Entries in Life

During my adult life, I’ve never really been comfortable with patriotism. I would prefer to think things through — to validate as much as possible or reasonable — before accepting some new government action.

Which is why I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of war in Iraq. It didn’t appear that most people supporting the war (including the president) had thought it through. No one seriously considered alternatives.

And, as soon as the idea was broached (“Let’s go to war!”) the sides quickly became “War!” or “No War!” — completely binary. No “Let’s take action, but not an all-out war!” group sprang up. Perhaps that’s because no one really understood the urgency of war. I suppose many of those supporting war were thinking “This is what we should’ve done the first time around.” And many of those against it were thinking “Why now? What’s so important that we have to do this right now?” At least, that’s what I was thinking.

I knew Saddam was a bad man. I had heard how he and his cronies tortured people and killed them. But, there are a lot of bad men in power all over the world. What is so important about Sadaam?

And, (this is where my lack of patriotism shows), I didn’t really understand how we were better. Our military has done terrible things to the people captured in Afghanistan, but somehow we are not as bad. We are starting to disappear poeple — holding people indefinantly without charging them — but somehow this is still a free country.

I’m not likely to understand it all because I question first and believe later. A patriot, from what I can see, believes first, and rarely, if ever, questions.

… getting into conversations about the war in Iraq. Either its with Liberals and they (inevitably) go back to that tired “Bush wasn’t really elected” or its with conservatives and they froth about how we should be carpet bombing.

Especially surreal was a conversation I had today with someone who was convinced that we had the technology to make this war “predictable” (in response to my statement that “war is not predictable”), but that Bush wasn’t using them because Hollywood celebrities had spoken out against the war.

Say what?

A little networking humor. Excerpt:

  4. Processing of the Evil Bit       Devices such as firewalls MUST drop all inbound packets that have the     evil bit set.  Packets with the evil bit off MUST NOT be dropped.     Dropped packets SHOULD be noted in the appropriate MIB variable.       Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have a harder problem.  Because of     their known propensity for false negatives and false positives, IDSs     MUST apply a probabilistic correction factor when evaluating the evil     bit.  If the evil bit is set, a suitable random number generator     [RFC1750] must be consulted to determine if the attempt should be     logged.  Similarly, if the bit is off, another random number     generator must be consulted to determine if it should be logged     despite the setting.       The default probabilities for these tests depends on the type of IDS.     Thus, a signature-based IDS would have a low false positive value but     a high false negative value.  A suitable administrative interface     MUST be provided to permit operators to reset these values.  

I told Jeff about the TaxAct.com, the online Tax filing service I used this year. He mentions that you can fill out the forms for free, but he doesn’t mention any complaints about the service. Although I liked the service, I did have a couple of complaints. But first the good stuff.

The free service gives you PDFs of your forms. This means that instead of pulling out a manual typewriter or hand-writing the answers in, I filled out the answers to pertinant questions and they provided the filled-in forms. I did some 1099 work this year and they managed to ask about that and provide forms for self-employment taxes. Alexis and I donate quite a bit to the charities that take in-kind dontations and we managed to get almost all the itemizations done as well. So, at least for my purposes, it was thorough enough. Finally, because I goofed on my timesheet last week, we paid the $20 or so for electronic filing (and direct-deposit of the refund) so we could get it this week.

All that said, it was a major pain filling out parts of the questionnaire. They used the “Wizard” style interface where each question has its separate form. This is great if you only have to go through the system once, but we found that we had one too many in-kind donations for electronic filing so I had to go back and redo one of the forms. Instead of presenting me with a list of the items and allowing me to edit them individually, I had to go through the whole wizard thing again to get to the one I needed to change (thankfully it was pre-filled with my previous responses). Their user interface could use some work.

Despite any complaints, I was glad that such things exist. Offering the free service (with such a cheap route to electronic filing) for users of non-conventional systems (like Linux) is wonderful. You can find others from the IRS.gov “Free File” site.