Sales Tax, and the bottom line

With sales taxes due at the end of the month, and a week of travel impending, it's a Good Thing that I was finally able to get started. I was able to get the data-entry for pre-orders done by starting with my shipping-label address list and editing in the somewhat smaller number of entries from my paper list. Sales to dealers, and non-preorder sales, were easy enough to add up by hand.

I have yet to break down sales by location for sales tax purposes, but that's all I have left to do this weekend. The bottom line is 390 albums out the door, and a gross take for the year of 4665. 80 out of the total were contributor, promotional, and gift copies -- anyone out there know how I treat those for tax purposes? There were a total of 195 pre-orders, meaning that there are 61 signed, numbered pre-order packages still available. All-in-all I've definitely made a profit on the project, so I'm a happy filkish bear at the moment. I may have to leave off some related expenses in order to convince the IRS that I've made a profit, but that's a problem for another day.

I can haz uptime?

So far the fileserver has been up a little over 3.5 days. That's less of a sample than I'd like, but if it stays up through Wednesday I'll probably have to take it as an indication that it's finished with intermittant crashes. Grumf. The last thing I need to be wasting my time on, between now and when I leave for Conflikt Thursday morning, is putting together a new server.

The contingency plan, if Nova does crash, is to move its drive over to my current workstation, Harmony. It's a little old, but it's been very reliable so far, and nobody's likely to be using it while I'm gone.

In other news, the chaoswolf seems to be turning into a genuine geek-girl. I got her a KVM switch yesterday; her Windows box (which is USB-only, no PS2 ports) was having serious keyboard problems, but she figured out that she could hang a USB keyboard on the Windows box and use the PS2 for actuating the switch and talking to the Linux box, which seems perfectly happy with it. I'm guessing it's some kind of power problem. I'm particularly proud of her for figuring it out herself.

The Wolfling has also been having fun playing with Photoshop; she's taking a class in it this quarter, but she's already at the point where she can figure out how to do things she hasn't been taught yet. More than anything else, this is what distinguishes a geek from a non-geek.

Proud bear.

18th Century tools for the 21st Century shop

18th-century Tools for Every Shop - Popular Woodworking

Eighteenth-century woodworking tools. This 20"-wide piece of mahogany will make a great tabletop when I get it flattened. My long try plane may not be the fastest tool for the job, but I sure am glad I have it. I could never justify purchasing a 24" stationary power planer because I come across stock like this infrequently. This plane allowed me to buy a piece of wood I probably couldn't work otherwise. Eighteenth-century woodworking tools can be restrictive in some ways. In this case, however, my try plane has opened up opportunities I wouldn't have had without it.

(From this post by gmcdavid.)

My shop has only a limited selection of power tools - tablesaw, drillpress, circular saw, sander, corded and cordless drills. I use the cordless drill a lot, but the rest don't get used nearly as much as the planes, scrapers, and hand saws.