colorado. Dude.

I just purchased some software from a well-known security vendor. I’m not sure what I did wrong on the form where I enter my billing information, but I guess I’ll never know. They have an amazing error message:

Undaunted by this display of web programming prowess, I perservered and re-entered the data. Now I get something slightly more helpful:

At dinner Laralee remarked, “My new favorite food is whipped cream.”

That was kind of shocking coming from the woman who makes “green drinks” from horrid mixtures of juiced vegetables and some kind of crazy powder that contains all the tasty goodness of chlorophyll. Maybe we’re entering a new era of dining at Casa del Schroeder…

I lost a couple of ping-pong games against Brent this afternoon. During the game I kept feeling my socks sliding around under me. These are new socks I just bought because I’ve worn holes in a few other pair.

Back in my office, I discovered the reason they felt strange. Both socks had literally rotated 180 degrees around my feet and were upside-down. What the heck is this:

Much better:

Clearly this was the reason for my loss. I’ve appealed to the U.S. Table Tennis Association to find out the ruling for “rotated socks”. I believe that’s in the rules somewhere.

My basement office is always a little cooler than the rest of the house. On a hot summer day, that’s a wonderful thing. On a cold winter day, it means I have to bundle up a bit more as I venture downstairs to work.

Today it was cold enough that the lava in the lamps beside my monitors couldn’t muster up the courage to actually float.

The lamps were on all day but only managed to make huge blobs that sat morosely on the bottom.

I had to explain to Kyra and her gaggle of friends that lava lamps work by heating up the waxy “lava” material, which then floats up in the liquid where it cools off and then sinks back down. The cycle repeats, and the mystical beauty of lava lamps is created.

It’s kind of a bummer that today I just saw fat blobs.

It seems like kind of a shame to reboot a server that’s been running non-stop for six and a half years: