Tax Forms

Ok, here is where I am going to expose just how ignorant I am. So, be prepared...

Anyone who knows me knows that I love computers. I own way too many computers for my own good, and if I could just sit in front of a computer and have endless amounts of time to spend learning how to recompile my kernel in new and interesting ways, I couldn't be happier. I do almost everything using a computer - balance my checkbook, maintain lists of things to buy or read, shop, read the news, etc. But I don't use the computer to file my taxes...

I was taught how to fill out my federal tax forms by hand. We didn't have any of that new-fangled computer stuff when I was learning. That's the way that I've always done things.

For the past two years, I have been experimenting with Turbo Tax. I have filled out my tax forms by hand, and then filled them out using Turbo Tax, and compared the results. And they are never the same. Last year, almost every line was identical, until I got to the tax table portion. The taxable income number was exactly the same. The number that was different was the amount of tax that I should pay, based on that taxable income. I checked it like 100 times, and I am sure that whatever number Turbo Tax came up with didn't match what it said in the tax table on my paper form. I don't know how I could have screwed that up. And it's not an interpolation issue, because the number that Turbo Tax came back with wasn't in the correct range, according to the paper tax table (for single, married, etc).

So, I filed the paper form.

By the way, the IRS did not notify me of any corrections that I had to make to my return, so I am fairly confident that it was done correctly.

I just received the last of my W2's and everything for 2006. So, I'm ready to fill out my forms. And I'm faced with this same decision that I am faced with every year. Do I pay for Turbo Tax, knowing that it probably won't match up with what I calculate using the paper form, or do I just stick with the paper form all the way...

I know, I know... Everyone else my age uses Turbo Tax and wouldn't dream of doing it by hand. But why the hell doesn't it calculate my taxes right?

Are Americans Saving Too Much?

Over on rebecca's pocket [rebeccablood.net], I saw a link to a New York Times article called A Contrarian View: Save Less and Still Retire With Enough [nytimes.com]. The premise of the article is completely ridiculous (which, I guess, is why it is so interesting).

The basic jist of the article is that financial advisors are way over-estimating the amount that people have to save for retirement, and that you could get better use out of your money if you're saving too much:

The dispute revolves around how financial planners determine how much a person should save...

The starting point for most retirement plans is the so-called replacement rate. It says an American needs an annual income in retirement equal to 75 percent to 86 percent of what he or she earned in the final year of employment...

Coupling that with a second industry rule of thumb that says retirees should spend no more than about 4 percent of their assets each year to make them last, a typical couple with that level of income should enter retirement with at least $2.1 million in assets, including 401(k)s, I.R.A.’s, stocks and bonds, real estate, cash value life insurance, pensions and Social Security benefits."

Alright, that does sound like an impossible amount of money to save (although a huge chunk of that probably will be in real estate). But if anything, I think that the average person is on the opposite extreme. Most of the people I have talked to about retirement planning haven't really put that much thought into it. And when you look at the cost of retirement homes and care facilities, I can't imagine how we're going to be able to afford anything like that 30 years from now.

System Tray Icons

I do this thing that I bet a lot of other people do. No, not that. When someone else gives a presentation using their computer, you usually see their desktop before they launch their Powerpoint presentation. And I usually look at their system tray to see what icons are in there, and how many of them I recognize.

Do you ever do that?

I love it when I see that someone had to make their taskbar double-height, just to accomodate the 30 icons that they just have to be able to see in the system tray. And then there are people like me, who hate system tray icons and keep them to a minimum:



I do most stuff at home in Linux, but above is a shot from my Windows desktop. The few things that I need Windows for are really obscure, which is why I would be shocked if anyone could name 3 of the 4 there.

From left to right, they are:

1. Sirius Recorder. This app rips the feed from my satellite radio, breaks it into the correct chunks, and makes it easy for me to time-shift broadcasts using my mp3 player.

2. GPGtray. GPG is an open-source version of the popular PGP. GPGtray makes it easy to encrypt or decrypt files on your hard drive, or send or receive encrypted email. If you receive an encrypted email, you just highlight the ciphertext, and hit the system tray icon, enter your passphrase, and it'll display the plaintext (in other words, the unencrypted message).

3. Volume control.

4. TrayManager. I use this to hide the myriad of system tray icons that Windows won't let you hide. For instance, if you turn off the Windows Firewall, you'll constantly be nagged about Windows Security (which is a complete joke, at best). That allows me to forget about those icons, because after all, they shouldn't exist in the first place.

Mozy

Marley told me about a new service that he heard about called mozy [mozy.com]. It's an online backup service. If you have less than 2GB that you want to back up to their servers, it's free (well, for now, anyway). And if you have more than that, you can have an unlimited amount of space on their servers for about $5/month. That sounds reasonable to me.

They also have it set up so that you can have scripts automatically just backup certain types of files, or files just in certain areas of your hard disk, etc. Plus, if you want to retrieve any parts of your backup, you can access all of the individual files over the web. Very cool.

I'm going to start telling friends about this service, because so few of the people I know actually bother to back up anything. Meanwhile, I am on the opposite end of the scale - I actually back up my files to archival-quality DVDs, and then put one copy in a safe-deposit box, while I keep the other at home.

Cooking with Nerds

Ok, I'm a nerd. I'm sure that all of you knew that already. Wait until you hear this one...

I've been using my nerdy gaming dice in the kitchen lately. For instance, if I am cooking something that requires me to put x number of teaspoons into a mix at specified intervals, I always lose count.



Most of you probably know exactly what is in the picture above. But for those of you who aren't huge nerds, it's an 8-sided die. You would use several of these to play nerdy games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

Let's say that you were pretending to be a chaotic-evil half-elven fighter, who was attempting to rescue a cheeseburger from the clutches of a particularly ugly goblin. Do you have that mental picture? You would draw your longsword and swing it at the goblin (remember, you're EVIL), and then roll a 20-sided die to see if your swing hit. If it hit, you would roll an 8-sided die (like the one pictured above) to determine how much damage you delivered. And then there are these modifiers... But anyway, then you would sink your teeth into a scrumptious, mouth-watering cheeseburger, that happens to be drenched in cheese, and has just the right amount of mayo.

On a completely unrelated note, I need to stop writing these entries when I'm hungry...

Right now, my readers fall into two groups: gamers, who are laughing hysterically, and non-gamers, who are shaking their heads and wish that they didn't know the above information.

Photoshop Selection Tool Cursor

Why is it that in every version of Photoshop, the selection tool disappears if you are editing an image that is exactly the wrong color?



In the above image, I have circled the selection tool in red. It looks like a small cross. If you're editing an image with a dark grey area, the selection tool just disappears when it moves over that region (see below).



Microsoft Word used to have this exact problem, before they fixed it, like, 10 years ago. How is it that the image editing software out there can't manage to keep their cursor visible?

I should mention that I am using Photoshop Elements. Is a visible cursor something you only get with the full-blown version of Photoshop?

Ugh, CDs...

Recently, I was forced to discover how little I listen to CDs anymore. Before having an MP3 player, I, of course, listened to them all of the time. And I amassed quite a collection.



The jewel cases were too bulky to carry around, so I put about 20 of my most-listened to CDs in a slim carrying case. When I would go on a road trip, I would just grab the case. That way, music didn't take up a lot of room in my bag, and I would have plenty to choose from if I wanted to switch to another disc.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that case. And it's not even clear to me how many months (or years) it has been missing.

Presumably, it contained my 20 most favorite CDs (minus the ones that were in my cars at the time). I thought that I might have just misplaced it when we moved into our new house at the beginning of last summer. But I'm now pretty sure that I lost it before then. And apparently, I haven't changed the CDs that are in the CD player in my car in a long time, either, because otherwise, I would have realized the case was missing. And now I am faced with the task of going through all of those jewel cases, trying to figure out which CDs are missing, because I don't remember what would have been in that case.

It's not that I listen to FM radio, because I don't. In my next car, I should just have the entire radio replaced by a dock for my MP3 player, since that's apparently the only thing I listen to anymore.

Poor Computer Security Practices

In the latest issue of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram [schneier.com], I saw a link to an amusing article [thedailywtf.com]. Probably everyone has seen people who aren't good with computers doing things that are poor for security - the worst being people who physically write their password on their monitor. The article shows a picture of someone who has attached their SecurID to their laptop.

For those of you not in the know, many computer systems require two factor authentication [wikipedia.org] now. In order to access the system, you need two things that, presumably, only you would know. The first is a password or a PIN number. The second often comes in the form of a physical device such as a security token [wikipedia.org] (a SecurID is one such example), which displays a time-synchronized, one-time password. The idea is if someone determined what your password was, they still wouldn't be able to access the things you have access to (because they wouldn't have the security token). Similarly, if you lose your security token, someone finding it wouldn't be able to use it, unless they had your password too.

The author of the article is poking fun at the user for attaching their SecurID to their laptop, because one of the two factors of the authentication method is now just as easy to steal as the laptop.

I agree that attaching your SecurID to your laptop is a bad idea. But at the same time, what are we really worried about? Those security tokens are too large to really keep on your keychain, so I would imagine that most people keep theirs in their laptop bags anyway (which I would argue is just as bad).

While I'm talking about Bruce Schneier, I thought that I would mention my favorite quote of his. In a New York Times article [nytimes.com], he was making fun of how ridiculous (and ineffective) airport security policies are, and he said: "It’s a good thing the shoe bomber wasn’t an underwear bomber."

Technical Writing

Last Friday, I wrote about being invited to submit a journal article, due to the strength of a technical paper that a group of us sent to a robotics conference last year.

We actually submitted two different papers to conferences last year, and both were accepted. In my post on Friday, I linked to the paper we submitted to the International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR). That one was presented in Brussels last September. The other paper was submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) [icra07.org], which is significantly more prestigious. We recently were notified that paper was accepted, and that one will be presented in Rome next April. Of course, I can't link to that one yet, because it hasn't be published.

Both of those publications were a result of the work that I performed as a postdoc. I actually think that the quality of the work that I performed was significantly higher as a postdoc than as a PhD candidate. Of course, that's not a coincidence. As you gain experience, you're going to get better at it. I look back at some of my earlier publications and am embarassed by the writing. It is not necessarily that the quality of the work was poor -- it wasn't. I cringe when I read my earlier publications because my writing now is so much clearer and more concise. My writing improved a huge deal when I wrote my dissertation.

I spent some time over the weekend providing final edits to our ICRA submission and a smile crept to my face at the realization of how much confidence I have in my proof-reading skills.

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me, part 2

Yesterday, I started writing about things that you probably don't know about me. This is part 2.

3. I am totally OCD about counting units of food. This is something that almost no one knew about me, until recently, when it started getting out.

The deal is that I count units of food. For instance, if there are pre-wrapped slices of American cheese in the fridge, I will only put even numbers of them in my sandwiches, and it bothers me if there are an odd number of slices left. It bothers me to the point where I have to eat a single slice by itself so that there will be an even number left.

Believe me, I totally know how ridiculous this is, but I can't not do it. And it's not like I count units of food because I'm on a diet or something (although, I probably should be on a diet). It's just a ridiculous OCD thing. And I really don't have any idea where that comes from. But if you saw the looks on people's faces when they hear about this for the first time...

4. I once took an Acting for Non-Majors class when I was in college. I mean, I figured, how hard could that be? I figured it was an easy A, and it might be interesting.

Boy, was I surprised. Having never tried acting before, I was astounded at how idiotic I could sound in front of people. There was no worse actor that semester than me, trust me. If I were cast as me in a movie about my life, you would never believe my delivery of lines. In a sea of humbling experiences that I have had, that is one of the standouts. And it also was the scene of the now infamous "beating a teddy bear with a 2x4" incident (which I'll have to write about sometime).

5. I almost ended up totalling my mother's station wagon when I was about 6. Can you tell that I was not a well-behaved child?

We were in a hurry somewhere, and I was young enough that I still had to sit in the back seat whenever we went anywhere. I jumped in, but goofed off instead of closing the door right away. So, my mother starts backing out of the garage. I reached for the door (to close it), but the edge of the door hit the track that the garage door slides on. So, at that point, I couldn't close it. But she kept backing out, because she didn't realize what was going horribly wrong.

So, the door continues to be bent, as the car continues to back out of the garage. And I'm staring at it with this wide-eyed look of horror -- you know, when you know you're about to get the beating of a lifetime, but are too paralyzed with fear to do anything about it. This continued until the back door was bent so far around that it actually folded onto the front door. At this point, my mother realized what had happened, and was probably moments away from sending me to an orphanage and/or military school.

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me, part 1

On little.yellow.different [littleyellowdifferent.com]and bluishorange [bluishorange.com], I saw the products from the latest meme going around: Five things you didn't know about me.

I have no idea if I have gotten tagged, because I never bother to check any of these things. And it wouldn't surprise me if I haven't gotten tagged, because I almost never participate in these sorts of things anyway. But it's a slow week, and I have revelations to burn.

