donnunn.com

Links: Mar 31, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Local News: Mounties begin criminal investigation into ferry sinking
  Criminal liability a possibility in the sinking of the Queen of the North; 99 rescued, 2 missing and presumed drowned.
  (tags: seattletimes vancouver britishcolumbia bc bcferries ferries transportation news:transportation)

Friday, randomly

There is a stretch of tile floor near the laboratory’s restroom area that has been so thoroughly waxed, so completely spit-shined, it is almost dazzling to behold. Also it makes the soft rubber soles of my shoes click as if they were hard leather.

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

The pending change to daylight saving time irks and pleases me.

The one-hour loss is annoying, though the adjustment doesn’t take very long. It makes the Sunday the change occurs a bit weird, but otherwise: Shrug.

I do, however, absolutely adore the light later in the evening. Especially in Seattle, where in June it’s pretty well daylight until 21:00 or so, and the pleasant weather absolutely rocks.

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

The gnats are back. Or I’m just noticing them more the last few days, but the damned things are trying to fly up my nose and I think they’ve succeeded a few times.

Little bastards.

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

Happy Friday, and yay upcoming weekend.

Easter Bunny Name

Via Julie Anne and Quizopolis, I learn my Easter Bunny Name:

Easter Bunny Name Your Easter Bunny Name is Fuzzy Lemondrop Get Your Easter Bunny Name at Quizopolis.com

Oh how adorably charming.

Trivia: Mar 30, 2006

• Today in history: 1822 Florida becaome a U.S. territory—1867 The U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia—2002 Elizabeth, Britain’s Queen Mother, died aged 101
• News of the weird: BERLIN, Germany—German prostitutes are signing up for a career change, training to become nurses to tend to the country’s aging population or working phones as telemarketers. (Reuters)
• Strange fact: Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Jim Palmer never gave up a grand slam home run in his entire career.
• Daily quote: The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.—Harold R. McAlindon
• Daily word: renitent—resisting pressure or restraints
• Daily trivia: Fun names for Indian foods: Rogan Josh (a spicy lamb and tomato dish) and Saag Paneer (a curry-like dish with paneer cheese, eaten with roti or naan).
• Celebrity birthdays: Musician Eric Clapton is 61. Singer Norah Jones is 27.

Yellow singing bunny!

Yellow singing bunny!
Flickr: Don NunnToday’s customer silliness in the gift shop:

“Do you have any more of the yellow bunnies that sing?”

Yearning for the day

I was using EvokeTV, a new television listings service with both series and episode ratings and a slew of fun features like sharing your program listings and whatnot, when I goofed and clicked on a Teletubbies listing and I thought, How cool would it be if a show with a description this even remotely appealed to me, like back when I was 5?:

Tubby custard; mess; painting; voice trumpet; joke; laughing.

Ah, childhood....

Yearning for the day

I was using EvokeTV, a new television listings service with both series and episode ratings and a slew of fun features like sharing your program listings and whatnot, when I goofed and clicked on a Teletubbies listing and I thought, How cool would it be if a show with a description this even remotely appealed to me, like back when I was 5?:

Tubby custard; mess; painting; voice trumpet; joke; laughing.

Ah, childhood....

Links: Mar 29, 2006

• Contextures -- Excel Tips and Techniques
  Step-by-step instructions (with illustrations and example Excel files for many) to walk you through some of Excel’s less obvious functions
  (tags: excel reference help howto resources tips)

Today’s is even better/stupider

And today’s Customer Brilliance:

Customer: What day is Easter on this year?

Mom: April 16th.

Customer: No, what day of the week?

I suppose the customer could’ve been Canadian....

Which IS better?

My mom runs a hospital gift shop in Salt Lake City and has decided to provide Katharine and me with a daily Memorable Quotation provided by a shop customer.

Yesterday’s email brought this gem:

Which is considered better? An angel with a harp or one with a flute?

I am not well-versed in the science, the mythology and symbolism, of angels, so I turn to you, The Internet, for answers. I mean, sure, harps look more angelic—I don’t remember the last time I saw an image of an angel carrying a flute, it’s always the harps. But when I think of harps, I usually think of a couple of beers.

