Brian @ Wongside

Yahoo! Finance had a great article on how to do your taxes in 7 days (and wouldn’t you know it, they listened to the biblical admonition, and gave you a Sabbath to rest?). For those of you who procrastinated, this might be your one week ticket to tax filing bliss–or at least it should reduce some of the pain. It seems like a pretty straight forward plan. In short, here’s the steps:

Day 1 Gather data.
Day 2 Reduce taxable income.
Day 3 Find your forms.
Day 4 Fill out your forms.
Day 5 Take a break.
Day 6 Check your work.
Day 7 Sign, seal and deliver.

As I mentioned previously, I finished my taxes with the help of TurboTax. It more or less takes care of Days 3, 4, 5, and 6, so it was mighty worth it to me to buy. Speaking of TurboTax, Bank of America is currently having a deal where you can get it for 35% off the regular price.  That’s even a better deal than getting it from Costco.

In general, I’d say the most painful part of filing taxes is the gathering of documentation and forms. Fortunately, most of my material was filed all together in one folder.  There were a few pieces that seemed to escape.  So for tax year 2009, I’m going to be extra diligent in keeping all of those pieces of mail together.

With apologies to Bob Dylan, we’re about to get dumped on today. Today Weather.com is predicting:

Periods of rain. A few rumbles of thunder possible late. High 59F. Winds SSW at 15 to 25 mph. Rainfall near a half an inch. Chance of precipitation: 100%

Tonight:

Showers with a possible thunderstorm early, then variable clouds overnight with still a chance of showers. Low 48F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

And get a load of this Doppler Radar image:

But the rain will be welcome for allergy sufferers as the pollen count has been quite high lately. And being the son of my father, and quite Asian, I’m looking forward to the free car wash

Yesterday was a great day. It was delightfully relaxing. We didn’t have to do anything all day if we didn’t want to.

It did start on a bittersweet note, however. We took our friends, Jin and Yuna, and their infant son Isaiah, to the airport for their flight back to Seoul, Korea. Jin’s mom was kind enough to buy us lunch before they departed, so we got to have our “last supper” together, which was nice.

After returning home, we promptly went to take a nap. It was a long, gloriously restful nap.

When we woke up, it was just about time to get ready for the 5:30 service at church. Then after church, we went to Ikea to have dinner and look at dinning tables–something our apartment currently lacks. We might have found on that we really like. It’s part of the Bjursta series/line. We like it because it’s small and round, but can expand with the addition of a leaf that is hidden under the table, and swings out when needed. It’s a tad expensive to me, but we’ll shop around and see what we can find.

After Ikea, we came home, unpacked a bunch of boxes, and then it was time for bed.

What a wonderful weekend. The weather was perfect. The only thing that would have made it nicer is if we had a BBQ and got to grill up some juicy tri-tip. Hopefully, that dream isn’t too far from becoming a reality. A grill/BBQ is definitely one of the items on my “to be purchased” list.

Praise God for His provision!

I thought this article on Ars Technica was quite apropos  to my post on the new Mini 10 a few days ago.

It lists the following 5 ways to put your netbook to use around the house:

1. Portable music
2. Second computer for the spouse or kids
3. Media center
4. Kitchen computing
5. Social appliance

I’d say 1 and 4 are most likely to be used around my house. 2 and 3 are possibilities, but would probably encompass a small percentage of the time my netbook would be used.

Portable Music
I like the idea of streaming my iTunes library from my main desktop onto my netbook via WiFi. It’s almost like having an AirPort Express without having to pay the Apple Tax. (Granted my iTunes purchases are of course subject to said tax.) But since it’s so portable, I could carry my netbook into any room in the house and have instant music floating over the 2.4GHz band. Of course, as the article mentions the speaker performance is definitely lacking. That probably means

1. I’ll just have to suffer through poor audio quality.
2. I need to grab my headphones and be tethered to my netbook.
3. I need to plug my netbook into a stereo (which I don’t currently own)
4. I’ll need to use my small, portable Sony speaker with it.

3 seems like the best idea, but at this point, it’s unviable. 1 and 2 are sufferable options, but less than ideal. So I think that leaves me with 4.

Kitchen Computing
Those who know me, know that I like to cook. So the idea of having my netbook as a kitchen companion is fantastic. I can definitely imagine having it sit on the counter ready and available to display the recipe to my next fabulous concoction. Heck, it could even be playing my music at the same time

So there you have it folks, if you don’t already have a netbook around the house, here are 5 ways to justify its purchase.

I just finished doing my taxes. Yay!

Turbo Tax is a really nifty program. I’ll be sure to use it next year. The only part that’s kinda jacked is that they made me pay separately to file my state taxes. So I shelled out some relatively reasonable amount of money thinking I was set–only to discover that I needed to shell out another $20 to file my California taxes. Charlene had to do the same thing, so we ended up shelling out an additional $40.

Oh well, part of me thinks the convenience is worth it, and it’s certainly cheaper than having H&R Block do mine.

What a relief to be done.

Last week, Dell introduced the Inspiron Mini 10, the slightly bigger brother of the Inspiron Mini 9, which I wrote about 7 months ago.

This new version comes in at a base price of $399 (which is where the Mini 9 topped out). The “10″ in Mini 10 denotes a 10″ screen size, which is a fairly modest increase. But unlike the Mini 9, which was saddled with a paltry 8GB SSD, the Mini 10 has a spacious 160GB HDD.  And it’s only slightly heavier at 2.86 lbs vs. 2.3 lbs for the Mini 9. That’s only about 8oz difference in weight. Nearly inconsequential at this size.

I won’t be getting one as I’m quite satisfied with my MSI Wind. But if you’re in the market, it certainly is getting crowded, which is only good for consumers. More choices = more supply.  More supply with no change in demand = lower prices and/or better features. There’s your economics lesson for the day.

Our freedom to cook crabs the way we see fit might be in jeopardy.  According to a new study, crabs might actually feel pain. Why does this matter to me? Well, in some sense, it doesn’t. I’m certainly not a card-carrying member of PETA (if there is such a thing), and I believe that Genesis 1:26 gives us the mandate to rule over all animals, but I have a feeling that places like Thanh Long in San Francisco, might face a strong inability to make their famous roasted crab.  And that saddens me.

In any case, I hope this doesn’t go too far. Or at least the authors are going to need to come up with a good suggestion on how I can get my fill of roasted crab.