1. I used to play the viola. I took private lessons for about 10 years -- you know, the whole deal. I wasn't half bad at it, either. In my senior year in high school, the orchestra director wanted to recognize some of the better more accomplished string players, so a quartet of us were featured in the Spring concert. Which would have been great, except that I came down with the chicken pox that week, and the orchestra director's wife had to fill in for me at the concert.

Even though I enjoyed playing, I quit during college. I never was able to find a private teacher that I felt comfortable with. I didn't have a car the first two years in college, so I was limited to teachers who taught in the immediate area. And all of those people were used to teaching to music majors. However, I was an engineering major, and playing viola was something that I did for fun in my free time. Except that they had unrealistic expectations of me, since they weren't used to teaching to non-music majors.

I had a beautiful viola too, which had a great tone. And I ended up selling it, because I didn't want to see such a beautiful instrument start to deteriorate (since I wasn't playing it).

2. I once bit a girl on the shoulder. Ok, I was in second grade, and was a complete moron. I have an unlimited number of stories of being an idiot at that age, and this is one of them.

We were out on the playground during recess, after lunch. Of course, at that age, there is a lot of assigned seating. So, you end up sitting next to the same people all of the time. This one girl was one of the people who constantly had to sit next to me. And for whatever reason, I decided to walk up to her on the playground and bit her shoulder really hard.

The gym teacher was monitoring recess, and he grabbed me and dragged me into the principal's office, where he proceeded to ask me, "Didn't you have enough lunch today?"

Part 2 tomorrow.

Spare Tires

Ok, below is a picture of the spare tire that is in the trunk of my car. Click on it to view a larger version of the picture. Can you guess what really pisses me off about this spare?



The big thing in the middle (that has the Bose logo) is a subwoofer. That isn't the thing that pisses me off. And unlike some cars, there is actually some space around the spare, which is convenient for me, because I usually store a pair of work gloves there (along with some other random crap I might need). That part I like.

Ok, if you look really closely, you'll notice that something is missing. The valve stem.

It turns out that the valve stem is on the bottom side of the wheel. Which means that if you want to check the air pressure in the spare, you have to unmount it and flip it over. How annoying is that?

I suppose that most people don't even bother to check the pressure in their tires at all, so checking it in their spare is even further from their minds. But making the process annoying for the owner is going to make people check spare tire pressure even less often.

International Journal of Robotics Research

Recently, I got some pretty good news. Last year, a group of us submitted a paper to The International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR), about the robotics research that a team of us were working on. The paper was:

Wei, T.E., Daltorio, K.A., Gorb, S.N., Southard, L., Ritzmann, R.E., and Quinn, R.D. (2006) "A Small Climbing Robot with Compliant Ankles and Multiple Attachment Mechanisms," Proceedings of the International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR06), Brussels.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the conference in Brussels last September to present the paper, but the second author graciously accepted the opportunity to do so. Here's an image of the robot climbing (which was included in the paper):



Recently, based on the strength of that paper, we were invited to write a journal article for the International Journal of Robotics Research [ijrr.org]. For a young academic, this is a huge honor. We're being recognized for having innovative research that is among the best in the field, and the journal article will give us greater visibility. It will also look good for the government agencies that funded the research.

Unfortunately for me, I'm already out of the world of academics. So, I'm flattered that our research is being recognized, but I won't be able to directly benefit.

It'll probably be at least a year from now, but I can't wait until I see our work in print. And, it will round out my list of publications [fluggart.com] nicely.

New Phone

For the past year and a half, my only phone has been the Nokia 3220 [nokiausa.com]. It's a typical phone, complete with a mediocre camera and the other features that are a commodity these days. It was not a PDA phone or a Blackberry or anything like that.

I'm a big fan of Nokia phones, though. Their user interface is easy to use. And once you learn to use one, you can pretty much pick up any other Nokia phone and immediately know how to navigate around it without a manual. Plus, the reception that I have gotten on my Nokia phones has generally been much better than when I have chosen to buy a competitor's.

Nokia phones almost always include two features which I use all of the time. The first is an alarm. I use it all of the time. I don't usually need an alarm to get up at the right time on weekdays, but I use the alarm on the phone as a backup. And it's nice, because it won't be affected by power outages (I know many alarm clocks have battery backups, but there is no battery indicator, so how do you know if your backup battery is dead?). I also use it when I am cooking or doing laundry, because the alarm on the phone will stay with me. If I use an egg timer when I am cooking, and then I leave the room to complete another task, I might not hear the timer when it goes off. Whereas, I will hear the phone because it is right in my pocket.