Flutes remind me almost solely of Katharine’s grade-school music lessons.

So have at it! Let the debate begin! And let’s get an answer for the poor customer who just didn’t know!

Trivia: Mar 29, 2006

• Today in history: 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted on spying charges—1973 Last U.S. troops left Vietnam—2004 NATO admitted 7 new countries
• News of the weird: COLLIERVILLE, TN—A cat stuck in a wall at a house under construction initiated his rescue when he caught the attention of a prospective buyer by meowing and waving his paw out a small hole. (AP)
• Strange fact: The Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team were originally known as the Alleghenys.
• Daily quote: God is love, but get it in writing.—Gypsy Rose Lee
• Daily word: inflict—to cause, to pass along violently
• Daily trivia: Jim Nabors sings the song Back Home Again in Indiana every year at the Indianapolis 500.
• Celebrity birthdays: Actress/model Elle Macpherson is 42. Tennis star Jennifer Capriati is 30.

Links: Mar 27, 2006

• Zocalo. Your town. Centered.
  New mixed-use development in the former green space near the apartment complex where I lived when I first moved to Bothell, WA, in 2002
  (tags: zocalo apartments mixeduse neighborhoods bothell washingtonstate development construction)
• Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial
  “[T]akes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists, and multi-column layouts”
  (tags: articles css web techniques reference style tutorials layouts guides howto)
• Flickr: Photos tagged with tortola
  Spent a combined 2 hours on this British Virgin Island on the way to and from St. Maarten in June 2002
  (tags: tortola britishvirginislands bvi islands caribbean travel vacation stmaarten 2002 airports airplanes customs)
• delicious:days
  Beautifully designed foodie blog with the tagline: “food. munich. restaurants. music. delicious.”
  (tags: food blogs cooking recipes photography daily design ideas music restaurants)
• david maisel : home
  Beautiful images that belie the seriousness of their content: “large-scale photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes”
  (tags: photography photographs photographers beautiful photos images galleries)
• david maisel : commercial
  David Maisel’s companion site to exhibit his assignment-based photographic work. Portraits, lifestyle shots, athletics, etc.
  (tags: photographs photographers photography photos galleries)
• The Movie Timeline
  If history were determined by the times/dates given for events in movies
  (tags: movies film history time date timelines)

Trivia: Mar 27, 2006

• Today in history: 1794 President George Washington and Congress authorized creation of the U.S. Navy—1958 Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier
• News of the weird: SAUGUS, CA—A 78-year-old woman was mistakenly asked to join the U.S. Marine Corps. (AP)
• Strange fact: Richard Nixon had a pet cocker spaniel named Checkers.
• Daily quote: How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?—Charles de Gaulle
• Daily word: hermaphrodite—a plant or animal that has both male and female reproductive organs
• Daily trivia: Darjeeling, Oolong, and Earl Grey are some commonly known types of tea.
• Celebrity birthdays: Director Quentin Tarantino is 39. Singer Mariah Carey is 36.

Plastic wallet

I haven’t carried a wallet for a couple years now. I tended to cram too much junk into wallets when I did carry them—too many receipts, cards, whatever, most annoying.

Jimi™ walletWith the death of my PDA (though it’s straddling the life/death line right now), I am hoping also to get rid of the large zipper PDA case I’ve carried around for a few years. That case has doubled as my wallet too, which means if I want to go somewhere sans PDA, I end up with loose cards (ID, debit/credit cards, whatever) stashed in my pockets.

So Saturday afternoon, I got one of these at the Tom Bihn factory showroom on 1st Ave S (map).

Holds my driver license and health-insurance card along with several bills folded up on one side; the other side holds up to four credit cards, so I can easily stash the four cards I use at all. Easy to open one-handed and the items within are held tightly in place by friction but slide out easily under thumb pressure.

So far, very happy with the change. The Jimi is small and light and the hard shell means I can carry it in my front pocket without worrying about bending or breaking it.

Must-read emails, judging by the subject lines

ninth did crocodile on martha?

cunning hey testicular derisive in!

