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I didn't do my daily treadmilling yesterday. I had some stomach discomfort which wasn't enough to cause vomiting or anything serious but was distracting enough to convince me to lie down, which turned into a four hour nap that I didn't plan on or ask for. Upon starting today, I rounded up my coffee cup and noticed a layer of sludge on the bottom, which is rather disconcerting because I only make the coffee with some milk added, so that tells me that my source of pain might have been some finely ...

Before I make an official set of test return submissions to the IRS, I send in the scenarios individually so that when I'm ready to go, I have them all prepared to go in a single batch. This is required by the approval process, anyway, so that they know you have means to properly increment the return identification numbers and send several returns at once. Sure enough, between my initial tests and today, there was a new version of the XSD schema released and the prior 21st was the last day permitted ...

One thing I'm glad I figured out how to do in my tax form development is to go directly into the XML source content to edit things rather than use the normal system interface to change values. When you connect repeatable values from an XSD file to a form, the elements are marked as "[*]", meaning that they fill into a virtual table as they occur. This would be fine except that when you assign and copy groups of elements, the structure gets all kinds of altered and what might look like ...

New cartman had his first day today, but because the store has very strict rules about the all important computer training segments that people have to complete (among which are rules about sales of alcohol and tobacco, which will never apply to any of us), I didn't get a chance to work with him at all. The next day I'm scheduled is Saturday. I'm fearing that by the time I return, he'll have picked up bad habits or otherwise already be worn down to the point of uselessness. As it stands he's already ...

I've been informed that at least two cartmen who were ready to be hired by the store failed their drug tests. That explains a few things. I personally find the situation distasteful on both sides - I get that the company can set whatever hiring standards it wants, and that it wants to present a strong corporate image by having drug testing for even the lowliest of jobs. But the job in question is pushing carts for minimum wage. Unemployment pays better and the job is thankless, particularly with ...

Once upon a time at the retail store, they had two-way radios available for us lowly cartmen which were on the same wavelength as the radios which everyone else in the store uses, which was "good" in the sense that we were able to be paged by anyone and communication was easy. Over time, there came to be a dearth of functioning radios and it came to the point where we didn't have any to use at all. An attempt was made to use off-the-shelf walkies which are sold in the store, but that concept ...

With all the work I'm doing on translating kanji from Gal Gun, I'm wondering if I should just go full nuts on it and try to translate all of the text in the game. There's a finite number of lines to the game and it is much less than any RPG, so I guess I could get to it eventually? Eh, something to think about. Honestly, I shouldn't have lost this habit and kept replaying games which I had this whole time.

Regardless, I don't have a lot of time here before I have to tend to other ...

I haven't played a game in Japanese in some time, so I've resolved to do now with Gal Gun what I used to do years ago, in that I'd have a notepad nearby and take the time to write out kanji and look things up if I don't know what it is from memory. It grinds the progress of the game to a halt but this is one of the few things I ever did right to learn the very little which I do know to begin with, so it's just as well to try to do things right this time as well. Sure enough, once I sit down with ...

So a few weeks ago I mentioned that I purchased some RAM for use in the PC of one of my wife's coworkers, on her basis of saying that the machine was "running out of virtual memory". Just recently she informed us that her PC had lost all of the files on her hard drive and that it was telling her that the drive couldn't be accessed. Sometime between my putting the RAM in and April 15, she found a way to be infected with one of those bullshit anti-virus trojans which make all of the files ...

My wife has been on a bit of Lumines kick lately, on the PS3 specifically. She's on vacation so she has some time to play that here and there. We played 2P versus for a bit, which we only did once or twice before, and I quickly remembered our primary annoyance with it - you can't just have a new song played with each new battle or choose Random or make a playlist or anything. In 2P, you keep playing with the same song until you exit out of the mode, reconfirm that two players are playing, and then ...

I had an estate income tax return to do today, pretty much immediately after I returned home from retail work and had dinner. Notice the phrasing there, because that is different from a mere estate tax return, which is filed one time on a different form and only applies if, as of 2012, the estate is worth at least $5 million at the time of valuation. Independent of that is an estate income tax return, which occurs every year for the income which the estate receives. Having not filed a Form 1041 ...

I have successfully evaded the rain today. The downpour was very temporary but it was enough to give everything a good soaking, and while that happened I was high and dry (well, the latter at least). I have adjusted the remainder of the Excise Tax forms for the 2012 year and should be ready to start making tests soon. From the looks of it, I might be able to copy the majority of content from last year's outright - which I won't do, but rather cite heavily for reference to ensure that what I create ...

Five stockmen scheduled. Opener is a no call no show. Second is me. Third is the guy who has stopped coming to work and is possibly actively trying to be fired. Fourth has successfully applied for transfer to another store and will be gone in a week. Last guy continues to be scheduled despite injury. The machine died an hour before my shift ended. Another new helper sent out with me, and within the span of hours he goes from completely fresh to the job to saying that he "wants to slap people" ...

I played some Gal Gun just a bit ago, and I chose to do so then because I did so last night in the early hours of the morning and the noise from using a gun attachment with the Move controller forced my wife to turn the fan on so that she could remain asleep. I guess my masturbation noises weren't the problem after all! Haha! Have fun getting that mental image out of your head. Well, trust me, it'd be worse if you knew what I looked like. But you already know, because I admittedly own Gal Gun and ...

Today's Lesson is that it is difficult to find a bank's RTN when you only have eight of the nine requisite digits, nor the bank's specific name. Managed to put the Form 720 revision under wraps, so that means I should be able to get the other two forms (6627 and 6197) under wraps pretty much within a few days, because I don't think those forms were revised, and they would take much less effort to update if they have been. Next thing I need to do are few State returns and I'll be all caught up. ...