thunkgeek.com

A tax return is what you send to the government by April 15th of each year. What they send back to you, if you were dumb enough to let them hold your money all year without paying you any interest on it, is called a tax refund. I can’t believe how often I hear the term tax return used to indicate the speaker’s enthusiasm for a fat check they are supposed to get in the mail. I’ve even seen advertisements this year promising to educate you on ways to increase the size of your tax return. Of course, the only way to increase the size of what you send to the government is fill out more forms than you are required to and mail them all to the IRS, which will just increase how much you have to pay to send it. Duh.

Had to come to the office at about 5:30 this morning to kick a server in the chops. It has been snowing all night and the roads are powdery and white. I saw just one public snowplow on the way in, though the commercial guys were zipping around doing parking lots all over the place. Nice to know that once people manage to slide off the road every thirty feet on the way in at least they’ll have a clean place to park when they get to work.

My boss brought a copy of this article to me the other day:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/page/1/

It’s interesting to see that people are finally catching on to the fact that boys and girls really are different.

I had prepared a big long rant about the unintended negative results of the feminist movement and the staggering number of parents these days who just don’t care about their children enough, but I don’t feel like publishing that today. Count yourself lucky.

I haven’t posted anything in quite some time, at least, I haven’t posted any real content in a while. I haven’t felt that there was too very much to say, I guess. Well now I have story to tell.

I worked last night till about 3am, upgrading the motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive and operating system on one of our servers here at work. Everything went pretty well and I went home tired but happy. I hit the sack at about 3:15. At about 8:45 I heard the phone ring and my son pick it up and answer. He likes to answer the phone, which is good for me, since I hate answering the phone. It all works out in the end. I heard him say into the phone that I was asleep, and then he brought me the phone and said it was Mom. She had an appointment to get her contact lens prescription updated, so it was convenient that I was home to be with the kids, and sleep, while she left to get her eyes checked. After I said hello to her on the phone she told me that she had gone to the wrong location for her appointment, so she had to hurry to the other location and she didn’t really know where it was. She had to reverse direction several times and finally, during one u-turn, she had hit a curb and flattened the tire on the car. So now she was at Macey’s and needed me to come rescue her. In my half asleep state, I almost decided to hang up and hit the pillow again. Realizing that would be a pretty serious mistake, I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed. She had the kids’ car seats with her in the car, so I had to decide whether to strap the kids into the back seat of the truck and hope we didn’t pass a police officer, or leave them home and risk them throwing each other off the couch. I went with the latter choice, but with a few instructions to Jonathan before leaving:

“In a minute I am going to call you on the phone and we’ll talk while I drive to where Mom is and rescue her.”

I took my cell phone and headset, turned on an episode of Blue’s Clues for the kids (thank heaven for DVR technology) and headed out. I went south, because Erica’s eye doctor is located in Provo, so I assumed she was at the Provo Macey’s. I called Jonathan and talked to him most of the way there. It’s amazing how little response you can get from a five-year-old when he is watching TV.

When I got to Macey’s I couldn’t find my wife and the stricken car. What to do? I dialed her cell phone knowing full well that it was sitting on the shelf at home, since that is where she always leaves it. Lo and behold she picked up. I told her I had driven around the parking lot and couldn’t see her. She was at the Macey’s in Orem, which is about 4 blocks from our house. How did I miss that?

“Call Jonathan and talk to him while I drive up there.”

It took me another 10-12 minutes to finally get to the right Macey’s and find her. She had put a one inch rip in the sidewall of the right front tire of the car and banged up the rim a bit. I was pretty concerned with what potential suspension damage there was but after getting the wheel off I couldn’t see anything. I was also concerned that the rim might not hold a bead anymore and I’d have to replace it. I could just imagine having to pay $500 for a rim and $1000 for suspension work having just two weeks ago paid off the loan on the car! I got the spare on and drove back home, then over to Pep Boys to get the damage assessed.

