Xeeban’s Musings

Well, its been a long while since I posted here last. In that time, I’ve finished school, moved to Canada and started a new job with Abe Books. I’ve been pretty self absorbed with adjusting to the new location, the new job and meeting new people.

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I spent a few hours this weekend finishing up my taxes. I am always suprised each year at how much a pain in the butt the whole process is. Luckilly I’ve been using Turbo Tax for the web. Its saved me literally hours of frustration and hassle. Its a nifty web-based program that pretty much walks you through all the details of doing your taxes. It even checks for errors, gives suggestions for missed deductions, and is all around a very cool thing to use.

It just takes a few minutes to get all the various W2, 1099 and other forms you have, log into the website, and a while later you’re all done. Highly recommended. Even better, you can then file electronically and ask that any refunds be sent via direct deposit. No fuss, no mess. We live in glorious times that even tax time is easier.

Did you remember to set your clock forward an hour? I’ve always hated Daylight Savings time. I lose an hour of sleep! Grrr.

I’ve dug deep into my browser’s on-disk cache and discovered that I has some JPEGs of my studio there, and a quick search of Google recovered my old studio page. So with those two serendipitous events, I’ve been able to reconstruct my studio page. Enjoy!

Here I am with a brand spankin’ new site. Why, you may ask? Well… its a painful story of how a stupid person picked the wrong hosting company and basically lost everything to a hard drive crash. My provider was doing a “routine” upgrade of hardware when there was a problem… then my web site went “black” (off-line, down, buh-bye) for 5 days without a single response to several frantic support tickets. Then on the 5th day, the bad news. Really bad news. They lost a hard drive. A score of customers were affected in some way. A handful lost everything. And, oops, sorry, we don’t have any backups. Yes, I was one of those unlucky few to loose it all. Poof, digital oblivion.

So here I am. New provider (that does regular backups!), new blogging software. Let’s hope that this time I stay around for a while… =)