stuff

It hadn't seemed worth mentioning, but it's recently been brought to my attention that people notice these things. A few weeks ago, I reduced the size of my friends list by half for time management reasons. If you were wondering if it was something you said, the answer is no.

I seem to have finally kicked the cold from hell. Hopefully I won't have to so much as look at NyQuil for the rest of the winter. The stuff is nasty. And I missed Writers With Drinks on Friday and a basketball game yesterday so it's been a pretty dull weekend. I did catch up on some sleep though. Maybe next weekend I'll try having a social life again. Kelly and I need to organize a little get-together for her birthday (on Wednesday) also, but we're postponing it a bit because of two friends who're inconveniently out of the country.

Because of a temporary moratorium on new book purchases and not enough time to visit the library, I've been scrounging around the house for stuff to read. I finished The Blind Assassin (octopus, I think you were right about stuff getting repetitive) and started reading A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power's book on US responses (or lack thereof) to genocide, even though it's a bit hefty for subway reading.

Work continues to kick my ass, but you're surely tired of reading about that. I'm trying to balance testing for one application with new development on another and it makes my head hurt. But when it works it's good stuff. I'm also rapidly getting attached to the Eclipse IDE after a week of struggling to get it configured the right way. I haven't really gotten into using its refactoring tools (I want to write some more unit tests before I mess with my code like that) but some of the other features are helping me catch errors faster than I would otherwise.

In which our heroine valiantly attempts to file her tax returns...

Just about the only software I buy at a store these days is tax software. This year, having read some negative stuff about TurboTax's new licensing setup, I decided to try the cheaper TaxCut program from H&R Block. Never again. It decided that my 2002 IRA contributions would be non-deductible because I had an employer-sponsored retirement plan in 2001 and it had imported that data from last year's TurboTax. D'oh! And there was nothing I could do to change its mind. I wound up deleting the whole file after four or five attempts to fix it. I'll start over next weekend, when I've tracked down the rest of the relevant forms. Every year it feels like I'm forgetting something. My goal for 2003 is to have enough job stability that I only get one W-2 form.

(no subject)

I seem to be watching a lot of TV lately. Kelly flipped to A&E before she went to bed and now I'm watching Role Reversal in which two men and two women sort of temporarily try to change their genders. They've got this guy trying to teach them how to be convincing. It looks difficult.

( I usually don't bother with the web quizzes, but this one is disturbingly accurate... )