As it turns out the situation was covered by the road hazard warranty on the tire (my wife’s driving is a road hazard!) so I only had to pay $40 to get that replaced. The car drives just fine so the whole thing could have been a heck of a lot worse. Did I mention it was raining while I was changing the tire? It always rains every time I have to change a tire.

If you haven’t seen them yet, you ought to take a look at Burger King’s Star Wars Toys. They’re kinda fun little things, and as far as kids meal toys go, they seem to be of decent quality. We bought the kids a couple at our local BK last night. Burger King has made an insanely smart move by offering 6 weeks worth of toys to collect. That’s 31 toys in all. You can either get one toy per kids meal you buy, or you can buy a combo meal and pay $1.49 for two toys. So to get them all you spend roughly $100 and have to eat at Burger King at least once a week for 6 weeks straight. I hope somebody in their promotions department got a huge raise and promotion for coming up with this little scheme. The worst part of the whole deal, of course, is that as soon as you have one of the toys in your grubby little hands you can’t possibly not want more. Humans seem to be wired to collect things. So what did I do when we got home from the restaurant last night? I got on eBay to see if I could just buy the whole set. Yep. $95 for all 31 toys. Of course then I don’t get to enjoy all that greasy uber-unhealthy food. The King must be laughing all the way to the bank.

So I’ve been fighting a portable hard drive solution for a couple of weeks now, trying to either get a USB 2.0 connection or a Firewire connection working on my machine here at work. They both work great on my home machine. I’m finally down to this article from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885464

So evidently there are some known issues that seem to be exactly what I am experiencing with my Firewire enclosure. Of course, you have to open a support ticket with M$ to get the hotfix. All I can say is they better not charge me for it!

No, not AIDS, that’s a physical disease. AIDBS is a newly discovered mental illness. The acronym stands for Anal Impaction Derived Behavioral Syndrome. Common victims of this disease include ISPs who choose to block port 110 requests from leaving their network.

Update to this post:

They’ve taken my station away… again! Why is it that Utah can not have a decent radio station? Now it is some weird genre bending “we’ll play whatever we want to” station, which is ok when they are playing something good, but really sucks the rest of the time. Argh.

I did a really stupid thing this morning. It’s a bit of a long story. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Erica goes shopping with her mom and sister. They’re typically gone about 12 hours and so that leaves me with the kids and not much to do. This year on the spur of the moment I asked the kids if they wanted to go see a movie. I gave them the choice of The Incredibles or The Polar Express. Jonathan said he wanted to see both of them, but ended up choosing The Incredibles. I told him we would go see the train movie for Christmas Eve.

So, as Christmas Eve approached, being the techie that I am I purchased matinee tickets online for the first show of the morning. This morning we all had breakfast and piled into the car in enough time to get to the theater by about 20 mins before the show started at 10:40am. Of course when we got there the show had already been going fro about 20 mins… because it actually started at 10:05am. Duh. So much for me being a smart guy. Erica even told me she had been thinking it started earlier than that. She should have mentioned that at 9am… not 11am. Oh well. We’re going to the 3:45pm show now. Two sets of tickets for one movie. Nice.

That’s right. Everything is falling apart. I took my truck to the shop on Friday because it seemed to be acting weird and was getting really erratic gas mileage. That turned out ok. I took my car to the same shop on tuesday because it needed new tires, an oil change, radiator flush, etc. That was fine (other than it cost me $600 total!!) until last night when I was driving to work to do some late night router maintenance. I rounded the last corner and suddenly the engine starting running really choppy and the check engine light came on. By the time I got down the road a couple blocks and into the parking lot I could smell burning coolant and see big plumes of white smoke coming out the tail pipe. So I did the stuff that needed to be done last night and fortunately my boss was there with me and was able to give me a ride home. The tow truck just picked up my car and dragged it back to the shop.

To add insult to injury, the remote control key fob for the alarm on my truck broke this morning! Everything is breaking.