Taking the plunge from Palm Desktop to Mac OS X’s Sync Services-aware apps

Several weeks back I waxed yammerific about how I wanted to switch away from Palm’s included Palm Desktop application for on-computer managing of my calendar, contacts, memos, etc. from my PDA. I wanted to use Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync for Palm OS application to synchronize with Sync Services-aware applications that are part of Apple’s Mac OS X—specifically, iCal and Address Book for the relevant item types, with the option to use iTunes and iPhoto synchronizations as well.

Well, I did it—or I tried to do it, anyway—starting five days ago, and it’s been a (heavily qualified) disaster.

In short:

1. Backups, backups, backups. I made multiple versions of backups, so I could go back incrementally if necessary—the backups saved me in the end. It’s all about the backups.
2. If you’re considering making this same change and you have 15,000+ calendar records and 10,000+ memo records on your PDA, you may want to pare down those counts—radically down, in fact. Apparently anything over 3,000 records has been known to wonk things out pretty quickly, so that I ever got a successful sync is something of a feat in itself—even if it is only that an initial sync completed without reported errors. But! See below.
3. Mark/Space’s tech support folks are amazingly responsive and full of suggestions and tips, quick to offer alternatives, eager to solve problems. Unfortunately nothing so far has worked.

Details after the jump.

Trivia: Mar 26, 2006

• Today in history: 1827 Composer Ludwig van Beethoven died—1875 Poet Robert Frost born—1911 Playwright Tennessee Williams born
• News of the weird: NEW YORK, NY—U.S. employers lose up to $3.8 million in employee productivity during the NCAA’s March Madness. (Reuters)
• Strange fact: The Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts, and San Francisco 49ers are not original NFL teams. They started in the rival AAFC league.
• Daily quote: It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.—Chinese proverb
• Daily word: piccalilli—a relish of spicy chopped vegetables
• Daily trivia: The girl pictured on the labels of Morton’s Salt packages is carrying an umbrella.
• Celebrity birthdays: Sandra Day O’Connor is 76. Leonard Nimoy is 75. Teddy Pendergrass is 56.

Links: Mar 25, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Local News: Seven people dead in Capitol Hill shooting
  Damn... I hadn’t looked at local news this morning until I saw the Times’ home page.
  (tags: seattletimes capitolhill shootings murder seattle news:crime)

Shooting in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood leaves at least 7 dead

Damn.... I hadn’t checked local news yet until I loaded the Times’ web site a little while ago:

Seattle Times: Seven people dead in Capitol Hill shooting
By Seattle Times staff

At least seven people were killed in a shooting this morning at a home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Police said one of the dead was the gunman.

At around 7 a.m. a man walked into a blue rental home in the 2100 block of East Republican Street and opened fire, killing six people. More than a dozen people who attended the party were relaxing inside after a late night party when the shooting happened, said Seattle police spokesman Rich Pruitt.

When officers confronted the gunman he “turned the weapon on himself,” Pruitt said.

The man shot himself in the head with a shotgun. He was armed with several handguns, Pruitt said.

Three people injured in the shooting were taken to Harborview Medical Center, Pruitt said. The uninjured partygoers were loaded into buses by police and taken to a “warm, secure spot,” Pruitt said.

“We’re interviewing close to 20 witnesses—some from the house, some from surrounding areas,” Pruitt said.

News tips
If you have information about the shooting, call The Seattle Times at (206) 464-2144 or email us at newstips@seattletimes.com. Please include your contact information.Nancie Thorne, whose 15-year-old daughter, Suzanne, was in the house at the time of the shooting got a call from her daughter’s boyfriend this morning.

“It’s the worse phone call a mom can get,” Thorne, said, adding that she went to the home after getting the call.

She said she doesn’t know where Suzanne currently is.

The girl, Jesse Mullens, Suzanne’s 18-year-old boyfriend, and another friend had gone to what Thorne called a “zombie rave” in downtown Seattle last night.

It appeared to be a sanctioned event, she said. They purchased tickets. Her daughter told her she thought it was at Studio Seven, a rock club south of Seattle’s Sodo district.

Mullens told Thorne that after the rave, they went to a house on Capitol Hill for an after-party. As the couple and their friend were preparing to leave, he told Thorne, the gunman arrived and barged into the house. Suzanne had gone back inside, possibly to get something.

