TAXES

Actual ‘Letter to the Editor’ from the February 5th edition of the Wichita Falls, Texas Times Record News.

Dear IRS,

I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost.

I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog licence tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting licence tax, fishing licence tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, medicare tax, city, school and county property tax (up 33 percent last 4 years), real estate tax, social security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle licence registration tax, capitol gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico sales tax, and many more that I can’t recall, but I have run out of space and money.

When you do not receive my check April 15, just know that it is an honest mistake. Please treat me the same way you treated Congressmen Charles Rangle, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, ex-Congressman Tom Dashelle, and, of course, your boss Timothy Geithner. No penalties and no interest.

P.S. I will make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check.
Ed Barnett

Advertisement

3.29.09

Ellijay weekend #3 is over and so many good memories were made 🙂 like Rachel’s YUMMY Turtle Cheesecake!

Yesterday we avoided the rain for the most part. Our first stop was a Mercier Apple Orchard where we enjoyed fired apple pies, apricot pies and apple fritters—not any of us ate all of that, but some of us ate some of it 🙂

Then it was off to Blue Ridge for some shopping and lunch again at Repaz on Main. Endive Salad- interesting…

After lunch we headed to a new German bakery, Meyer’s Breads & Bagels, in Blue Ridge that’s only been open about 6 months. They close at 2:00 on Saturday afternoons and we arrived just a few minutes before—just in time to take advantage of the BOGO chocolate cake – YUM-O! I wish I could have tried a bite of everything they had. It was an AMAZING display of German pastries and the like. And the man running the place was seriously German!

After a little more shopping, we headed back to the cabin. Rachel and I took the dogs for a nice long run and I danced with them a bit and then it was time for dinner– pork loins wrapped in bacon on the grill, baked potatoes with all the fixings, salad and bread.

me dancing with the dogs

After dinner we built a nice fire in the fire pit outside and made S’mores. It was PERFECT weather for it—just a wee bit of a chill in the air.

Late last, night a line of fierce wind and heavy rain came through—actually, I think that might have been early this morning. We were sleeping on the third floor and it was really, really scary. I was almost up and headed to the basement. Praise the Lord for keeping us safe!

Tomorrow, my dad goes to the dentist to get his missing tooth replaced. He will also get his new hearing aids this week and that will be a blessing! My mom goes to the hospital for pre-op tomorrow. We still don’t know what time the surgery will be on Friday. Funny thing—she said just before we left this afternoon that she was more concerned about all the needles than the fact that she has cancer. That’s probably true to some extent.

3.28.09

So, this is where Coco, my parents’ miserably unhappy cat, bit me yesterday

I’ve been feeding him while they are out of town and well, I guess he’s just a little bit upset because they have been gone so long. So yesterday I go over there to feed him and instead of feeding him first like I usually do, I stopped and cleaned his litter box first. Well, I don’t think he liked that. So while I was cleaning his litter box, minding my own business– cleaning up HIS business… he sneaks up behind me and ambushes me! He grabbed my leg with his claws and bit me!!! OUCH!

BAKE SALE anyone? Sari Beri’s class had a pre-order type bake sale fundraiser last fall and it went over pretty well so they decided to do it again– and I think it went over pretty well this time too. Chocolate chip cookies were our responsibility.We ended up having to make 23 dozen! THIS is what 23 dozen chocolate chip cookies looks like.

Yesterday’s trip to Ellijay was uneventful, thankfully. Traffic was pretty bad around 285 and I-75 but besides that and the rain– thankfully uneventful.

We arrived last night to the greetings of my parents, uncle and aunt and Misha and Tasha. Dinner was Phil’s famous, yummy shrimp and pasta salad and French bread. Rico likes pasta 🙂 THEN, it was Rachel’s DELICIOUS homemade Turtle Cheesecake. YUM-O!

Today we had planned to go to the farm but with the rain and all we’ll pass. We are going to make a run back to Mercier Apple Orchard. Rachel wanted a apple fried pie last weekend and we got there too late They only make 300 a day and they were all sold out. So, we’re going there first. I’ve yet to have one of their apricot pies and am holding out for that.

After that we’ll head into Blue Ridge for some shopping and there’s a new German bakery there that my parents discovered yesterday that they want to take us to. YUM-O again! I hear they have good coffee too– I’ll be the judge of that!

Should be a good day despite the weather 🙂

No joke in April Fool’s Day computer worm

(CNN) — A computer-science detective story is playing out on the Internet as security experts try to hunt down a worm called Conficker C and prevent it from damaging millions of computers on April Fool’s Day.

