Last weekend’s IT projects

Boy, are my arms tired. *YOU MUST CLICK*

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Exhausted. Every damned day, exhausted.

This weekend I did the taxes. Not really a month late since Sherman the F2 Tornado gave us a tad more than a month’s extension to file for Fulton and DeKalb counties. Federal tax forms = six pages this year including two pages of the full-on form 1040, Schedule A, Schedule C, Schedule SE, and form 8863. This doesn’t count three pages of GA form 500 and resubmitting Federal Schedule A to Georgia. Nor does it count a dry run on form 2106 (two pages) before I figured out all that crap belonged on Schedule C. And it’s pretty funny how every form makes you stop and go fill out another chunk of some other form before you can continue. I had to work hard to get my dependencies straightened out to avoid the most basic compilation errors. Doing your taxes shouldn’t be like that.

Fortunately, at the lowest level, code is code. It all works the same.

Hey, Georgia. The computerized “fill-in” form is inconvenient as hell when you can’t save it and have to hit “tab” between every fucking character you type. In that long list of things you accept donations for at the end of the form, why don’t you allow us to tip $5 to updating your bogus ancient ScanTronic crapola hardware to something modern for next year?

And here’s a tip for all governments involved: how about not making the process so complicated you need a degree in order to get through it without screwing yourself out of a bundle or risking going to jail? For that matter, the criminal code could use a similar overhaul. The only correct answer for “Do you understand the charges that are being brought against you?” is “How the hell could I, your honor? I’m not wealthy enough to have the money or free time to study law and/or accounting. Once the state has paid for my CPA and my education sufficient to allow me to pass the bar, I’ll get back to you.”

Again, code is code. I try to avoid programming in languages I don’t know, but I can usually get by. Regardless, if you have to pay someone for criminal defense or tax preparation to make sure it gets done right, the system is broken. And unfairly skewed against people who would find the hiring of such people a hardship.

The day previous was spent taking apart the trap under the kitchen sink to snake twenty-five feet of manual auger through twenty-year-old sludge to try to poke some kind of hole. Three or four full-extension passes later, the sink drains enough to wash half an evening’s worth of cooking and serving dishes before you have to take a half-hour break for the sinks to drain again. That’s not clear enough–not enough bandwidth–to consider installing a dishwasher and/or garbage disposal. It _is_ just a system of tubes, after all…. Networking is networking. Moving the sludge.

Before appliances are feasible a big chunk of drain pipes in the crawlspace will need replacing or pressure-flushing or whatever an actual plumber thinks will clear the goddamn line. If what I snaked up is typical of what’s in there, we’ll probably have to rocket the replaced pipes/removed sludge into the heart of the sun for proper disposal.

Next week I’ll do the DBA metaphors for cleaning out a fridge and doing yardwork. Pruning, mowing, cleaning out the cruft, and sanity-checking. Store only what you’ll use, clear out noise to speed searches, handle spoilage, yadda yadda yadda.

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May 20, 2008 · by xalieri · Posted in Everything Else  
    

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