Death and...

DONE. TaxCut. Needs to be checked: tomorrow, when I have a brain.

TaxCut wasn't too annoying this year, except that there doesn't seem to be any to scale the damned fonts up so that I can actually read them from a comfortable working distance. And itemized lists no longer work right -- that was really only a problem with the charities (there are too many to fit on the form, so I have to group them). Fixed that problem by adding sub.codes to the appropriate items in data-entry file, which is just plain text. Piece of cake.

Total time from downloading the program to done: three and a half hours. Data entry was done in two or three evenings this last week.

Other than that, ...

Took the car in for an oil change this morning. They told me it would take 45 minutes to an hour, so I went out for a walk rather than sitting around. Beautiful day for it; it was just starting to get uncomfortably hot by the time the car was finished.

We'll go out for a drive after dinner. We don't say much, usually; it's just a good way of getting out of the house and spending some quiet time together. At home, there are always too many distractions: kids, computers, books... Even with gas near $4/gallon, it's a cheap evening out.

Cited

Our Filk Hall of Fame citation is finally up on the FilKONtario website.

Another one bites the dust

The flower_cat's desktop computer (in the bedroom) appears to have finally bitten the dust -- Windows has been flaky for at least a month, and now Linux is having problems as well. Its CPU fan appears to have died, which has probably caused collateral damage elsewhere. This makes the second of our three Fry's XP boxes to die; the third is the one in the Y.D.'s room. I'll be surprised if that one makes it to the end of the year.

I'm reluctant to just go out and buy her another Windows box -- Fry's track record is pretty poor at this point, and she seems to be happy with Linux on the EeePC. And the budget is still blown all to hell from the wedding and FKO; I really don't need the expense just now. I've been trying to justify a new workstation for the office, because Harmony has become noticeably noisy, but I can't do that either right now, especially when I'm trying to save for an EeePC for the Cat.

So I think what I'll do for the moment is move Dantooine in from the office -- it's an ultra-quiet Mini-ITX system. Fanless, which eliminates that point of failure. We do need a Windows box or two, but that's what virtualization is for.

The other advantage of this move is that it will, at long last, completely defenestrate the computers downstairs. That's a Good Thing.