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Mail to cousin, sent. Mail to possible language exchange contact, sent.

I woke my wife up at about midnight today as I was rummaging through the basement closet to ensure that we didn't have a capture card or anything else lying around which I could use for streaming, rather than buy it now and discover we had something useful later. In the process of doing so I knocked an LCD monitor over a bit and its landing a few feet down upon some tupperware containers was enough to echo directly ...

In Densha De Go Final, the five star difficulty routes require a level of precision beyond the lower difficulty ratings. For example, on easier difficulty you can stop within 5 meters of the line, and on five stars you must stop within 2 meters of the line. Similar precision is required for not being penalized on tardiness. There's a five star course I had left to do in a Tokaido route that runs the entire length, which means it has more than a dozen stops and takes about sixty minutes to complete. ...

Thanksgiving week is in full swing at the store already with people freaking out all over the place, customers and employees alike. Despite the staffing of my department being light today, I was paged to go out and help push carts twice, and neither time was there any particular need to do so. Things like that don't really matter when panic is the rule of the land. It's rather unfortunate that I'll only have two days away from it this week.

In the last hour at retail work, the truck ...

My wife has tomorrow off of work, so what I'll ask as a suggestion for her and her mother to do is round up the materials necessary for me to begin streaming my daily sessions. Here's hoping they spend the time to do it, or at least my mother in law does. Lord knows she needs something to do.

Sundays at the store remain quiet. The other shifts did their job well enough to not impede mine, and I have a routine figured out so that I know how to find something to do from one task to ...

Today is as much of a relaxation day as I'm going to allow myself for the near term future, as today's activities consisted of going to work, and then promptly going to a coworkers place for her to host us for a dinner evening to watch the Dr. Who special that was earlier broadcast. The show was good, and she had a good time with making some thematic dinner choices (fish and vanilla pudding rather than custard, and some good simple souffle). Her three month old cat proved to be good entertainment ...

Hi there. I have just emerged out of my cave and have first heard of Cryptolocker today. I am one of the many who don't make offline backups daily and I didn't have Malwarebytes installed, so I stopped procrastinating on the second part and got the free version to see what it could find. Thankfully, I don't seem to have that particularly nasty infection yet, but I seem to have others, so I think the $25 cost is justified to get it registered and support the company. I'll be sure to let the program ...

All Forms and return header updates are complete. Next phase is to get the new IRS A2A program installed (which should not be an issue at all) and get the test submissions formed. As it turns out, a lot of the elements in the return headers were slightly renamed, so it's a good thing that I checked to make sure it required editing.

I slept in like a bum and wasn't able to get much else accomplished on the day. I indirectly blame my wife, because she had a slight fever in the morning ...

Within the last few days I've completed Forms 1040A, 1040EZ, and 1040 SS, which means that I'm basically getting to being finished on the phase of work where I update the Forms for the upcoming tax year. This means that I should be getting to sending out test submissions within a few weeks at most.

My wife is still sick enough that her voice is mostly a whisper, and she keeps coughing up a fair quantity of phlegm. It's been like this for a week now. I hope she gets better soon. ...

I woke up on Monday at 455AM, and I was up until 310AM this morning so that I could complete the work for Form 8839. It is done and thankfully all came to function in short order, and all of my scripts worked basically right off the bat. Unfortunately, the process of getting things within specific Subforms so that they can match the layout of the original content with its tables simply takes a lot of time and requires more effort than a simple drag and drop operation. No matter, it's done, and Form ...

I worked a full eight hour shift today without doing anything which is specific to my current position of inventory management. I did spend a few moments out doing carts, but I was one of many who was summoned to do so after yet another unwarranted panic, so it wasn't painful or long. Otherwise, it was just moving pallets around and eventually being the person to fill the unload line out of an inbound trailer. Yeehaw. At least I was glad to do the latter part, as I was able to do some very subtle ...

Another new Form being introduced this year is Form 8960, which will be used for the reporting of investment income and an additional tax imposed thereupon. Yet again, it all comes rather easily together despite having to fundamentally recreate it from scratch. All that's missing from the Form at this specific moment are the scripts to automate the line computation. That'll be simple to do tomorrow.

Also - thank you, Dawn, for the bagels.

Today has been a very windy ...

I had to do a small bit of cart pushing today. Thankfully, it wasn't when there was some light rain outside. I had one other person help me push by hand, as there was only one usable machine available at the time. Yeah, I don't miss any of it at all. Thankfully, I kept my time out there to a short stint.

Form 6252 is something that I didn't have to do last year, and I'm pleased to discover that the 2013 version of the Form is finalized on the IRS site, so this means that I was able ...

Forms 1040 Schedule E and F are a wrap, along with a few others. E was basically unchanged, thankfully, while F had a lot of elements renamed. No problem. Form 1040 Schedule D had a set of new rows added to its short term and long term tables which allows for Form 8949 to be filed optionally, which I think is a good idea overall.

My wife is still not feeling too great and in light of some PC problems I had earlier today I didn't make it to bed until she was almost ready to start her ...

Well, a contact from an old friend out of the blue has just come. Looks like he's in line for the PS4 and is bored and has nobody else to converse with. Catch up over a few years through texts isn't so bad, I guess.

Tax Form progress. The Charitable Donation reporting on Form 8283 needed to have a lot of its XSD binding redone, because a lot of the element naming was changed from last year to this year. That consumed a fair amount of the day, particularly since I had to undertake ...

Today's mission was to acquire the Popeye's Cajun Turkey. The mission was completed, but not without some interference along the way, in the form of longer travel than planned. The original store that I went to was not selling them, despite the location being shown as doing so online. The next closest one was not too far away, but the initial route that I chose to get there had a solid line of traffic in all four directions of an intersection that had some kind of new construction going on. This ...