Mullens told Thorne he heard a lot of gunshots. He thought Suzanne was stuck somewhere in the house with the shooter between her and the door.

“She shouldn’t have gone to the rave. I’ve never approved of those things,” Thorne said. “The young kids just don’t get it. I just hope to God she’s alive,” she said crying. “And if she is, she’s grounded for life.”

Thorne said Mullen was taken by police with a large group of people to a police precinct and she has not been able to reach him again.

Charles Jackson, who lives two doors down from the home, said he was “just getting out of bed and I heard ‘boom, boom.’”

“By the time I got out there was one more shot fired,” said Jackson, 67.

Jackson put on his clothes and saw a man lying on a sidewalk who appeared to be shot.

Jackson, who has lived in the neighborhood 40 years, describes the area as relatively quiet.

He said he’s seen young people with facial piercings and heavy makeup walking around recently. He believes they’re connected to the rental home.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels spent a portion of the morning surveying the neighborhood.

“Our thoughts are with the people at Harborview and with the victims of this senseless violence,” Nickels said. “It’s a terrible tragedy, we don’t have incidents like this in this city very often.”

Spring rainbow

Spring rainbow
Flickr: Don NunnBrief squall begets beauty.

ow.

I’ve just spent the last four hours working on several electronic data reports under a format charmingly known as ADaPT—I wish these formats’ names were remotely normally capitalized—only to discover, as I finished the last report, that I have to redo them all Monday to incorporate some new analytical results from a subcontract laboratory.

I now have the beginnings of a world-class headache.

I hate Friday-afternoon headachinessness.

Trivia: Mar 24, 2006

• Today in history: 1976 Argentine President Isabel Peron deposed—1989 Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska
• News of the weird: MELBOURNE, Australia—A police officer watching over Prince Edward was charged with taking unauthorized photos of the royal’s hotel room. (Reuters)
• Strange fact: Tom Cruise’s real last name is Mapother; Cruise is his middle name.
• Daily quote: After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.—Aldous Huxley
• Daily word: eminent—of great importance (cf. imminent)
• Daily trivia: Washington state’s official flower is the coast rhododendron.
• Celebrity birthdays: Alyson Hannigan (32)—Peyton Manning (30)

Ray’s Café Brewmasters Dinner, Mar 23: Initial notes

Back in January I scored a reservation to the third Brewmasters Dinner at Ray’s Café (map). Last night the event finally arrived and it was well worth the wait.

The event was presented as a tasting menu of sorts, five smaller courses each paired with a worthy beer brewed by a Puget Sound-area brewery. Chef de Cuisine Peter Birk did a spectacular job—the courses and beers were delicious on their own, the matchings absolutely incredible.

I’m on the way out the door to work right now, so for now merely a summary listing of the menu:

• Penn Cove Select Oysters on the Half Shell
  Anacortes Brewing Klosterbier
• Mulligatawny Soup (basmati rice, lime, toasted coconut)
  Hood Canal Brewing Agate Pass Amber
• Smoked Chatham Strait Sablefish (petite greens, pickled plums, balsamic)
  Port Townsend Brewing Hop Diggidy India Pale Ale
• Misty Isle Farms Top Sirloin (“carbonnade” and buttered egg noodles)
  Water Street Brewing Queen Nina’s Imperial Pale Ale
• Chocolate Caramel Chunk Tart
  Silver City Brewing Fat Bastard Scotch Ale

I’ll add details in a separate posting later.

Trivia: Mar 23, 2006

• Today in history: 1743 Handel’s Messiah premiered in London—1942 Internment of Japanese-Americans began
• News of the weird: TULSA, OK—Police arrested a man after he left his toddler alone in a car while he visited a strip club. (AP)
• Strange fact: After California achieved statehood, the Native American population dropped by 80 percent in the first 12 years.
• Daily quote: Abstract art: A product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.—Al Capp
• Daily word: imminent—about to take place immediate (not eminent)
• Daily trivia: There are 206 bones in the adult human body.
• Celebrity birthdays: Andrew Lloyd Webber (57)—Keri Russell (29)

Rattled

This morning I woke not to the sounds of Flex jumping through the blinds or batting at the power cables behind the TV table, nor to Annie clawing at the box spring or yowling insistently for her breakfast.

