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My sister is pregnant. This will be her first child, and I think she and her husband are ready for it. The house that they moved to is considerably larger than where they were living, so there's a timely accomodation for the newest addition to the family. She will likely be due in late August.

Finding an XML Validator that works with the 1120 Return Data XSD is proving to be difficult. Of course, there are a few products out there which cost several hundreds of dollars, but I'm not ...

"Are you using an XML validator?"

When I got to have a singular person assigned to me as a programming assistant at the IRS, this is a question which eventually came up. The answer then as it is now is no, I don't, because I haven't had a very specific need for doing so. The error statements that I get back usually were explicit enough to tell me how to fix errors as they arose in the data that I sent.

A response comes back today where both main issues that I ...

Yesterday, while I was entering records for yesterday's post, I turned to pivot in my stool and inadvertently kicked my foot into one of the walls of the desk nearby. It seemed very painful. As it turns out, I discovered at the end of the day that I had jammed it up so badly that it had bruised the entirety of the toe and is now a sickly purple color, and still rather sensitive to pressure. I can still walk and was able to exercise like normal today, and it's more of a discomfort than acute pain, ...

Finally, a new IRS response comes after a week had passed since I last wrote them. The person who responded is the same person who helped me extensively last year to get my 1040 submissions up and running. It's good to have a familiar name to work with. Now I just need to respond tonight before I get to playing.

Despite the lack of increases, I'm pretty satisfied with today's song session. Reading the charts felt more comfortable to me today, somehow. Interesting that I had a push ...

Despite today's weather being nothing but light rain and forty degrees, I didn't come home as miserable as I would have expected in respect of the circumstances. No news otherwise.

I kept the song session short today, as the slide show burn in still has a full day to go at minimum, and I was rather disturbed to see the faint shadows from yesterday. It was something that stewed in my mind for the majority of today. Upon returning home, the shadows were reduced anyway so I think if ...

So, carts. Them carts. We ordered carts to come in, supposedly. Allegedly. I was asked "as a favor" to empty all of the trash out of the registers today. Surprises included a full 12 pack of root beer that had half of its content spilled in a canister, and another featuring a similar spill, only it was that of milk. I have no idea how long it sat there. While doing this, the store manager walks past me. "Good news", he says, "we have 400 carts coming in the 21st." I ...

On one of my trips to the GM vestibule while at work today, I was stopped by a few coworkers. One was a "zone manager" and another works in asset protection, the latter of whom was sent to go climb a ladder to put the flag at half mast. He didn't ask me if the flag at a given position looked as if it was at half mast, he merely asked me what does it mean to put it at half mast. OK. I ask out loud why if the flag being put at half mast - "did somebody die?". I glanced at my phone ...

There are no scores to report for today, as I spent the majority of the day getting acclamated to my new TV, a Panasonic Viera P60U50.

The coupon to be used at the store could only be used today or tomorrow. I work tomorrow. There's a deal where if you apply to the store's credit card, you get a $20 cashback coupon for the first transaction, and there's another deal where if your first purchase is an electronics item exceeding a certain amount, you get the service plan paid for by ...

Moving Day.

Two simple blessings made today's ordeal transpire without much pain and aggravation - a sufficiently large moving truck was rented, and there was just enough space in the truck to hold the entirety of the contents to be moved. Every bit of floor space was taken up, but I wasn't able to build good walls past the initial few because there were less square boxes and more furniture objects and the like as the day progressed. The most difficult object to move was the washing ...

I should have known that there would be an issue with it this time. With little else to do, I finally took to opening the Form 1040 Draft and start poking around. The conversion process of it in LiveCycle requires me to set it to "flowable" layout, so that I can manually edit everything on the page, and I need to do this so that I can delete the "DRAFT" text which is prominently in the background. For this year's form, opening it in this fasion renders about 75% of the second ...

The note that I sent to the IRS about the <OverpaymentSection> tag in the Form 1120 XML data is dated as sent on November 18.

I received the response today.

This is response to your inquiry dated November 9, 2012, regarding 2011 Test Scenario 1 Form 1120. Please ensure you are using the correct schema version for the scenario. The latest version is 2011v2.2. If you continue to have problems, you can call the eHelp Desk for assitance at call 866-255-0654.

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Rather than merely set a meeting time over a series of phone calls, my Mother insisted that a meeting was to be held today at my Sister's house in order to determine the timeframe of her upcoming move. The only real necessity that I perceived was that I was there to visually see the entirety of material set to be transported and gave my honest assessment that there's no way for it all to fit in a single 24 foot rental truck. One small benefit for me out of this is that the timeframe which carries ...

Now what I need to do is tinker with the 1040 drafts and get things set for when the live forms are dropped, which still hasn't happened yet. Electronic filing won't open until the middle of January as normal, but I feel incredibly ancy to get underway on work with it being December now.

Speaking of which - everyone is so happy about the balmy weather. I can't help but feel depressed over it. It's December. It's a winter month. Winters in the midwest are supposed to be cold. A nationwide ...

I completed the Ethics course to fulfill the requisite CPE hour requirements for the year. There is a separate category for "ethics" beyond the general knowledge. I fulfilled the latter a few weeks ago by finally completing the test for the Lasser Income Tax course. I had simply never taken the test until that point because I had no pressing need to do so sooner. The ethics CPE requirement is two CPE hours, and the ethics course which I had undertaken gives credit of five CPE hours. It ...

The pool has been put into place at the parent's home today. They had to take out half of a length of fence in order to get a full sized construction crane into the area so that they could position the pool into place. It is a single piece of fiberglass of about 40 feet length and 20 feet in width, and a deep end for a diving board. The other end has steps across the entire width with a few jet streams at the sides, so it's possible to sit and lounge at the shallow end as well. It looks like it ...