The second feature that almost all Nokia phones include is timed profiles. Whenever I go into a movie theater, I always remember to turn my phone off. But I typically forget to turn it back on. It was kind of a problem, because every time I would do something like go to a movie, no one could get a hold of me for several hours afterward (until I remembered to turn my phone back on). And since that is my only phone, there isn't another way to get a hold of me.

With timed profiles, I can tell my phone to leave the ringer off until a particular time, and then it will revert to the previous profile it was using. It is very useful for me, because I don't have to remember to turn the ringer back on.

Anyway, this time around, I went with the Nokia 6133 [nokiausa.com]. This phone is in the same class that my previous phone was in. Except that it has a beautiful screen on the inside. It is very bright, and appears to be a much higher resolution. The official specc on the inside screen are 320 x 240 pixels, and up to 16 million colors.

Now when I read my email on my phone, I don't have to scroll a million times to get through each message. Plus, the phone loads the messages much faster. I didn't realize that a lot of time I spent waiting for messages to load was caused by the phone's interface. I just assumed that all of the wait time was for actually transferring the data.

I've only had it for a few days, but I am very pleased with my choice. I will have to post a more in-depth review after I have used it for a longer period of time.

Sony DVD Player Settlement

On Monday, I mentioned that I was one of the beneficiaries in many class-action lawsuits. I discovered another one of those through Barry's weblog [cwru.edu]. He wrote about how Sony was trying to settle out of a class action lawsuit over faulty DVD players. There is an official page on Sony's website [sony.com] about the settlement.

If you have bought one of the listed DVD player models, they are preparing to give you $40 or replace your DVD player with a refurbished one. Apparently, some people also had their firmware chip repaired to fix whatever problems they were having with theirs, and Sony is preparing to reimburse you for the charges if you are one of those people.

This is of interest to me, because I own one of the DVD players that is listed. The DVD player that I have sometimes skips when playing DVDs that play fine in other DVD players (which is incredibly annoying). Also, sometimes a big black rectangle will appear on my TV that obscures a lot of the picture. This only happens during the winter months. And when I hit anything on the DVD player remote, the rectangle disappears, returning the picture to normal.

For a long time, I have debated about buying a new DVD player, but I don't really use it enough to justify the cost. Plus, I have other DVD players that I can use instead. It never occurred to me that many other people were having the same problems. But I will definitely have to keep an eye on the settlement, because I would like to have mine replaced.

Aerial Photography from Africa

On kottke.org [kottke.org], I caught a link to a Flickr gallery [flickr.com] containing some amazing aerial photography from Africa.

I'm still amazed at the pictures you can find on Flickr. I frequently browse that site, looking for pictures that I can use on my rotating desktop. Some are really breathtaking, such as these ones.

I actually really need to upload more of my collection of photos to my Flickr gallery.



Only about 1% of my pictures have been uploaded so far. I have gigs and gigs backed up to DVD, and I think that I would look at them more often if they were on Flickr. Plus, I would probably get more feedback if they were public.

Carfax Class Action Lawsuit

It turns out that I am about to become one of the numerous beneficiaries of a few class-action lawsuits. Go me. This was quite a surprise to me, since, as usual, I am totally oblivious to everything.

One of the class-action lawsuits was against Carfax [carfax.com], which is a company that offers information about used cars and their accident history. The way it works is, you pay a flat fee, and for a set period of time, you can enter in an unlimited number of used car VINs. You will then receive a report that details any accidents the car has been in, as well as information about how many owners the car has had.

Earlier this year, I was looking to buy a used car, so I bought a Carfax subscription for a month. Of course, the very first thing that I did with my subscription was Carfax my own vehicles. We have a couple of cars, two of which we have owned since they were brand-new (so we knew the exact history of those vehicles). The Carfax information on our vehicles was frighteningly complete. It contained information about the vehicles that I kind of wish couldn't be accessed by someone that didn't own the car. I mean, they had the date and mileage of the vehicle every time the car was subjected to a state inspection or an emissions test, etc.

With my confirmed trust in the tool, I used it to check out several used cars (some of which turned out to have questionable histories). Of course, before getting into any serious negotiations with any car owners, I checked out the vehicles myself, in person, and test drove them.