This morning I drifted awake slowly. I became aware that I was awake at the moment I opened my eyes and looked out the window to see muted light, the kind typical at this time of year around, say, 06:20 or 06:30.

I figured I had half an hour, maybe 40 minutes of lounging in bed before my drop-dead time of 07:00 to get ready for work, so I just drifted there, half-awake, vaguely aware of the cats’ stirrings but otherwise inattentive.

Then it occurred to me: It was cloudy and raining.

I reached for my cell phone to see what time it was and went into Oh Shit! Mode when I saw: 08:39.

So I leaped out of bed and flew down the hall to the shower (guest bathroom; the master bathroom’s shower stall has to be resurfaced), showered and shaved and dried in less than five minutes—no idea how I managed that, but next thing I knew I was dressed and seeking shoes and right after that running down the stairs with my laptop in its backpack (also no memory of gathering the computer and gadgetry) and I’m trying to find my keys, where the hell are my keys?!

They were right on the kitchen counter where I left them last night, of course, so I sprinted down the stairs to the garage, slapped at the door opener, into the car and off I went.

I encountered a few problems or noticed some anomalies because of my late, and rushed, start:

1. My shoes, though both brown, were from different pairs. No one at work noticed; I didn’t even realize it until I got home and was on the phone with my feet propped on the ottoman.
2. I forgot my lunch, which I made last night and left in the fridge for easy quick retrieval on my way out the door. Instead I had chain-restaurant Mexican, a.k.a. CHEEZ BOMB.
3. Aforementioned road-construction irritations from hell. I probably would’ve run into this no matter what, however.

Today’s “Bite Me” target

Crews are installing fiber-optic equipment and bundles along 39th Ave SE between Maltby Rd and 228th St SE.

39th Ave SE between Maltby Rd and 228th St SE is the last long straightaway on my back-roads route to work each day.

This morning I sat there in a line of southbound cars at least 100 long. We remained motionless for 12 minutes while the fiber crews dicked around with moving a steel trench cage (one of those wall things they use to hold up the sides of the holes they dig) using a backhoe.

So what I want to know is: Why don’t they just close the damned roads when they know they’ll be digging trenches and holes all the way across the roadway?

They don’t even put up signs warning of occasional traffic stops or one-lane alternating or whatever, so you have no idea you’re approaching the delay until you’re in the middle of it.

I’d rather see a sign informing me of a several-days-long closure, so I could use alternate routes the entire time, than just a typical  ROAD WORK AHEAD  sign that gives no indication of what impact the work might actually have on traffic flow through the area.

I need to do some checkin’ with Snohomish County to find out what the rules and regs are for such situations. I’d bet many times these road crews aren’t meeting their own standards for signage and such.

::plot::

Links: Mar 21, 2006

• Stopping Spotlight indexing
  The X Lab provides a good tutorial on how to deal with weirdness in OS X’s Spotlight search utility
  (tags: macosx osx apple spotlight hints tops reference tutorials tiger tips)

Trivia: Mar 21, 2006

• Today in history: 1685 J. S. Bach born—1965 Martin Luther King, Jr. began marching from Selma to Montomery, AL
• News of the weird: ANCHORAGE, AK—A web site showing Augustine Volcano’s recent eruptions has received 253 million hits since the start of the year. (Reuters)
• Strange fact: Odd-numbered interstate highways run generally north-south; even-numbered, generally east-west.
• Daily quote: Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.—Ambrose Bierce
• Daily word: octet—a group of eight
• Daily trivia: Before he created Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney animated a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
• Celebrity birthdays: Matthew Broderick (44)—Rosie O’Donnell (44)

For the record:

I hate, hate, HATE the word blogosphere.

Links: Mar 20, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Travel Outdoors: 30 million bags temporarily lost by airlines last year
  “The 30 million misdirected bags comprised 1 percent of the 3 billion bags processed last year by airports, up from 0.7 percent in 2004”
  (tags: travel airlines baggage luggage lost news:travel news:business seattletimes associatedpress)

Silly injuries

I spent several minutes about an hour ago stanching blood flow on my left leg from where Flex, who must have experienced some sort of night terror as he lay curled up on my lap, launched himself across the room from a sleeping start by digging his claws about three inches into my flesh.

