Oh, and for those of you who heard me whining about the tax paperwork this week? Guess what, it wasn't ME. I was feeling so stooooopid, and wondering why in the world I couldn't figure the form they sent me from the State department of Revenue. I finally went to an Actual Tax Accountant yesterday, who had to check with the senior partner in the Firm to be sure...yep, here's the new form the State said they were going to start using this quarter....turns out THEY thought it was complete gibberish, and weren't sure what was being asked for. You'd think they'd send the new forms to the people who fill them OUT, wouldn't you? Guess what his Sage Advice was?
VOTE.

lifelong knitter

I picked up on this because I just spent last weekend working on taxes, and could not figure out why the state form said that they were refunding me all of my money. I use a computer program to do it, and, you know, you figure it must be your mistake, and not the program's, because they're supposed to be right.

I finally printed everything out and looked at it line by line, and it turns out that, while I had entered everything correctly on the duplicate W2 forms, it was entering ten times the Social Security tax I paid on the state form. Not federal -- that was okay -- just state.

I'm glad I figured it out. I doubt anyone would have been convinced that either a) I accidentally entered a figure exactly ten times what I really paid or b) I truly believed that I deserved a complete refund of all my state taxes.

This is pretty unbelievable. Someone wrote a book titled katie.com, and then the publisher decided after the fact to try to bully the person who owns that domain name (and has owned it since 1996) into giving it up. Because, you know, it's a BOOK, and just because Katie is your NAME, that doesn't give you the right to own it.

Link from BoingBoing.

I like this:

Sometimes it is just the act of moving a pen across the page that makes me feel good, no matter what is written (or drawn). Is it that thoughts are being expressed? I am not sure. Why also do I enjoy seeing pages fill up in the journal so much? A form of capturing a process, evidence that one existed during a period of time?

I have a real love for journals, blank books. I can hardly resist looking at them in a bookstore, and almost every time I go into a bookstore, I buy one. I always have several new ones at home so that when I fill one up, I have a selection to choose from, to choose the next one.

No matter how much work I do on the computer, how much easier it is to type than to write by hand, there's something about writing on nice paper with a pen that fits my hand that just feels right. I don't know what it is, exactly, either, but it's a very satisfying process, and very satisfying to look back at a journal with every page filled.

Just this weekend I took a stack of old journals from a bookcase and stored them away so I could use the bookcase space, and I opened a few of them to random pages, reading brief passages from the things I was interested in, or worried about, five or ten years ago. A history, meaningless to almost everyone else but me.

wish jar journal: what it is

This is a pretty scary ruling, I think:

A state appeals court ruled that a verbal agreement between a woman and her sperm donor was invalid, and ordered the man to pay child support for the woman's twins.

It was hard to tell from the brief article, there may be more to it than that (I hope so), as it appears that the sperm donor and the mother of the twins actually had an affair, but still, I would expect a ruling like this to cause some major tremors in the sperm donation business.

Anybody who is a sperm donor ought to understand that their identity could be made known to any child that's produced, and they could be seen by the courts as the best place to go to make sure the child has adequate financial support,' he said Friday.

Who in their right mind would donate, knowing that at any time in the future a woman that you've never seen before in your life, and never had any contact with, could be hitting you up for child support, whether or not you had an agreement of anonymity with the lab or doctor who did the procedure?

It's like being a blood donor and finding out that the person who received your blood during surgery died, so you're going to be charged with his death. Crazy.

CNN.com - Sperm donor must pay child support - Jul 23, 2004

This is cool: New York Times Link Generator creates a link to NY Times articles that won't expire, and won't require a fee to access (it may still require a log-in, I'm not sure about that). It's apparently not an unapproved workaround, but an actual policy of the Times. Link via Neil Gaiman.

Wired News: Bloggers Suffer Burnout. (Link via Ceej.)

Part of the downside of posting frequently is that people come to expect it, and if you don't post for a day or so (or in the case of the people in this article, a few hours), people worry about you and think there's something wrong.

I remember another blogger years ago (when we were still calling them journals) who told readers something like: "If I don't post every day, it doesn't mean there's something wrong. It means I'm having a life, which is a good thing."

I was thinking about that article about the "Fatkins" diet as I ate my lunch yesterday: a hard-boiled egg, a handful of peanuts, and three slices of bacon spread with chive cream cheese. Surprisingly good, actually, and surprisingly weird that I would feel like I'd eaten "well" according to the new guidelines . . . Quite weird.

That's the problem with Atkins. After several weeks on the diet, in which you bore everybody in the world to big, heaving tears with descriptions of what you ate that day, you're slimmer and, at the same time, feel like killing yourself or somebody else, possibly not in that order.

Fortune.com - While You Were Out - I'm Doing the Fatkins Diet

Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips. That has officials at some installations worried the cans could be used to eavesdrop, and they are instituting protective measures.

Coca-Cola Co. says such concerns are nothing but fizz.

CNN.com - Military on alert for Coke's chip contest - Jul 2, 2004