The work week continues along. I’m starting to work on end-of-year things already, and have an appointment today with my accountant to make sure my taxes and withholding don’t need any end-of-the-year corrections. There’s been a lot of year-end planning this month, but it used to be worse. I can remember a time when the entire Mac market would be scurrying all through December to get new products ready for MacWorld in January. Now, December is actually one of the slower months, as companies have already blown their budget for the year, and are trying to figure out what to do about next year. I think I like things better this way, even if it means I’m going to be scrambling for new work in January.
I managed to put together the first of the two lists for Christmas cards yesterday while waiting on a compile. I’ve got the list of personal cards ready to go. Now I need to make the list of companies that will get the cards that I’ll be sending out from the business, and then write something for each list. If I’d planned ahead better, I would have had a custom card designed for the business, but I’m probably going to settle for something more mass-produced this year.
There’s plenty left to be done before Christmas, too. I still have a couple boxes of lights sitting in my living room, waiting for me to figure out how to plug them in if I hang them on the front of my house. There’s a light socket out there, but it’s up above the roof that covers my front door, and I need at least a sixteen foot long ladder to reach it. I don’t have one, and I don’t know if the light socket actually works. I dunno. I’m starting to wonder if the lights will go up at all this year. I’m also resigned to not getting a tree. It’s not like I’m going to be hosting much in the way of holiday events here, but I feel a little bad about not doing any decorating, but I also still need to start shopping for presents one of these days. Sigh.
- A New weapon to battle identity thieves unsheathed late last month is available in thirteen western states now, and will be available nationwide by September 2005. Here in Minnesota, we’ll be able to get free credit reports from the FTC’s Annual Credit Report website in March 2005. You can order a report from each of the three major bureaus once a year for free. [some guy]
- This conversation with Bruce Lindsay says that Designing for failure may be the key to success. It’s loosely related to the ten most-wanted bugs I pointed to last week. As I’ve been involved with lawyers more over the years, I find that one big similarity between good lawyers and good programmers is that both look at
what can possibly go wrong
and then codify the ways around the problems. With lawyers, it’s contracts. With programmers, it’s exception-handling code. If you miss something that could go wrong, you’ll be unhappy when it does in either case. [some guy] - A group of Canadians want to Free Stanley Cup from NHL, and have set up a website which is down as I write this. I think they’ve got a case, but whether they’ll be able to successfully fight the NHL is a different question. [fark!]
- Claire had a terrible thought about the TSA when asked why she won’t fly. That’s about the same feeling I have. [claire]
- Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier has a post on Airline Security and the TSA.
I think that civil disobedience is a perfectly reasonable reaction [to airline passenger screening].
[schneier]