The Mandelbear's Musings

A reasonably productive day, though I should have done more during the preceeding week, too. I'll manage, I think.

Anyway, I got a short walk (about a mile) in at lunchtime, and posted on my invisible chronic illnesses and a corresponding Thankful Thursday. So that was good, too.

Some links in the notes.

Sorted and totalled the CD sales receipts - sold 62 disks, which isn't too bad for this far down the long tail.

I went out for a walk, but started having pain in both hips and my left knee. Realized that I was wearing the New Balance running shoes, which I hadn't used for a couple of weeks. Hmm. Around 5pm I started feeling as though I had the flu. Apparently the flu virus hasn't gotten the memo about "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

On the way home I stopped at Lucky's for vitamin D and a couple of red snapper fillets. Yum.

Still feeling distinctly under the weather, I went splat around 10:30.

Not all that good a day, really, though I don't think my mood suffered much as a result. And I was pretty productive at work, which was a good thing since I stayed home sick today.

Another largely unproductive day, especially at work, though I did manage to make and write up some significant decisions about $current_project.

I tried to print the taxes, and was unsuccessful. Weird -- it worked last year, on the same hardware and OS versions. Oh, well; I'll take it in to work today and print there. I did, finally, manage to track down and exorcise two "phantom printers" that have been around for the last year on my desktop system. The magic file is /var/cache/cups/remote.cache.

Most of the pain from the torn muscle was gone; what was left were some secondary soreness in the neck and shoulder from working around it. I still need to baby that arm; it's all too easy to forget that it's injured at this point.

I found myself smiling when pocketnaomi came online on IM -- I'd missed her over the weekend. It feels a little odd to be noting that, but simply noticing my mood is a big step for me.

I took a walk; the weather was cool and cloudy -- perfect for walking.

I came home before Colleen and her friends got back from Britex (a huge fabric store in San Francisco that was having their Columbus Day sale), and was surprised and happy to find a dealer order for CC S waiting in my inbox, for delivery at OVFF.

It's amazing how much energy pain and recovery use up.

As I mentioned upstream, an email from cflute left me cheerful and optimistic, a very unusual sensation for me. It was a good day in spite of getting comparatively little accomplished.

Well, OK, I took a walk, and got the quilt washed, and a bulk CD order shipped, and ordered a walker holder for Colleen's scooter. But still.

Now that I have actual products (plug: buy CDs here), I have a good excuse to separate my publishing business (HyperSpace Express -- I really need to get that website up, don't I) from my writing business (Steve Savitzky). It becomes even more important now that Tres Gique is trying to get off the ground and is incurring things like travel expenses.

I need to keep better records, too; that's another problem. And I need to finish the sales taxes this week; that's not entirely unrelated to the record-keeping problem.

The immediate thing that needs noting is the fact that I forgot to pay half my royalties back in 2007. more specifically I forgot that mechanical license fees get paid at the statutory rate to both the songwriter and the songwriter's publisher. Oops.

... So my plan is to file two Schedule C forms this year, one for each business, and for HSX to pay Steve Savitzky his back royalties. It's not uncommon for songwriters to split their publishing share between themselves, or their own publishing company if they have one, and the the record label; exactly what fraction HSX owes should have been negotiated up front. But it's OK that it wasn't, in this case.

A more complicated set of decisions is which expenses to allocate where. An obvious one is to put equipment intended for songwriting and performing -- instruments, for example -- under me, and equipment intended for recording -- microphones, for example -- under HSX. Travel is a little less clear, but it's traditional for record labels to pay travel expenses for performers (it sells records) and HSX is already paying for travel related to Tres Gique. (Eventually there will be a Tres Gique Travel Fund -- watch this space.)

Computers are another item that's hard to allocate, since they're used for both songwriting and recording/editing. They're also used for a lot of other things around the house, so they go in my account for now.

All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.

The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.

22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.

22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.

Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.

The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.

So here we are at the LAX Marriott. I couldn't get the wired internet connection in the room to work; the wireless sucks rocks but it's better than nothing. I'll bug the hotel in the morning.

I've already bugged the hotel about the lack of an outlet near the bed for the facehugger: they sent up a bloke with a power strip, extension cord, and what sounded like an Aussie accent. I can haz facehuggr now. The Wofling has just put herself to bed. She very sensibly brought an air mattress this time (sharing a bed with her little sister is Right Out).

The trip, down US 101, was uneventful. It's much prettier than I5 and the traffic is consistently less (though it was heavier this year than I've seen it in the last decade of Loscons). About 7:30 including the break for lunch at Pea Soup Anderson's.

Annoyingly, I snapped off a fingernail unloading the car. Even more annoyingly, it was the right forefinger, which is what I use most for fingerpicking. And of course there's no superglue -- I forgot to pack it. Could have used it to extend the stub a fraction. I can get by, though. Won't sound quite as clear, but the difference is surprisingly slight.

The flower_cat, chaoswolf, and I had dinner with AJA and Kore; I hadn't really had much of a conversation with K before, so that was good. There was enough discussion of CD production and related matters that I figured I could treat it as a business expense. The Y.D. joined us briefly for desert; she'd already had dinner up in the Con Suite.

I should probably go to bed soon.

Note: I'm terrible with phone calls. I put them off for weeks, sometimes. If I don't have everything written out ahead of time, I don't remember what to ask, and leave out important stuff.

Note: I'm calling discmakers, shortstacks, and Oasis; I'm mainly interested right now in printed blank disks and short-run CDROMs with added audio tracks. Any other recommendations?