Couple of Addendums, the Joy of Taxes, the Despair of Corporate Interwobble, and Kicking Up the Reading Jam

BLOT: (04 Apr 2011 - 01:46:55 AM)

Couple of Addendums, the Joy of Taxes, the Despair of Corporate Interwobble, and Kicking Up the Reading Jam

Remember when it was vogue to link to your "currently listening" and "currently reading"? And then people started getting all hipster with it with things like "the sounds of my own breaking heart" and such? I kind of miss that. As a business model, it made sense. It was buzz, concentrated to a purpose (i.e. linking to the content you like, therefore providing sales to your favorite artists while at the same time giving you a platform to share your tastes). I won't be bringing it back, often can't quite be bothered, but I will in this case declare that I am jamming (no, wrong word) to Sunao Inami's "Laid Back Computing". Dig those [un]smooth and [v. ]funky beats. Unfortunately the old website is down, which was an actual shop, so you have to click a bit on the personal site and then scroll down a couple of entries to see it, but there you go. One of the strangest facets of my musical tastes is the semi-structured noise genre (Sunao Inami, The Wretch, Kohsuke Tajima, Kenji Siratori's many side-projects) and even though I might have trouble explaining why I like it in a 100 word essay, I do keep turning back to it.

Enough of that weird digression, I have a couple of updates to previous blot posts. Somehow I forgot to mention in my post on the moonbuggy race that UAHuntsville got second place [and took home one of the safety awards]. A&M also finished (not all buggies survived so just finishing is a mark of pride) with a time of 6:43.

Now, something I did not forget, but read later. As I said when I blogged about the author angrily attacking a reviewer on the reviewer's blog, there is a chance that infamy is being earned to cash in. Maybe, maybe not, but at least one article on the subject pointed out that book sales were definitely up for the book, even though many of the buyers gave it low reviews.

Ok, so now on to our favorite topic: Taxes. I talked Sarah into doing the State taxes because she has never filled out such a form (well, she fills out lots of forms, but never filed taxes). Except, well, she got done and there were some questions about this or that. Then I looked at them, and...to cut to the chase: We filed through H&R Block. I plan to completely not use them next year but with her job and its travel and my education expenses, the whole deduction process is a morass that I do not get. I also need to keep track of online sales because I don't have a record of this or that sale, here or there, and so I guess we could have just came up with a number bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a truck. Anyhow, we didn't get but a tiny amount back, and I donated that all to alternative fuel research and an art initiative. All of that tiny amount, split between causes. Look upon me, oh charity, and despair. By the one, one of the points of consternation was the federal tax paid deduction, which changed us from owing to being owed, but I was getting elements of it wrong and thought it was applied on some complex scale and it is actually straight-forward. Tonight, appropriately, I saw this article: "Alabama House member proposes eliminating federal income tax deduction to raise revenue". Good news, next year I won't be confused by it. Bad news, next year we are so going to owe money back to the state. heh.

Then, right after the guilt and despair that was e-filing state taxes, I got an email from one of my credit cards that goes "Hey, someone broke into a company that we {use to send you stuff you don't want | sold your address to so they can send you stuff that you don't want} and so they have your address. The good news they don't have your financial information, the bad news is that they now know you do business with us [and that company's other clients] and so watch out for scams! Good day, sir!" Sigh. I remember we had to once change our debit cards because a business that handled credit card transactions for a number of businesses got hit. At least in that case, that was Company A who provided a direct service to Companies B through Z getting attacked, while this time it is much more Company 1, which has nothing to do with Company 2 besides generating some more revenue for them in a way that does nothing for me, has been attacked and so I am having to be more wary. Ass and fiddlesticks.

To wrap up, I am only about 15 books into the year. That sucks. I was expecting to be near 30 but guess not. I have to bust ass. The only way I can get back on track is to aim for about 40 in this quarter (April through June). Then do about 35 in one of the remaining quarters. I can so make this 144 book goal. Maybe. Time to get my reading on...

Me in 2011

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: April 2011