The anti-worm researchers have banded together in a group they call the Conficker Cabal. Members are searching for the malicious software program’s author and for ways to do damage control if he or she can’t be stopped.

They’re motivated in part by a $250,000 bounty from Microsoft and also by what seems to be a sort of Dick Tracy ethic.

“We love catching bad guys,” said Alvin Estevez, CEO of Enigma Software Group, which is one of many companies trying to crack Conficker. “We’re like former hackers who like to catch other hackers. To us, we get almost a feather in our cap to be able to knock out that worm. We slap each other five when we’re killing those infections.”

The malicious program already is thought to have infected between 5 million and 10 million computers.

Those infections haven’t spawned many symptoms, but on April 1 a master computer is scheduled to gain control of these zombie machines, said Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA, a New York-based IT and software company.

What happens on April Fool’s Day is anyone’s guess.

The program could delete all of the files on a person’s computer, use zombie PCs — those controlled by a master — to overwhelm and shut down Web sites or monitor a person’s keyboard strokes to collect private information like passwords or bank account information, experts said.

continue reading…

Masked Developer Demos iPhone 3.0 beta

iPhone 3.0 won’t launch until summer, but a mysterious, anonymous developer walks us through the beta version of the operating system. see the video

source: WIRED.com

Starbucks CEO gears up to defend the brand

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is mounting a charm offensive and touting his product’s fair-trade credentials. He rues that his coffee has become the “poster child for excess” and vows a more aggressive response. “We have been relatively silent about how we’ve been positioned,” he says. “It’s not going to remain like that.”

source: SmartBrief.com

3.24.09

My mom went to see the surgeon yesterday and surgery will be a week from Friday [April 3] at Southern Regional, however we don’t know a time yet.

Just another PRAISE THE LORD yesterday! She found out that her cancer is a fast growing type. She hasn’t had a mammogram in about 4 years. Praise the Lord that she found this while still in stage 1!

The surgery will be the less evasive kind, probably will be out the same day. If no cancer is found in the surrounding tissue she will be able to have a new type of radiation that is given from within called MammoSite. Basically they insert a “balloon” type device into the area of the surgery and the radiation is given through that, twice a day, for fifteen minutes each time, for 5 days.

They come home from Ellijay the day before surgery, so they really don’t need anything right now except a lot of prayer!

My dad’s had a kind of rough time of it too. I think I wrote in a previous post that one of the dogs jumped up and knocked one of his hearing aids out and then before daddy could pick it up the dog tried to eat it and it’s broken and unusable.

Well, then just this morning he broke the cap on one of his front teeth eating cereal— there’s nothing there but a stub my mom says right there in the front! Momma said he REALLY looks like a hillbilly now! I said, well, at least he can’t hear people talking about him. LOL!

I’m looking forward to Ellijay weekend #3 this weekend and spending time with them and other family memebers and friends. Maybe BIGGER Tom will come 🙂

OK, so I had a really weird thing happen to me this morning– this is for all you iPhone users out there.

You know that ever so often something weird happens with the iPhone and you just have to reboot and things are all grand again… Well, this morning I was at the grocery store and went to look at my list, which I keep in the Notes, and the thing wouldn’t do ANYTHING! Wouldn’t cut on when I press the button at the bottom, wouldn’t cut off when I press the button at the top– NOTHING! I didn’t panic.

When I got back int he car I plugged in the charger and all was well. When I got home I tried to use the phone and again, it wouldn’t do anything– just a blank, black screen. So, I plugged it into the charger on my laptop and WHALA! It worked.

Now you’re probably thinking the battery was dead– not so.

So, then I did what I do whenever something weird happens with my iPhone and what I do sometimes when some program continues to run in the background running the battery down– I rebooted.

I hardly ever cut my iPhone off, just when I have an issue like this. However, I’ve never had “this” issue before.

Now it gets “odder” if I can say it that way. When it rebooted, still plugged into the charger on my laptop, iPhoto opens [which happens when I have photos on the Camera Roll and I plug in to sync or whatever] and there is this one photo on the Camera Roll.

Now, I don’t know how this happened but this is what time it was when the issue first happened at the grocery store. How would the iPhone have placed this photo of itself in the Camera Roll? I’m beginning to think maybe it’s possessed. Maybe it knows I’ve been thinking about the 3rd generation iPhone and how I’m going to trade it in for a new one as soon as the new one is released?!? WEIRD!