Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Water into Whine

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Loverly day in North Puffin today. It’s not going to rain.

We’ve gotten over 9 inches of rain since April Fools Day, which is three times the normal rainfall for the period. The not-quite-great-but-still-pretty-darned-good Lake Champlain is more than three feet above flood stage and has broken the all time record for high water by more than a foot.

There was supposed to be patchy fog around this morning but not here. It will be at least partly sunny all day. The temp should be in at least the lower 60s and the 10-15 mph north winds all along the lake will tend to push the water back into the lake and slow the drop, but it ought not drive too much more onshore.

Last night’s report did show the water level draining down a couple of inches from the record high of 103.2 feet above sea level Friday afternoon.

Buying flood insurance never occurred to Bill Stapleton in Underhill. At least not until flood waters swept away 70 feet of his driveway. That cost him $2,000 to fix and temporarily stranded Stapleton and his wife, St. Albans Town Manager Christine Murphy who just approved our concert budget for Bay Day. There are 13,834 structures in the state in high hazard flood zones, and just 2,355 have flood insurance.

The flooding may continue for weeks and will continue to impact homes and camps through the spring and into the summer. Roads and people who are underwater now will be underwater for weeks to come. It usually takes 20 days per foot of drop to drain according to the National Weather Service. That means 60 days — well after the 4th of July — just to get back down to flood stage. If it doesn’t rain more.

Everybody’s talking about Memphis these days. In terms of water in your house, it is NOLA all over again here on the tenth largest lake in the United States and nobody has noticed.

Making Friends, Part I

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Two weeks ago in Boston, Geoffrey Mutai ran the fastest marathon ever with a time of 2:03:02. He blew by the standing world-best time by 57 seconds.

I don’t know if Mr. Mutai spends much time on Facebook but Sarah Greene of St. Albans does.

Ms. Greene also ran the Boston Marathon. She used Boston to kick off her goal to raise funds for the American Stroke Association by running a marathon in each of the 50 states. She ran her first, the VT City Marathon, a couple of years ago as a member of the ASA’s Train to End Stroke in honor of her grandmother. Her Gram had suffered a massive, debilitating stroke that left long-lasting physical and cognitive deficits.

Ms. Greene is using the Facebook to get in touch with friends to coordinate her marathons, have some peeps to come to cheer and support the cause, and to find place to stay on her journey.

Making friends.

“We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world,” an insurrectionist said in Cairo.

Social media. It is our source for news. It foments revolutions. It is our source for lovers. It advertises brands. And it is the place the friends of our friends hang out.

Of the 32.7 hours per week Americans spend online, 22% is spent on social networks. That’s all? Twitter averages about 40 million tweets per day. (I did find the multi-tasking statistic fascinating: 57% of Americans watch TV and surf the Internet simultaneously.)

People meet on the ‘net all the time. They
get together, go out, have dinner, then,
you know — horrible axe murder.

Back in the Stone Age, when Usenet was the only “social network,” I met axe murderers I could never have discovered any other way.

Usenet is one of the original online systems. It started in 1980 at the University of North Carolina and at Duke more than a decade before the World Wide Web. People post “articles” that spread to groups on Internet servers around the world. Unlike the restricted friends lists in many social networks today, anyone can read and post to most newsgroups.

One writer I met on a newsgroup and later in real life was born in the former Yugoslavia, grew up in Africa, and was living in New Zealand in the time before she moved to the States to marry another writer in South Florida. They now live in Washington state. As it turns out, I’ve met a lot of reprobates at one time or another. My closest friend, Elizabeth “Liza” Arden, lives in the southwest. Peeps from Georgia and Michigan, a cop on Lon Guyland, a game developer from England, and a medical examiner from Maryland all showed up at a party in Pennsylvania. I met a Canadian who taught at UIC but has retired to Tucson on one of my trips to Arizona.

That leaves the virtual friends like the good Quaker girl from Wisconsin, a seismologist who returned the other day from Haiti, the ESL teacher in Korea, a musician in England, the Chicago nurse who emigrated to Israel, a whole raft of fruits and nuts and engineers and ordinary folk in California and Florida, a homeless man in Texas, a woman in Germany, and even a fellow in southern Vermont. And those are just some of the people I like.