By the time Flex landed 10 feet away from me, I was cringed and cursing and he was puffed into a furball, in full fight mode with no one’s ass to kick.

Even now he’s still a bit twitched up and I’m looking at some amazingly ragged scratches and wondering how much fun it will be tomorrow when my jeans rub against the scratches all day.

Crazy cat!

BOING

When I was a kid, my parents would rattle off a little rhyme around this time each year:

Spring has sprung
The flowers is riz
I wonder where
The birdies is?

Spring officially arrived, if you subscribe to the idea that seasons have definitive start and end dates and times, at 10:20 PST today.

No flowers yet, but I can state for the record that the birdies is in my back yard, where my cats can see them all the time and they can drive me up the damned wall until, oh, about the end of September.

So happy freakin’ first day of spring.

Me, I’m just waiting on the arrival of the allergies.

Spring-time alarm clock

Ah, spring. Each day the sun rises a bit earlier, casting its warm glow upon the trees and lawns and gardens about to burst forth with the promise of a new growing season.

Also, the birds get busy, and they create more birds.

Birdie Patrol
Flickr: Don NunnMy cats, particularly Flex, note the arrival of spring by going absolutely bananas over every bird that flies past my bedroom window. Flex does this by leaping from whatever part of the bedroom he happens to occupy all the way across to the windowsill, usually in the process making the blinds rattle and crash against the window.

Blinds make a distinctive sound when they hit a window like that. Every damned time, it makes me start awake, a miniature adrenaline rush surging through me.

Doesn’t matter if I raise the blinds higher than Flex stands; he still manages to hit the blinds every damned time.

Last year I had a birds’ nest under the eaves just outside the window, so of course Flex and Annie were in carnivore BLISS. I couldn’t leave the window open because I’d frequently find Flex dangling from the screen, yowling in protest as the little birdies taunted him with their flying just outside the window. Flex put several holes in the screen and I imagine he’d eventually have plunged straight through it if given the chance, because a circumspect approach to the realities of his situation—see bird, fling self at window, bounce off screen, climb screen, holes in screen, eventual plunge to pavement two stories below when flung at window and screen gives way—simply isn’t his nature.

The bonus? If I forget to set an alarm clock, I’ll be awake already anyway. That sucks too though, I can’t use “I overslept” as a reason for arriving late to work.

So happy freakin’ spring. I’m already counting the days to autumn.

Links: Mar 19, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Local News: “Trapped in between life and death”
  Spc. Brandon Powell, a quadriplegic since being shot in the neck in Iraq 16 months ago, now relies entirely on his younger brother Blaine for the most basic daily care.
  (tags: seattletimes vancouver washingtonstate iraq war mosul paralysis quadriplegic quadriplegia)
• The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Mom would blanch over cookbooks’ dumb down
  Cookbooks avoid terms like “blanch” and “fold” because they think readers won’t know what they mean. It pisses me off how we cater to the lowest common denominator in everything in this country.
  (tags: stupid dumbingdown seattletimes washingtonpost cookbooks language intelligence)

Sucky Sunday

Some Sundays are relaxing and enjoyable and worthwhile. This is not one of those Sundays here at stately Don Manor.

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

First:

Some days back I dropped my PDA in water, which of course instantly rendered it dead. I let it sit there for a couple of days, hoping a good drying-out would resurrect it, but no soap. It turns on occasionally but goes immediately into a fatal error condition, never gets into the full startup mode even.

Blah.

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

And second:

Today I did my 2005 taxes with Katharine’s copy of TurboTax.

So what happens when

1. your taxable income increases more than five-fold in a single year, and
2. you goof and forget to adjust your withholding mid-year to account for the increase?

Well, I happen to know first-hand, so I’ll tell you what happens.

You end up with a several-thousand-dollar tax bill, which TurboTax, as a dispassionate non-sentient computer program written by people who think such applications should be endlessly cheerful in their non-emotive way, spits out at you with nary a glimmer of concern other than a confirmation that your return contains no errors! And would you like to run TurboTax’s Error Detection and Deduction Finder Tools?!

