keep keepin on..
September comes around..
I haven’t written anything since before I left Texas. It’s been 3 months since then.. A lot has happened, but it’s hard to even pinpoint what those things are. Both Megan and myself are still unemployed. Both of us have tried, but the job market her is just crap. Kinda sucks, since we both had decent jobs in Texas.
I’m working on getting a consulting business off the ground, and looking for the next big thing. I have a couple ideas, hopefully something will work out. If you’re in Shepherdsville or Louisville and you need someone to work on your computers, network or website; Check out my site FIVE OH TWO.
I guess that’s about it for right now.
Funny stuff
Got this voice mail the other day from Fox. While the message itself is mildly humorous, Google’s transcription of the message is epically bad. I actually donated the message to Google so they could use it to improve. No, really I did.
Here’s the message.
Here’s the transcript. I was really hoping the embed feature would have the transcript in it, so it would highlight as it plays.. but no such luck. You’ll just have to imagine it.
WTF
LOL.
Music I’m Currently Obsessed With
The National – High Violet
I seriously have a love hate relationship with this album. I can’t tell if I love it or if it’s really boring. I’m still not sure, but this song rocks my world.
Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
I always liked Lazy Eye, but I never knew much of their other stuff.. This album is pretty damn good, and I listened to it a lot at work.
Death Cab for Cutie – Narrow Stairs
Amazing album, start to finish. This isn’t the best version, but they have the official version of this song disabled for embed. Losers.
My taxes and welcome to them.
Today is the 24th of May. Over a month after normal people have filed their taxes. I have not.
For the first time in the last 5 or 6 years, I thought I was going to get my taxes done on time and might even get a refund. However, due to my former employers thoughtfulness, I am still trying to get my W2 correct.
Best I can tell, Turbochargers.com and it’s owner David Rafes, decided to withhold taxes from my checks, but only pay about half of that money to the IRS/SS/Medicare/etc. Instead I ended up with a 1099 and a W2. Both for roughly half of my total income from.
Undoubtedly, this is his way of screwing me and at the same time, saving himself $1000′s of dollars in taxes. He claims that the computer records were lost. His own accountant suggested that I just deduct the withholdings as “an expense.” Sounds like the fail to me. I offered to provide copies of all of my paystubs. They ignored this idea.
I have filed a complaint with the IRS, and I will continue to press this issue as long as possible.
From: Ann McKenzie <ann.mckenzie@sbcglobal.net> Subject: update To: Sean Newton Sean, I went to turbo yesterday. David took every document related to all payments to all parties down to TWC and they reissued the wages for all, grossing them back to gross pay. David does not want to reissue anything not that the TWC is done. I recommend reporting the W-2 and 1099 income as issued to you and counting the taxes withheld (and employers portion ) as an expense so you can be done with the return. Ann M. McKenzie Attorney/CPA 281-374-9600 (phone) 281-374-9601 (fax)
Perfect advice. FAIL.
The first car I ever bought..
Ten years ago today, I bought my first car. I had two vehicles before that, both of which I have fond memories of, but today I picked and purchased the first (of many) car of my own.
It was a 1996 Honda Civic CX Hatchback in Midori Green. The car was basic as could be. It didn’t even have a radio. I though this was because someone had took it out when they traded the car in. Nope. No radio, no speakers, nada. I had a radio for it, I wasn’t expecting to have to buy speakers too.
The very same day, I had the car totally disassembled. No need to wait!
I kept the car for about a year and a half. I sold it to my friend Dustin, who sold it to some guy in North Carolina, as I recall. It’s probably riced out now.
Rate me, bitches!
You know at the bottom of those emails from your tech support people, where it asks you to take a survey and you might win something? Yeah, they use those ratings for something. I wrote a little script so I could cut and paste my most recent ratings and see my average. We’re expected to stay above a 9.0. I’m just on the edge. I got rep bombed with some 1′s. 
$ ./rate.pl -n Sean's Hack-O-Matic Rating Hack! HUZZAH! # Rating Total Avg ======================================== 1: 10 10 10.00 2: 10 20 10.00 3: 10 30 10.00 4: 10 40 10.00 5: 9 49 9.80 6: 1 50 8.33 7: 10 60 8.57 8: 10 70 8.75 9: 9 79 8.78 10: 1 80 8.00 11: 9 89 8.09 12: 10 99 8.25 13: 10 109 8.38 14: 8 117 8.36 15: 10 127 8.47 16: 10 137 8.56 17: 10 147 8.65 18: 9 156 8.67 19: 9 165 8.68 20: 10 175 8.75 21: 10 185 8.81 22: 10 195 8.86 23: 5 200 8.70 24: 10 210 8.75 25: 8 218 8.72 26: 10 228 8.77 27: 10 238 8.81 28: 10 248 8.86 29: 10 258 8.90 30: 9 267 8.90 31: 8 275 8.87 32: 10 285 8.91 33: 10 295 8.94 34: 10 305 8.97 35: 10 315 9.00 36: 10 325 9.03 37: 10 335 9.05 38: 10 345 9.08 39: 10 355 9.10 40: 10 365 9.12 41: 4 369 9.00 42: 10 379 9.02 43: 10 389 9.05 44: 10 399 9.07 45: 5 404 8.98 46: 10 414 9.00 47: 10 424 9.02 48: 10 434 9.04 49: 6 440 8.98 50: 8 448 8.96 51: 10 458 8.98 Rating Average: 8.98
Here’s the code, just for those who are curious:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
getopts('hn');
