Friday, April 15, 2005

Optimistic

Had my car at the dealership for service; the headlights, horn and wipers got fixed. Cost me nearly $500, yikes. All this is part of the vast array of preparations for the M&M visit (Mom and Maria) who arrives on Thursday; looking much forward to that. Took off the top of the car for the 30 mile (50 km) ride back:



davidz-freezing.jpg


It’s the lighting that makes my chin looks fat. It isn’t fat really :-)


Note to self: Never ever again ride with the top down at 75 mph (120 km/h) when it’s 45F (7C) outside. It’s fucking cold.

Saturday, April 9, 2005

I like art

Played around with Camorama today; this software got some wicked filters, check my piece of art.



webcam-20050409.jpg


Check out the new haircut


It would be cool if setpwc was integrated into the capture tool so I could control my Quickcam Orbit. Maybe we need an integrated video capture widget in GNOME, maybe there is one already?

Monday, April 4, 2005

Power Management

I’ve consolidated my thinking on Power Management in GNOME. I hope people like it.

Taxes

Inspired by the other Dave I sorted out my taxes tonight. Unlike Dave, I couldn’t really get H&R Block to work (since it determined I was in a special situation being a H1B alien and all), but after surfing a bit on IRS.gov I found a link to Turbo Tax which rocked. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.


After about 60 minutes of my time and the parting of $29.95, I had electronically submitted my federal tax papers and printed a copy of my Massachusetts tax papers for snailmail submission (for some reason, the Mass papers couldn’t be submitted electronically).


One really funny question during filling out forms and answering questions in Turbotax (btw, the UI wasn’t that bad actually), was whether I wanted to pay the optional 5.85% instead of the ordinary 5.3% Massachusetts income tax. TurboTax said that it was unclear why one would want to do that (go figure), so I opted for no. I later found some rather funny commentary on the subject :-) . Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m getting about 70% of my US taxes paid in 2004 back. w00t!


Now to look into sorting out my Danish tax filings. Not so w00t!