Well, it turns out that most Carfax reports are not as complete as the company would like you to believe [consumeraffairs.com]. Apparently, there are many ways to cleanse the history of a vehicle, and there are states in which Carfax is not able to retreive data about cars. For instance, here is an article about a car [communitypress.com] that someone bought with the confidence of a clear Carfax vehicle report, which later turned out to have been salvaged, which left the new owner in the lurch with their insurance company. That story is particularly horrifying.

I guess that buying a used car is always a serious risk, but I had no idea that the Carfax portion of the process could be so erroneous.

The Good Shepherd

One of the other things that I got to do over the weekend was see The Good Shephard [imdb.com] in the movie theaters. It was pretty fantastic. About the only complaint that you could have is that they could have tightened the movie up a little. But I actually loved it the way that it was presented.

The movie was about the CIA, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs invasion [wikipedia.org]. one of the major themes of the movie was how intelligence officers can't trust anyone. I know that a lot of spy movies touch on that theme. But almost none of those other movies are really believable. The Good Shepherd is. You really felt how alone they themselves felt.

Another major theme of the movie was how easily intelligence officers can be manipulated into betraying their own country. And again, it was amazing how real and plausible it felt.

Among the many stars in the movie was Matt Damon [imdb.com], who put on a very good performance. He wasn't like any of the characters that I've ever seen him play in another movie, and he was so natural in the role.

I thought that Angelina Jolie [imdb.com] was a weird casting choice, becuase she didn't have that many lines, and the role wasn't challenging at all.

Joe Pesci [imdb.com] and Alec Baldwin [imdb.com] also starred in the movie, but neither had many lines. It was a lot of fun seeing them in this movie, though.

There is no doubt that this was a long movie, though. It also moved fairly slowly. If you weren't into the topic and the storyline, this movie would have been torture. Again, I thought that it was fine as it was, but I understood the criticism. People have short attention spans these days.

There were tons of little details that were very easy to miss. For instance, there were multiple Russian guys who looked very similar to each other, and at one point, two of the Russian guys had the same name... Our group had to talk about the movie afterward before everyone (including myself) understood all of the plot twists. But after we all talked about it and understood all of the intricacies, I started realizing just how cleverly written it was.

All in all, very good. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thrift Store Formal

Yesterday, I talked about a New Year's Eve party that I went to. The theme of the party was Thrift Store Formal. And holy crap -- it was a lot of fun. People went all out with their costumes:





My outfit turned out to be completely boring next to everyone elses, but I made up for it by looking like a total moron in every single picture that was taken of me. I think this is the only one where I look remotely like I am not constipated:



I was wearing a corduroy jacket and an older style shirt, because I thought that look ironic. But next to everyone else, I looked downright normal. More pictures here [flickr.com].

Wait, Are They Shooting At Us?

I hope everyone had a great holiday, and a fun New Year's Eve.

I attended a New Year's Eve party in, let's say, a rougher area of Cleveland. We had a great time, and got to catch up with a lot of old friends. When it got closer to midnight, we each grabbed a flute of champagne, and headed up to the roof of the building we were in, where we expected to ring in the new year.



We did see a bunch of fireworks, and it appeared that a lot of people in a 1 mile radius had stocked up on bottle rockets for the occasion. But we also heard what sounded a lot like celebratory gunfire. For one thing, gunfire sounds a little different than fireworks, and there weren't nearly as many fireworks in the air as could be accounted for all of the cracks we heard. Plus, the steady rhythm of some bursts gave away their origin.

But, we didn't think anything of it, because it sounded pretty far away, and we figured that the chances of getting hit by something coming back down were pretty small.

That was, until we heard a blast that sounded like it was really, really close to us. And then moments later, shotgun pellets rained down on the roof where we were standing.

It was at that point when we decided to finish ringing in the new year inside.

I Need to Get Back to Work and Relax...

I'm actually really thankful that I'm getting back to work today. I have been off for nearly a week and a half, and I'm totally exhausted.

I thought that the past week would be pretty relaxing, and that it would be spent goofing off and watching movies, etc. But the entire time was spent cooking food for parties, hitting after-Christmas sales (where we mostly bought things that we would have normally bought, but they were deeply discounted), shopping for new cell phones, shopping for a new washer and dryer, and running about a billion errands that we couldn't take care of before (because they could only be run during the day on a weekday), etc.

Before going on vacation, I had one episode of Heroes [nbc.com] left to watch on-line, and I figured that would be a snap. But I never actually got to it (or any other TV watching for that matter), because the week was packed full of things to do.

So, at this point, I'm really looking forward to getting back into my work routine, which in comparison, is relaxing.