This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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May 2024
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Various

I’ve been pretty busy, so haven’t had time to comment on things like the torture memos. I’m sure Ivan and I will talk about them on our next podcast though.

Also, yeah, I also watched the Susan Boyle thing a few times. Good for her.

There were other things too. I’ve got a bunch of starred items in my Google reader to either post about or talk about on the podcast when I get a chance. Some of them by the time I have time will be out of date though. Oh well.

I also have a request from a reader for a specific post about the banks and regulation that I got a couple weeks back. I’ll get to it before too long, but there has been no time lately.

Started

Yesterday Brandy sent all the relevant information to the lawyer she’d found for the purpose, and we sent in the first payment to said lawyer, so Brandy’s divorce process has begun. It will take awhile for anything to actually happen of course, but the process has now been started. Woo.

Heartbeat

We had another appointment Wednesday with the doctor. Everything is proceeding normally. Back in February we’d seen an ultrasound where you could see the heartbeat. In March there was an another ultrasound where we could clearly see the baby moving around doing stuff. But today was the first doctor visit that Amy came along to as well. And today was the first time we got to HEAR the heartbeat:

Amy burst into tears. Happy tears. Brandy and I had seen the other ultrasounds live (not just a still picture printout). But this was Amy’s first direct “contact” as it were. I think the little brother or sister who’ll be here in a few months just became “real” rather than an abstraction.

And yes, the pictures are something too… the last set in particular where we got to see something clearly baby shaped that was moving around and seemingly reacting to things really got to me, I left with a huge smile on my face that time… but there really is something unique about listening to the heartbeat as well.

And yeah, I got a bit choked up too as we were listening today. :-)

Taxes Done

All filed and paid electronically. Elapsed time 2 hours 43 minutes to get all my forms organized, fill everything out in TurboTax Online and to do the electronic filing. Not too horrible.

Could be better though. A lot was able to be sucked directly from my employer and financial institutions. But a lot could not be. There is no reason I see why it couldn’t be set up such that it COULD all be sucked in. In general, if ALL of your information comes from your employer and various financial institutions, I really fail to see why I should have to fill out anything at all. They could just figure it out and bill me or refund me as needed. I should only have to fill out stuff if I wanted to report something that wasn’t coming from those standard sources. And even then I should only have to fill out something describing that additional bit and they should figure out the rest by default, unless I chose to want to go through all the rest in the hopes of finding more for myself or whatnot. Oh well.

We ended up having to pay $229 on top of what was already deducted. Not too bad compared to some previous years.

Anyway. All done with that.

Oops… is today Tax Day?

I guess I should start doing my taxes then… just have to electronic file by midnight local time, right?

K. No Prob. :-)

Added

OK, I added the remaining few graphs to my dashboard. It now has all of the things I had been tracking day to day using other means. As I mentioned yesterday, there is still a bunch of backfill though. Almost all of the gaps seen in the graphs for the past two years I really have data for, I just have to find it and enter it.

Now time to start thinking of new things to graph now that it is nice and easy to add more. :-)

AbulDash Launches

Well, I’ve finally done something I’ve been intending to do for years, but this weekend I got up a head of steam and just did it (sacrificing some sleep). That is, I’ve taken almost all of the various things that I generally track on a daily basis in Excel at home and moved them onto a lovely dashboard. It now has a place of honor on my top navbar as well for easy access.

There are two of my daily graphs that I haven’t yet ported over because they require a bit more computation (not much, just a little, and in a different way than all the rest, so they will have to wait). I’ll get to those eventually.

And there are still some others on my old graphs page that I haven’t updated in a long long time, that perhaps this will spur me to reactivate.

All in all, I’ve actually automated a bunch of the graphs so they will update without human intervention. Others to require me to do something each time I add a data point, but rather than putting data in an intermediate place to later put in excel, now the data will immediately go live online. So much less effort over all.

I still have a bunch of data in email (and even some older data on paper) that eventually will get backfilled into this. The charts have what was already in Excel.

Woo.

Anyway, I’m excited.

And tired.

Boing Boing Boing

So, I was thinking that perhaps because my regular early Wednesday (UTC) teenager taxi duties were canceled due to Spring Break, that I might work on the Podcast and get it released a day earlier than I have the last couple of weeks. It has been really frustrating to me releasing it on Thursday given that we usually record it on Monday (sometimes Sunday). But after we record it Monday, I’ve already spent a decent amount of time on it and feel the need to do something else. On Tuesday Brandy and I usually spend some time together while Amy is at one of her activities. And on Wednesday I have taxi duty. In between those things are work and sleep. So usually these recent weeks the first time I get a good chance to sit down and get things ready to push out is Thursday. I may just need to suck it up and do all the editing Monday immediately after recording, as Thursday is just silly in terms of timeliness.

Of course, I did not end up getting things ready tonight. Instead of normal taxi duties, Amy and I went and dropped a travelbug in a geocache near home. And then went for ice cream.

And then, when I was sitting down deciding if I had enough energy to be productive and do the podcast, I had a quick IM conversation with my sister, who informed me about an audio glitch with LAST WEEK’S SHOW. Basically, there was a section where I went “boing boing boing” and put in an after the fact note about what Ivan and I were about to talk about. But I screwed up. RIGHT before I published, I unhid a working track that I had ended up adjusting and then putting a copy of elsewhere. The end result is that during this boing boing boing section, I was playing two copies of the same thing on top of each other, offset by about 5 or 6 seconds, with the first copy starting before it was supposed to and stomping on some more of me talking. Bleh. And I even did a specific spot check where I played back significant chunks of the final output before posting the new episode, but I missed this part.

Anyway, rather than doing anything new, I fixed the old episode. Which only took a few seconds of actual fixing, but then about two hours of exporting and publishing. In any case, if you haven’t yet downloaded last week’s episode and do so now, you’ll get the fixed version. If you have already listened to last week’s show, your podcast client may still pull down the fixed episode as if it was a new episode. Of course, by this point, anybody who was going to listen, probably already pulled it down, so this is all for naught most likely, but I figured I’d make sure the fixed version was up for the historical record. Some may accuse me of historical revisionism though. Oh well.

In any case, I’m going to bed now. I’ll get this week’s podcast out tomorrow (Thursday). And next week I’ll consider my options for changing my schedule around on this. When we usually recorded on Sunday (instead of Monday like we do now) my goal was always to release within 24 hours of recording the episode. I think I need to figure out how to get back to that.

Ing

It is snowing in Seattle. I am ready to be done with snow now.

All Hands 10