Then it helpfully tells you how to avoid an audit, and how to prepare for one should you be chosen.

Its advice for me?

Have full documentation of the reason behind the jump in income, because everything matches up but it’s the big changes like mine that sometimes trigger flags on files.

::grumble::

:: • :: • :: • :: • ::

For the first time in a long while, I’m actually looking forward to the start of a work week.

I must be ill.

AFI’s 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time

I thought I’d done this list before, but I can’t find it on any of my sites. No matter; if I do find it later I’ll link to it and also make sure everything agrees.

Anyway, I came across the list at Lists of Bests (via mention at verbatim) and I thought I’d compile my own version.

As I was adding links I discovered I didn’t recognize some of the movies I thought I’d seen when I read their plot summaries, so I now have a slew of additions to my Netflix queue, and I need to reorder the queue to distribute things a little better.

This list is presented in the AFI list order; I added links to IMDb entries.

I’ve marked the movies I haven’t seen in boldface—makes it easier to spot them in a list that’s about 70% complete as I post this.

I’m tracking my progress on this list at Lists of Bests as well.

Coffee on my mind

I can tell perhaps I’ve had too much coffee already when at the moment I realize I really need to use the bathroom (after my 2nd cup), I also notice my cup is empty, and my immediate reaction is to ignore the bodily function while I rush downstairs to the coffee maker, performing the Call of Nature Dance at each step.

I felt like a 5-year-old a few minutes ago as I poured a cup while I bent and twisted and clenched and so on. And then on the way back upstairs I nearly drop-kicked Flex into Everett when he got tangled up in my legs about halfway up the stairs.

Ah well. Open the floodgates, as it were.

Links: Mar 17, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Doubts cast on Picasso; Costco pulls it from Web
  Washington state-based Costco pulls a drawing from its web site after questions from one of Picasso’s children about the authenticity of the drawing itself and of the certificates attesting to the drawing’s origin.
  (tags: seattletimes washingtonstate business art paintings drawings picasso)

Links: Mar 16, 2006

• NCAAB - Scores & Schedule - Yahoo! Sports
  One easy way to keep abreast of Division I tournament scores
  (tags: basketball ncaa collegesports tournaments scores yahoo!)
• Washington Post: Lawyer in 9/11 Case Placed on Leave
  Carla Martin is placed on paid leave by the Transportation Security Administration following her improper contact with witnesses in the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.
  (tags: washingtonpost lawyers september11 trials news:legal tsa government)
• Vertically and Horizontally Centering a DIV
  Simple enough
  (tags: css html ideas)

Flight into Mariner Valley

Video produced from high-resolution imagery; beautiful visuals.

Links: Mar 15, 2006

• consumeraffairs.com: Supreme Court Asked to Rule on One-Sided Cell Phone Contracts
  “Nothing irritates wireless customers more than learning after the fact that their cell phone provider has unilaterally changed the terms of their service agreement. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to rule on the issue”
  (tags: business supremecourt scotus minnesota mn cellphones courts judicialreview appeals)
• The Seattle Times: Travel: Say WA? Washington’s new tourism slogan draws some flak
  It took a 32-member “brand development task force” 18 months to come up with “Say WA” as a replacement for “Experience Washington” in the state’s tourism marketing efforts.
  (tags: washingtonstate seattletimes slogans tourism marketing wtf)
• SayWA - What is SayWA?
  “This is the sound of jaws dropping.” (d'oh)
  (tags: slogans washingtonstate tourism government marketing wtf)
• EvokeTV
  Another TV listings service, this one full of Ajax-y goodness with ratings and JavaScript includes for your web site and other such craziness
  (tags: television tv listings ajax applications tools)

Intuition, gum, CDs, utterances, birthdate sum

Feast Eighty-Four, nearly a week late....

Appetizer: On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 highest), how intuitive do you think you are?
8 or 9 in some ways, 1 or 2 in others. Like most people, I imagine.

