I've been using the same software for doing my taxes for somewhere around 30 years. It was called TaxCut back then; the company that made it was bought by H&R Block in 1993, though they didn't rename the software until 2008. For much, if not all, of that time I've been doing it on a Mac of some sort.

Last year I looked at the system requirements and discovered that it would no longer run on my ageing Mac Mini. It also wouldn't run on Windows 7. It needed either NacOS High Sierra or Windows 8.1. So I used their web version, which I remember as rather slow, and enough different from the offline version of previous years to be annoying.

So for this year (which is to say tax year 2021), my options would appear to be:

1. Use the web version again. Ugh, but at least it would import 2020 without trouble. Maybe. It didn't let me upload a 2019 data file; I had to feed it a PDF and do a lot of fixing up.
2. Run it on the laptop that has Win 8.1, or put the Win 10 disk that came with (new) Sable back in and use that. Ugh.
3. Buy a newer Mac Mini. I could get a minimal one for about $100-150, or a more recent one (running Mojave) for around $200-250. (Those are eBay prices, of course.)

(Note that cost of the software is the same for all three options.)

I'm really leaning toward #3. But really that would just be an excuse to buy another computer, and would leave me with two Mac Minis that I'd hardly ever use. More likely I'll dither about it until the end of March and then break down and go use the web version again.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

A very busy three days. Sunday I finished up the taxes, and e-filed. Should probably have filed the state taxes on paper; the e-filing cost extra. Monday I started with Lee Hecht Harrison, the "career transition" firm that Ricoh is paying for. The initial session on Monday was very useful, since it included a "resume and linkedin jumpstart" segment. The experience section of my resume will need to be completely redone, of course.

I almost all of yesterday online, mostly on LHH and linkedin. Yesterday I took an LHH "webinar" -- in spite of the setup website telling me my browser was fully functional, the actual applet or whatever it was needed to be set up with a JVM and libraries, and couldn't find them on my Debian system. I switched to the Mac, but lost the visuals for about the first 15 minutes. Probably lost more to divided attention. Still useful.

A nice st/roll on Sunday, and a walk yesterday. A little walking Monday, but just a couple of blocks. Still, walkies good.

Some links down in the notes.

So... pretty good, though no walks. (I did some walking in Fry's and parking lots yesterday, but that hardly counts.) Got started on the taxes, which is good. Quiet days, mostly at home. I could get used to that altogether too quickly.

The kitchen was a disaster area when I got home late Wednesday; between the YD running a load of dishes (it's not one of her usual chores) and me washing pots, it is now more-or-less usable again.

I think what I need to do is to reconfigure the kitchen and office into something like their final (post-move) form. Anything that doesn't fit goes into storage.

A lot of stuff is going to have to wait until the taxes are done. I let that slip, as usual. Growf.

Quite a few links. The Google Art Project is way cool! Pictures from dozens of art museums online and browsable, though it has a few navigational glitches. This is a common problem with stuff based on Javascript -- it doesn't have to work the way the user expects.

I want a Pebble E-Paper Watch. Want, want, want. So, apparently, do thousands of other people. And Code Not Physical Property, Court Rules in Goldman Sachs Espionage Case. That can cut both ways -- clearly companies need to be able to protect their trade secrets, but equating wrongful copying of information with theft of a physical object isn't the way to do it. Somebody tell the media industries.

The main thing yesterday was taking my Mac in to work and printing out the tax forms. Needless to say, it was a huge relief. (The stupid machine didn't want to print -- I ended up putting the postscript files on a thumbdrive and printing them from my Linux box, which of course worked perfectly without any fuss.

My arm and shoulder were doing much better, but in the process of getting into my car coming home from work I managed to put a lot of pressure on my right side around the bottom ribs, and did something unpleasant to a muscle there. Cyclobenzaprine and naproxen sodium are my friends.

On reflection and going through the symptoms, I don't seem to have much actual social anxiety, though I probably did at one time. What I have now is a set of very efficient avoidance mechanisms that keep me out of potentially painful or embarassing situations. Possibly it can be dealt with the same way.

I do have a lot of apathy to go with the avoidance. That's from the disthymia, presumably.

It rained all day -- no walkies. Not really a bad day, just not a notably good one.

I started the day with comparatively little pain in my shoulder, but trying to put my shirt on took care of that detail very quickly. Ouch!! It turns out that reaching up or behind my back is what makes it hurt the most; that must have been what I was doing when I damaged it: picking up something a little behind me.

I spent the rest of the day listless and rather foggy. It seems that pain wears me out physically and eats away at my ability to think; probably effects of adrenaline and endorphins, respectively. I could pretty easily identify the adrenaline reaction, since it's similar to anxiety; a little deep breathing helped.

