New Ramblings Laptops and Taxes

Wow, that title says alot. Well I have quite a bit I haven't said anything about lately.
I found a donor for a new Laptop! The US Govt., well the IRS to be precise. I don't know about you, but I like tax time. Always have. I struggle through the year, and pay a little bit too much, so that I get a nice refund each spring. I know, I know, you should set your taxes up so you don't have to pay, or get paid so the Govt. doesn't use the interest for free. Well, I have a theory on that. I believe that there's nothing wrong with letting the Government use my money for free for a year! Sorry about all you greedy, bitter people who are more worried about Government waste than you are your own waist. (Both are expanding! HA!) Anyway, I don't mind them getting to use what little extra I pay in a years time, for the ability to have a nice bonus to start each year off with, do you? I've discovered through looking at various interest rates that money would have earned me, and I found out that I have lost no more than 2 dollars a year. That's right, the MOST, I could be giving up is 2 dollars. BIG WHOOPEE! So, for 2 dollars the Govt. holds my money, and processes my paper work, and gives me a nice Check each year. Not a bad deal I don't think. Anyway, I'm getting enough back, along with what I've saved here, there and yonder, to buy a nice laptop. Now if HP would just ship it. :-D. I'll tell ya' about it when it gets here.

The nice thing about the modern age is HTML and XML, and SSL, and all the other L's that make doing your taxes online possible. I tried Turbo tax, and I tried TaxCut. Taxcut will let you run in Linux, if you setup the browser ID to fake being in Windoze. Turbo Tax will allow you to try to get in, but evidently they do something that's very Windows specific this year. Taxcut was very much a pain, very many things changed since last year, and I could never convince it to allow me to remove them. It was trying to get me to file a Schedule C and all that business stuff. However, we never made any money off of any of the business stuff (and didn't spend any in 2006 to make it worth fooling with on taxes) so I just shut the stuff down. Well, Taxcut never asked me if those things were still valid, never asked me how much I made off of them, or anything. However, considering they were in last years TurboTax file, it was determined to error out on it.
So, I go to Turbotax.com (after booting into Windoze YUK) and it works perfectly neting me an extra 500.00 dollars! It allowed me to clear out all the stuff from last year that I didn't want to repeat this year. Needless to say, as soon as the IRS will let me, I'll be e-filing my return and awaiting a direct deposited refund! Gotta love it.

Now, after ordering the New Laptop from HP ( a very nice one at that with [hint] the AMD Dual core TL-60 64 bit proc) I have the misfortune of having to wait. I know, boo hoo. I can hear you now, "you poor slob", "I'm reaching for ya' I just can't get there.", or "I feel your pain". However, I'm not alone in my misery (it does love company you know) my wife is waiting for the hand-me-down crapshiba I'm using now. She's still got full reign over the AMD 3000+ Desktop, with a 19" flat monitor, but now she'll also have this laptop. I don't know how much of a blessing that will be, but if she avoids using firefox 2.0 on Edgy Kubuntu she'll be fine.

By-The-Way: I found out that Firefox 2 is responsible for all the lockups I've had since converting to Edgy and FF2. I've been running Seamonkey for sometime now, and its running without a hitch. (SeaMonkey is Mozilla's latest Browser suite that replaced "Mozilla" proper, and Netscape). The problem is you can't get the Google toolbar to work, or the Forecastfox add-on to work. I really liked both of them. There is some suggestion on the Kubuntu user list that Forecastfox is actually to blame for the lockups which are caused by run away processes. I don't know, 'cause my browser / KDE session would lockup so fast I could never diag the problem. Another problem was that it would lockup so fast that it would never right any error info to any of my logs. That makes it difficult to figure out. Well, everything is fine now. I may try removing forecastfox to see if that helps any. I think forecastfox is a victim of Firefox's poor add-on handling.

Well, anyway that's most of the rambling. I have also found a fairly cool website for IMing in a web browser: Meebo the IM client. Check it out. Its like GAIM for Linux only in a browser.

Kubuntu Breakdown

Well, it appears that my work was in vain, or worse. It seems that now, whenever I come out of hibernation my PC just forgets how to access the hard drive. It will slowly begin to lock up, and then eventually get to the point of being so hosed, that I have to power it off! The problem is that now, I don't even have to come out of hibernation, as it could do it any time. I got so frustrated just before new years because I had just finished balancing my checkbook in KMymoney, and the whole system seized up when I clicked the "save" button. ARGGGHH! I had to go through the whole process again later. I never had this problem with the ReiserFS, but now it seems to be very regular with ext3. What gives?
Anyway, I'm looking at putting another distro on here just because I want to try another one. Actually If I could get someone to donate about 2,000.00 dollars I'd get me a new laptop :-D! Yea, I know, that'll never happen. However, as soon as I can get off this lousy Toshiba Crapillite the better. (Oh, did I tell you I can't stand Toshiba's laptops?).

On another note, I discovered yesterday that my license plate was 3 months out of date!! I've been driving my truck around on expired tags since September! So, I went to the downtown location to get my tags renewed, found out they are still in the 60's and only take cash or check, so I had to go find an ATM. So, now I'm kinda like Kevin in Home Alone, "I"m not afraid any more!"

As you may know I work with Ardent Health here in Nashville. We just got in some shiny new P590's from IBM. We're going to put our AIX systems on those things, running most in HA mode. The problem I have is they want to put TSM on them as well, and I'm not real keen on that idea. Its not that I don't trust the 590s, or whatever, its just that I think it puts too many eggs in that basket. I've always run TSM as isolated from the systems it backs up as possible, maybe having the TSM box in the same rack would be about as close as I've ever gotten to that kind of thing (and I didn't really like that much). I don't know, maybe I'm just a little paranoid, but it just doesn't seem wise to me. Well, I'll go with it if I have to, but what I'm lobbying for is a couple of mid to high end Series X servers with Linux running on them. I think if we could use hardware thats easy to obtain, and an OS thats easy to setup, our DR could start much faster in the field. We have a get together scheduled tomorrow so we can hash out who's going to do what this year. We'll see what we run up against there. I've heard of folks running TSM on Windows servers with it all tied into the same AD tree. How crazy can you get? I mean if a virus gets in and attacks your environment, your TSM server is going up in smoke right along with the rest of your Windoze servers. No, I believe your TSM system, or whatever backup system, should be isolated from the systems its meant to protect. If you need to restore, you don't need the headache. I mean think about it, how will you restore parts of your AD tree if you can't get into TSM because the AD tree is down? Sounds foolish but take a minute, you'll get it. Oh, I'm a Certified Directory Engineer, so I know you can get the AD up enough to do what you need, but why? When you can run TSM on the same x86 hardware with Linux, and cut your DR time in half!

So, anyway that's my rambling for today.