Soup: What is your favorite kind of gum?
Extra’s mint flavors, though I rarely chew gum nowadays

Salad: Name a CD you own that you would never get rid of.
I have two: Twist and Johnson by The Fat Lady Sings

Main Course: When was the last time you said something you didn’t mean?
That would be Fri 02/24 on the drive back to the hotel from a restaurant in Denver.

Dessert: What is the sum of the numbers in your birthdate?
1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 26

Say WA?

Logotype for Washington’s new tourism marketing effortWashington state has itself a new tourism slogan.

It took a 32-member “brand development task force” 18 months to come up with “Say WA” as a replacement for “Experience Washington” in the state’s tourism marketing efforts.

The web site offers all kinds of fun information about the new slogan and marketing efforts, including font families and Pantone colors and guidelines for using the logotype in printed materials.

“The SayWA brand is confident, truthful, and fun”, and

The delivery of SayWA is crucial to its meaning. Depictions of these experiences need to be simple, emotionally loaded, and authentic. Beautiful, to be sure, but not shallow. Deep. Human. Rewarding. That is the feeling you must capture: the relationship between the traveler and the state. The romance and the magic, the sense of endless discovery.

Also the target audience:

Active travelers, 35 to 55 years of age, who are affluent and travel frequently, often on short trips. They enjoy both urban and outdoor activities. And they like to discover things for themselves; they go one step further in looking, learning and experiencing.

I am amused and appalled.

I wonder how much they’re spending on this.

Long weekend, randomly

My friend Matt arrived Thursday night and flew home this afternoon. In between we saw most of Seattle—it turns out I give a pretty good walking and driving tour of the downtown area and surrounding neighborhoods, who knew?—and we trekked into Vancouver, BC, and sampled several restaurants and had probably too much wine and put my Escape through its paces.

Though not at the same time, the wine-and-Escape part anyway. There may have been a bit of wine-influenced walking around—I know, very dangerous without side-impact air bags and won’t someone think of the children?—but we made it through unscathed.

Links: Mar 12, 2006

• The Seattle Times: Local News: Penchant for secrecy: One judge has sealed 12 cases from view
  King County Superior Court Judge Sharon Armstrong holds the dubious distinction of being the most seal-happy judge in King County, giving few or no details behind her reasons for sealing cases.
  (tags: kingcounty, superiorcourt, seattletimes, pugetsound, news:law)
• The Seattle Times: Local News: An appropriate week to let the sun shine in on courts
  Sunshine Week: “an initiative spearheaded by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to encourage dialogue about openness in government. It is driven by what has been described as a spreading culture of secrecy throughout government, especially
  (tags: openness secrecy government organizations sunshineweek news seattletimes)
• SUNSHINE Week
  Web site for the organization behind the Sunshine Week movement
  (tags: openness secrecy government organizations sunshineweek journalism media politics)

Baby wine!

Baby wine!
Flickr: Don Nunn300 bottles in each barrel, stacks viewed during a tour and tasting at Chateau Ste Michelle’s Woodinville winery.

They produce the white wines here but the tasting included the reds too—well, one Syrah, anyway. Their Woodinville wine store is extensive, a full selection of their wines and all the impedimenta required to make anyone an instant Wine Snob.

Of course I loved it. :-D

Leaving Seattle

Leaving Seattle
Flickr: Don NunnOn the way to Bremerton for a return via Kingston and Edmonds.

The weather’s been beautiful today, so we decided to take the ferry from Seattle to catch the skyline over the water. We’re aboard the M/V Kitsap about 10 minutes into the one-hour crossing and the cloud cover is roiling up quite nicely.

Of course!

Links: Mar 09, 2006

• The Logos of Web 2.0 | The FontShop FontFeed | Font blog, typography tips, and design news.
  Fascinating look at the typography in logos of a wide range of so-called “Web 2.0” companies
  (tags: fonts logos typography blogs design)
• macosxhints - Adjust visible hours in iCal via the scroll wheel
  Option key + scroll wheel
  (tags: ical apple macosx osx macos hints tips macosxhints)

Also I have this fear

that the photo of me on my web site will end up on that one CATALOG OF LOOSERS because I look a bit shell-shocked and swept back and, well, generally idiotic.

This day could have ended, oh, about 8 hours ago

Which translates to about 30 minutes after I got to work.

That is all.