At Colleen's suggestion I took a walk around the rose garden. It did help; I found that I could swing both arms naturally. It took out a lot of the stress.

After my walk I did the final data entry on the taxes. I get a little back from my withholding, which was a huge relief. (For those not familiar with the US's horrible income tax system, you can get an extension on filing, but you have to pay up front or you end up paying both penalties and interest on the difference.) I still have to do the printing, and mail in the forms.

I finally put Argo (the Thinkpad) away pending a memory upgrade, and switched over to Barnard (the Dell netbook). Much smaller and lighter, though the keyboard is pretty bad and the touchpad is absolutely loathsome. A mouse largely fixes that.

I spent the evening out in the living room doing things that didn't involve either my right arm or much of my brain: re-arranging files and culling old stuff from my to.do file.

Anyone out there reading this who has chronic pain has my heartfelt sympathy.

On the good side, Colleen walked a total of 87 feet in her morning session, and practiced transferring from the bed to the walker and back in the afternoon. So things are looking hopeful.

Other than that, though it was a day made of fail caused entirely by my own procrastination. I usually rely on the people around me, Colleen and Chaos in particular, to prod me about Things That Need Doing, like taxes and filling out my guest questionaire for Baycon (which I did this morning, a day late).

Taxes were particularly harrowing, in part because of TaxCut's user interface fail (which provides two ways of printing an extension, one of which works and one of which makes it look like you've zeroed out your entire return), and in part because a buyout at the end of the year left me with an unexpected $30K capital transaction. Luckily, it worked out to a $3K loss, which helped. I need to keep much better records and closer tabs on my finances, don't I?

I'm not at all happy about the way I snapped at people while I was doing my taxes. I should probably have just shut the door at the outset, after warning people not to disturb me -- when I'm concentrating on something tricky and disagreeable I seem to be totally incapable of civilized behavior. One thing that did help was that Alison found some gluten-free chocolate cake in the freezer as soon as she heard me cursing at the computer, and had it sitting on the counter when I finally emerged.

It was a lightly-attended Wednesday, but even so I wasn't up for handling it.

I am feeling particularly down on myself right now. Procrastination and failure. Typical.

A good walk, but uneventful. I feel good about singing for Colleen -- she loves it, and I need to get back into the swing of it. I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by the taxes; normally I'd be farther along by now. I can recognize it as avoidance, but don't know why and don't know how to stop. I did spend an hour or so sorting; I guess that's something. I still need to go through four piles of envelopes on the desk.

Thinking about the future scares the hell out of me now; it's becoming harder to avoid. The depression was probably one of my avoidance mechanisms, wasn't it? I can still avoid doing things, but not thinking the things I haven't done and am still not finding the time to do. Bletch.

Put in a little singing practice last night, and this morning I finally totalled up my sales for last year: over $1000, which is at least respectable even if it isn't nearly enough to break even for the year, given the need to pay the royalties I forgot to pay myself last year.

Most of that total went through dealers, so sales tax will be pretty minimal. And most of the non-dealer "sales" were actually gifts, but I'm required to pay use tax on them.

I also wrote a simple perl script to compute the totals from my tab-separated text file. Really ought to compute subtotals by county, too; I was lazy and just used grep.

... so I can at least feel a little bit productive, even though I have things to do that I've put off for months that are almost equally important.

The taxes are, finally, DONE: all that's left is a final look, sealing the envelopes, and a trip to the Post Office tomorrow morning.

Many other things have, needless to say, not been done, but I'm not going to worry about that tonight.

Done with the preliminary data entry.

The next steps are stacking up and sorting all the various forms 1099 so I can enter those, and making sure I have the sales and inventory numbers handy from the sales tax worksheets (09:08). That'll get done tonight. Then I have to actually set up the Mac laptop that I'm borrowing from work, install the software, and turn the crank. Which will change my mood to "cranky".

Added: Production cost: $3.05 each for About Bleeding Time, $3.16 each for Coffee, Computers, and Song. This is physical production and doesn't include royalties. I was originally thinking I didn't have to worry about those because they're all paid to myself, but then realized that I do need to compute them so that I can value my unsold inventory. Gaak!

On the other hand, that's good, because the royalties are all 2007 income for the songwriter (me), but the part that applies to unsold inventory gets subtracted from 2007's cost of goods sold. Um... right? Looks right.

(Anybody know offhand what [T]he statutory mechanical license fee is $.091 for songs 5 minutes or less, or $.0175 per minute or fraction thereof per copy for songs over 5 minutes.)... so that's $1.652 for CC&S, and $0.91 for ABT. So that's nearly $1900 total.