No Cigarettes

So, for some reason I decided to stop smoking last week. It was Tuesday morning on my way to work. I haven’t touched tobacco since and this is more than a week ago now.

The Two Towers: John Hancock and Prudential

The funny thing, however, is that it’s not completely clear to me why I want to stop. I’ve got a multitude of small reasons but not really any big ones. Part of my brain is trying to convince the other part about only smoking at night / at parties. I’m still clean though.

An interesting side effect of this whole ordeal is that my senses have improved. Somerville really does stink when the wind isn’t right

View from my study: City of Boston

It’s probably been helpful that while living in my new apartment, I’ve only smoked outside on the balcony and for the past 7-8 months I’ve not smoked more than about fifteen a day. To compensate and be nice to myself, I picked up a copy of Tiger which is installing on my good old Powerbook 12″. I’ve also got myself a mini tripod for the new camera which I used for capturing the (long-exposure) images above (click the pictures to view the full 3456×2304 images).

Now.. I’m guessing that all you people now think “It will be interesting to see how this continues”. I know I do..

Following the crowd

Seems to be sign of the times at planet fd.o

I like beer

Good times

M&M visit

My mom and older sister, Maria, visited last week; we went to Niagara Falls (on a two day trip), Cape Cod and did other tourist things here in Boston.

Visiting Niagara Falls, NY early Sunday

It was absolutely great to have the girls visiting and everything panned out very nicely. Also, now I’ve also got the right gear in the kitchen to cook food (my mom remarked that it’s an useful asset in order to pick up a girlfriend)

The Falls!

Visitors

Given I’ve lived here for about 7 months, I’ve been quite fortunate with friends/family visiting me; Dennis was here in December, Maz dropped by in January, the girls in April and it looks like Marco and Lars is coming in May. Yay!

Visiting Race Beach near Provincetown on Cape Cod

New camera

I’ve finally bought a new camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XT which is a very nice 8M pixel SLR camera. It nicely complements my (nowadays, rather old) Canon Digital Ixus V - one for serious pictures, and one for fun.

My view of Beantown through the new camera

Conferences / Travel

I will be at 6UADEC in Stuttgart, Germany and will also spend five days after that probably travelling around Europe (returning June 5). Also, I’m going to OLS in July and will probably fly up there with Blizzard in his small plane . Also, Kay is talking about visiting Boston just before OLS.

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:

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.

I like art

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

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?

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!