So, Dick wondered, is Facebook the equal of Usenet for meeting new people? Will Sarah Greene succeed in her marathon quest for contributors and supporters?

Stay tuned.

Smoke(stacks) and Mirrors

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“At a time of high gas prices and massive oil industry profits,” Mr. Obama has renewed “his call to end the $4 billion-per-year subsidies for oil and gas companies and invest in clean energy.”

Let us remember that the heavy “subsidies” are actually the tax breaks they get at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process rather than cash the taxpayer hands them at the pump. It’s also worth remembering that the oil business just happens to invest more in “clean” energy than any other industry.

Americans consume about 322 billion gallons of crude oil each year. Some of that goes to plastics. Some goes up the smokestacks heating our homes and making electricity. And about half, 146 billion gallons, is gasoline.

Oil producers pay on the order of $90 billion in income taxes each year and, in fact, pay a higher percentage of their earnings in taxes than most other American corporations. Obama wants to take $4 billion more in taxes from them. That translates to around 1.4 cents per gallon of crude or, if you want to assess it all on gasoline, about 2.7 cents per gallon at the pump.

2.7 cents per gallon.

Speaking of the pump, We the Overtaxed People pay 18.4 cents per gallon in Federal tax on gasoline so that not-quite-3 cents is really coming from our driving.

Do you think Mr. Obama will drive the price at the pump down or up?

And do you really think Mr. Obama has an energy policy here or a political platform?

In the interests of full disclosure (regular readers know this), I do own ExxonMobil stock. I remain disappointed in their performance. I dislike subsidies but I despise political poseurs.

But Little Jimmy Did It!

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goodmorningkeywest.com “We’re gonna just love this campus!”

Work on Key West’s new Horace O’Bryant Middle School began in October; the magnificent first building quickly rose to 56 feet at the peak.

Too bad the Key West City Commission has a teeny little zoning problem. The as-yet-unfinished school project violates the city’s building height restriction. Land development regulations limit building height in that zoning district to 25 feet. Errors in oversight may be involved.

Errors in oversight?

“How do you put up a building that is twice as tall as allowed without somebody noticing?” Rufus asked.

We-ll, several officials have pointed out that the relatively new Key West High School, Marathon High School, Coral Shores High School and Sugarloaf School all violate height regulations in Key West, Marathon and the unincorporated areas.

Heh.

“Ah hah! The old Little-Jimmy-did-it-too defense,” Rufus said. Except the Board used the old “it’s-OK-because-we-did-it-all-these-other-places-too” defense.

Nearby residents think the solution is to tear it down.

Key West finally issued the Monroe County School District a “notice of non-compliance” for the ongoing construction at HOB as the locals call it.

conchscooter.blogspot.com Good plan.

The district doesn’t have to respond to it or even explain why it’s not compliant with city rules. See, the district is its own permitting agency.

The KW mayor also opposes any solution that includes tearing down the building. “We’re trying to work it out with officials from the School District,” he said.

Construction on the five additional buildings — each of which exceeds the height cap — continues. The city’s acting planning director will meet with the school board’s architect in Tampa to go over the plans.

“They’re going to try to come into compliance,” the mayor said.

Uh huh. I’m not sure even Mr. Obama could spin this one.

“Let’s see, now. Let’s see,” the president said when questioned by Faux News’ Sergeant Watchtower. “We have five buildings that stand just two and a half stories taller than anything else in the neighborhood but it’s alright because we created six new jobs with this construction and we painted the roofs green!”

!@#$%^ Blockheads

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Like millions of Americans (except Rufus), I used tax preparation software again this year. Rufus is about the only individual filer I know who uses a computer and who does his taxes in a spreadsheet.

Like millions of Americans (except Rufus), I wanted to “click here” and have a finished return print out with the stamp(s) already attached.

Sigh.

I don’t much like Intuit’s Tubbo™ Tax™. I’ve had years of experience trying to get that program to manage my not-very-complicated mix of a couple of small businesses and some 1099s from Charles Schwab, a brokerage house of which neither Intuit nor H&R Block has heard. I decided to try the other guys this year.