if ($opt_n) { $nolog = 1; }
if ($opt_h) { print "USAGE: $0 [-n]\n\t-n = no logging\n"; exit; }
# Eat it, Yoshi!
@ratings = `cat ./rate.txt`;
$history = "history.txt";
# Setup variables
$total = 0;
$rate_total = 0;
print "Sean's Hack-O-Matic Rating Hack! HUZZAH!\n";
print "#\tRating\tTotal\tAvg\n";
print "========================================\n";
foreach $line (@ratings)
{
chomp $line;
# If a blank line or a comment (#) skip the line
if ($line eq "" || substr($line,0,1) eq "#") { $currentline++; next; }
# DURTY DURTY
($spam, $ham) = split/Rating: /,$line;
($rating, $spam) = split/\]/,$ham;
# NO NUMBER? NO CARE!
if (!$rating) { next; }
# If ticket had multiple ratings, let's not cheat ourselves. Conquer and divide... (and average!)
if ($rating =~ ",") {
@multirating = split/\,/,$rating;
foreach $mr (@multirating) {
# For each rating, you need to increment your count to keep the average correct.
$total++;
# Add the new to the existing
$rate_total = $rate_total + $mr;
$current_average = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);
print "$total:\t$mr\t$rate_total\t$current_average\n";
}
} else {
# Incremement for the average.
$total++;
# Add the new to the existing
$rate_total = $rate_total + $rating;
$current_average = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);
print "$total:\t$rating\t$rate_total\t$current_average\n";
}
}
# Average the totals, round to 2 decimal places
$avg = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);
print "Rating Average: $avg\n";
# Log it for historical tracking.
if ($nolog) {
print "Logging disabled\n";
} else {
&HistoryLog("$avg");
}
sub HistoryLog
{
my($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
open (LOGFILE, ">>$history");
printf LOGFILE "%02d/%02d/%04d %02d:%02d:%02d => %s\n",
$mon+1, $mday, $year+1900, $hour, $min, $sec, $_[0];
close(LOGFILE);
}
Whatever’s wrong with me is here to stay…
I found a DVD with a bunch of mp3′s that I had backed up.. In there, I found a bunch of old Louisville indie/punk/hardcore/whatever.. So I’m rocking out. Lots of Metroschifter and Falling Forward. You can see what’s going down by looking at my Last.fm widget.
Sold a couple more things on craigslist today, including one of my car stereos that’s been in a box for over year and our grill. The grill I just wanted gone, getting paid for it was just a bonus. I didn’t want to take it back to kentucky, and I didn’t want to just throw it away. Sold it for $50, which I figured was fair enough. I didn’t even flinch when the guy paid with a check. I figured I could play russian roulette for $50.. As luck would have it, the check was good, and Bank of America (where it was written from) didn’t even try to charge me some astronomical fee to cash it, as I am no longer a customer of that institution of lending.
On to slightly more depressing news, I bought some boxes today. I spent $87 on freaking cardboard boxes. I didn’t even buy a bunch. One bundle each of small and medium boxes. Good thing I’m trying to throw away everything I don’t think I’ll ever miss! Trying to break my packrat ways.
Closing on a brighter note, spent about 2 hours on the phone yesterday speaking to people (whom shall remain nameless for now) that I’ve had previous business relationships with, and we’re hoping to do some business together soon. Be good to hit the ground running when I arrive back in Louisville.
I’ve been cleaning up my data, cleaning up my possessions, now I just need to clean up my financial affairs, and I think the rest of 2010 will be ok.
Monday is my favorite time of year…
Another work week has come to a close, and here we are…. During this last week, I’ve given my notice, I turned 30, and I’ve had a serious motivation issue. Of course, my motivation, or lack there of is nothing new at all.
I felt like I struggled this weekend with my ticket counts. I only had 45 or so tickets on Sunday, and Saturday I didn’t close my 40th until right at 10pm. Granted, both days were slow, but still. Today wasn’t particularly busy and I closed 56 tickets. My ratings have sucked, largely because I’m just not getting any. I got 1 rating yesterday out of 46 tickets and it was a 1. Today I posted 56, and I got two ratings, a 9 and 10. Anything 2-9 is fucking worthless to me. 1′s suck, but I’m more of a yes or no, white or black kinda guy. Just so you know, at the job, you’re expect to maintain a 9 or higher rating. With today’s 9 and 10, I’m at a 8.6.
When I was leaving work, it was starting to lightning. As I drove home, the lightning got progressively stronger. On the beltway, the lightning got awesome. Cloud to ground. I wish I had a camera fast enough to get some shots.
By the time I got to 1960, it started raining, hard. I had the top down. I managed to get all the way to my apartment complex before I really got wet. If the gate had been open, I probably would have been fine.
So now it’s Friday (monday) night.. I watched the season finale of House which was pretty awesome, now I’m killing my Netflix queue. Good times.
Nerds at play, disregard.
Saving this for later.. read part of this, and it seems interesting, but I have no time for jibber jabber, and work is calling my name, so I’m using this as my bookmark.
It’s Orgasmatron 5.1: The Ultimate Asterisk Kitchen Sink
Asterisk + Google Voice + A whole bunch of other stuff. May be useful in my quest for global domination.
Edit: and while i’m here, I found this in a google search for a cheat command to update all the SERIAL numbers in my DNS zone files..
http://www.commandlinefu.com/
The command, by the way is:
sed -i ‘s/20[0-1][0-9]\{7\}/’`date +%Y%m%d%I`’/g’ *