Over the weekend I did almost no blogging and got an amazing amount of crud done. Maybe not crud, but stuff.
I did Jenny’s and my taxes (woo hoo!) and because I had a more conventional job than in the past few years (1 full time gig) the taxes were much more clear-cut. No freelance income, not enough business expenses to catalog in detail. Very painless and quick, and I filed electronically which I’ve done for the past 4 years if I remember right. I used Macintax, or rather TurboTax for Mac, which made the process even smoother.
Jenny and I also went to our local Fry’s and picked up a printer cable for her machine. Since we got her a new computer she’s had no luck printing. Turns out it was NOT Windows 98, incompatible drivers, or the Postscript driver – it was the PRINTER CABLE. Looks like the one we had, which was 25 feet long (very nice in it’s day) went bad. The exasperating thing was that the prints we would get would come, they were just bad. Printer technology is either more complex, or much simpler that something like TCP/IP. With that, one can ping to see if the connection is good, and if it’s good, things work. With this, the actual signal was weaker or damaged, causing printing problems. I of course blamed myself for installing the drivers wrong as it’s always a pain to install new drivers on Wintel. I was also blaming Win98 for general flakiness, but with no basis. I was also thinking that it might be the printer (an HP 5MP) might be dying. I had listened to enough of my lovely wife Jenny’s whining reporting printer problems to her Help Desk (Note: Help Desk = me) for several months, I thought I’d give a new cable a shot. So that’s another monkey off my back.
I also played racquetball on Saturday — wonderful games as per usual. Though I find that I have bruises on my legs I’m not sure how I got. I think they are the result of hitting the walls when going hard to make returns. I’ll have to watch that, exuberance is good but I don’t want to hurt myself. I can feel my knees are stressed for a few hours after a game – I’ll have to baby my knees, which are definitely a point of failure for my body as I age.
Speaking of that, yesterday I watched the USRA US Open. I had taped it from Friday from ESPN. I was delighted to see that the champs are older guys – there was even a guy age 50 in the semi-finals.
Add to that, the weather is improving, getting warmer. In 2-3 months the ocean temperature will be warm enough for the beach. In March Jenny and I will go to the wedding of a friend in Las Vegas. In May Star Wars Episode II will be out. In April Edward Tufte is coming to town! (You’d better not chart junk I’m telling you why!) And in July my sister and parents will be flying from back east for a visit. Still no peace in our time, but I’ll accept these personal niceties in lieu of general planetary contentment for the time being.