Yup, I bought into H&R Block At Home™. Deluxe.

Mr. Block will be history here in No Puffin in 2011.

My first run through, it gave me twice the mortgage interest deduction I had entered. I’m sure I made a mistake by putting it in twice, but I have no idea where. I burned down that return and started over using the tax-software-for-dummies interview exclusively.

“That is the problem with these freakin’ programs,” Rufus said. “They presume you have no idea what you are doing (or that you know the software intimately.)”

When I assumed I knew what I was doing, Mr. Block said I would owe a few grand more in taxes than I had already paid in. That was also when I saw Mr. Block had doubled the declarable mortgage interest I claimed.

Time passes.

The time came to checkprint the Vermont return (“full return for filing” the Blockheads call it). Mr. Block did not print the three Vermont homestead claim forms. Vermont has those forms online as PDFs, fortunately, because nobody mails tax booklets any more. Unfortunately, all I can do is print them and fill them out by hand.

Transferring all the appropriate figures from one form to the next (which is why we all buy tax software) and doing the calculations (which is why we all buy tax software) is all on me.

By hand.

!@#$%^ Blockheads.

I don’t care how much trouble Tubbo gave me, at least it printed all the freaking forms I need.

The very nice overseas tech support girl said, “First I want you to reinstall Windows…”

Actually, she sent me a link to download a new copy of the program. Yes, they wanted me to uninstall my current copy of H&R Block At Home™ and install the new copy. As expected, the new copy of the program comes with exactly the same state feature as the purchased CD has, meaning that after I install it, I must then download the Vermont files from exactly the same place I got them last time.

!@#$%^ Blockheads.

So I uninstalled the old version and installed the new one. The uninstall apparently did not remove the registry entries because it knew just where I had left all the data files.

Time passes.

Mr. Block includes an Error Check. It found a bunch, many related to Copy 9 of the Vehicle Worksheet for which the program couldn’t figure out in which Schedule C it belonged. Their Forms Central display is so crammed together that I simply can’t tell what data it has, let alone where it belongs.

Time to checkprint the Vermont return. Again. Everything is still smushed together.

Mr. Block has a nice online forum with bonafide tax experts just moments away to answer your pressing tax questions in real time. I posted as “Disappointed User” yesterday evening.

“Q: This program won’t print anything but squeezed together ‘Not For Filing’ pages.”

Mr. Block answered my question this morning at 4:39 ayem through Kathleen Drenzek, Master Tax Advisor and Enrolled Agent who wrote: “Disappointed, did you try rebooting your computer to see it that works. Or call tech support at 1-800-HRBLOCK.”

Another happy user worried about this:

“Q: software is telling me I sent my tax estimate late and owe a fee- but in RI we got an extension last year. What to do?”

Jayant Kanitkar, Master Tax Advisor and Enrolled Agent wrote: “If you believe otherwise, pay only the amount due.” What, is he nuts?

I think I did resolve the smushy question. When it prints its “mini worksheets,” it sends out the smushed up text you see in the example. When it print the return forms alone, they appear to come out fine.

OK, sort of fine. It is still printing three blank copies of Form 4562-page 1, but I can simply throw those away. And it keeps putting xxxxxxxxxxxxx in for the bank account number. Means no e-filing for me, though.

Looks like I cannot use even the one form TaxCut DID print. Here’s the word from the Vermont Tax Department:

FORMS THAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED
If your filing is not acceptable for our processing equipment, the Department may send your filing back to you… The Department may also transfer your filing information onto acceptable forms but you can be assessed a $25 processing fee that partially covers the costs of transferring the information. Examples of unacceptable filings are: forms marked “draft”, forms not pre-approved by the Department, photocopies of forms, faxed forms, writing in other than blue or black ink, and mixing computer generated forms with forms printed by the Department.

This software used to be called TaxCut but H&R Block wanted to leverage their own name to boost sales.
Why?

If this were my program, I’d never put my name on it. I might call it Rufus’ TaxCut. Anything but Dick’s Own Software.

Despite all that, I made the trip to the post office today. All three returns are in the mail at a cost of only three Forever stamps and two additional ounces at the new-today rate.

I wonder if the IRS shares DNA samples collected today with other agencies.