James Manning

I wish Picasa could automatically upload to Gallery - that’d make things a little simpler

A purchase exceeding the amount you specified has posted to your Discover(R) Card Account.

Merchant: USTREASURY TAX PAYMENT WASHINGTON DC
Posting Date: April 10, 2005
Purchase Amount: $805.00

We owe on federal taxes. That means:

1) I didn’t give the IRS an interest-free loan
[edit]: strictly speaking, I still did, of course - all the withholding is still an interest-free loan, I just managed to keep it below some relatively arbitrary level. In an ideal world, I’d do my own withholding in an account *I* earned the interest on, and just paid my tax bill as a lump sum.
and
2) I’ll get some cash back since I paid the amount owed on my Discover card

I really don’t get how anyone, outside of those really bad at math, can be happy about getting a refund :)

Although, I keep meaning to turn it around - since people *are* happy about getting a refund, I should offer to garnish their wages for a year, earn the interest myself, then pay it back to them as a lump sum (ala the IRS). After all, that makes most people happy and over the course of 3e8 US citizens, the interest would add up a bit.

Today’s amusing OOF message typo reminds me of Futurama!

I will be OOF fom 4/04/2005 until 04/18/3005

sure to be better ways to do this, but

doskey loop=for /l %%l in (1,1,1000000) do (cls $T $* $T ping -n 2 127.0.0.1 ^> nul)

so I can do “loop dir foo.txt” or whatever to check on the progress of a file.

SFU and bash are out there, just nice to have options in cmd.exe sometimes.

ISTR that the member schools get a chunk of the money when a school’s football team goes to a bowl game - is there a similar financial incentive for, say, a wolfpack fan to cheer for UNC tonight? What kind of money is on the line tonight anyway? What’s the spread between first and second?

More Sarah pictures I uploaded this morning :)

Today’s cool feature: Duck Typing

I like it as a flexibility option. Like operator overloading, I think it’s one of those things where usage should be limited, but it works when needed.