Disorderly Content

How am I supposed to feel about scamming fundraisers, when the people they're scamming thoroughly deserve it?

...but he is a god. And this is just the latest evidence.

As I type this, at gate B36 at Logan, it's four hours after my flight home was supposed to depart. The latest estimate is that we'll leave in another hour, assuming the replacement plane arrives from San Juan on schedule, unloads reasonably quickly and doesn't develop any gremlins. I feel like hell already, and I have another eight hours minimum before I can get home and crawl (quite possibly literally) into bed. There was a time when I looked forward to air travel. Today is not that time.

Update 06/25: A quick update: we left the ground another hour later, and reached San Francisco six hours and change after that. I'm functioning on two and a half hours sleep, plus whatever dozing I did enroute. I feel like hell, but at least it's a hell that's free of airports and aircraft. That was one long day...

I've been bouncing back and forth over whether or not to upgrade my iPhone to the new 3G model. On the upside, I'll get higher data rates, at least in places where there's 3G support. On the downside, it's another $10 a month plus the cost of the new phone. On the up, it means a new toy, although very similar to my old toy.

At first I was sure I would make the leap. Then I was convinced I wouldn't. And now I'm not so sure. The extra decision point is the performance of 3G. Which, by the way, I'm enjoying on the new laptop they gave me for work. It's really fast, not as fast as good WiFi or a wired Ethernet connection, but a whole lot better than EDGE. To give you an idea just how good, I'm typing this post into an Emacs editor running on my web server over that same 3G network. And it's not quite as snappy as being on a DSL connection, but it's not bad at all.

So what to do? My current thinking is that I'll get to an Apple or AT&T store just as soon after the release of the new phone as I can and do a little web surfing. And if it's as good as I suspect, well, it's only money, right?

Amazing. After all these years, I finally got to be among the not so few, the not exactly proud, the malware victims. No, it wasn't one of my Macs; how could you even ask such a thing? It was my work laptop, running Windows XP. The vector? Internet Explorer and MySpace. Apparently, I ran into a MySpace profile that was infected with something called Mal/ObfJS-AV, which I'm guessing involves Javascript. Good thing said laptop is equipped with Sophos Anti-Virus, which has been watching silently for the past two and a half years, ready for just such an occasion. Now I'm running a full scan of the laptop, and hoping it really is able to find all the bad stuff.

Hmmm... suddenly I'm thinking an antivirus program on my Mac might not be such a bad idea. Not for Mac OS, but for that copy of Windows XP I have ready to run on Parallels, on the off chance I have need of a Windows app...

What more is there to say?

And if it has, can we start using "nuke the fridge" instead?

If you saw Indy IV and thought it sucked, or you haven't seen it because you've heard it sucked, you're sure to enjoy this take on the movie's... er... um... script. Far better than the real thing, and more coherent too.

I read a blog post a couple of days ago about somebody's issue with his quarterly tax payment. You can tell how much attention I paid; not only can't I remember who wrote the post, it didn't even dawn on me to think about my own quarterly payment being due. Which led to a panic moment this morning, when I realized that it was, and a month sooner than I expected.

This is the first year I've had to deal with estimated tax payments, thanks to my second and third jobs, or my hobbies with income, or however you want to look at them. I made enough extra last year that I'm making extra payments, the first of which occurred on April 15th. So I carefully set up both iCal and Quicken with reminders for upcoming payments. Except, you see, the government can't be nearly as consistent as software expects. Quarterly payments aren't. Instead of April, July, October and January, spaced a consistent three months apart, the spacing is actually two, then three, then four, then three again. Fortunately, I discovered my error just in time, and got the money on the way before the guvmint got mad at me.

Which led to another small panic. Both the state and the feds have websites where you can make payments. The federal site requires you to submit a form, wait for paperwork and then call in to get a PIN. I forgot that last step, so it's another paper check for now. But California's is easier, and I used it for my previous payment. Except... I went looking on their site and was asked for my Social Security Number (no problem) and something called a Customer Service Number, which I remembered using to submit my return. And which isn't on any of the paperwork I printed back when I did my taxes. But after I was done panicking, I found a place to retrieve my CSN (that required a specific number from my return, which meant another panicky search). And after getting the number, discovered I didn't actually need it. I had mistakenly followed the My FTB Account link, which required the CSN, rather than the Payment Options link. I guess when you're giving them money, they don't care so much about who you are.

I wrote earlier about all the trouble I was having with Excel 2008 on my Mac. Bad went to worse, and finally to totally fscked; any attempt to modify one of my spreadsheets leads to an application crash. Out of curiousity I brought the same sheet up on my work laptop, a Dell Latitude running XP, and wasn't entirely surprised to discover that it worked just fine. That was one more nail in Excel 08's coffin, and I took the only practical action: I reinstalled Excel 04. It's PowerPC-only, so it doesn't work brilliantly fast. But working slowly is better than crashing quickly, wouldn't you say?

"Microsoft: We will sell no software before its time. Unless we can."