LateNightHacking Louis Journal

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Good evening. Well, what can I say today? Life seems to be settling back to some semblance of normalcy. I've been waking up earlier, which hopefully indicates that I'm getting more sleep. I've been exercising relatively frequently recently, which I'm happy about. Weight is relatively stable, though I'd like to still be going down. Seems like I've been generally hungry recently, but there was lots of birthday cake today at work and I only had one piece so I get a little gold star for that. I've been doing a good job of keeping up my daily work log. Now if I could only manage to write in my journal regularly, I'd be golden. Well, that and a million other things. :)

I did pretty good last weekend. Besides all the festivities, I spent a lot of time working on taxes. I finished 1040 schedule D part IV and the whole AMT, more or less. At it's heart, I think income taxe is pretty straight forward. The problem is that if you do something weird, then calculating the tax is also weird. This is most especially obvious when you start making money on financial investments. Apparently, it even gets to the point where no one, not even the IRS, knows how to calculate the tax. You can choose how to calculate it yourself, assuming you can provide a convincing argument for your calculation. Now, I also find it difficult to follow when they just give arbitrary math instructions. I basically have to reverse engineer the algorithm to figure out what they're really trying to calculate. Still, the result is usually pretty straight forward. That said, the AMT is a hole. What they actually want you to do is calculate your taxes two or three times (for one or two tax years) using different rules and then pay the highest amount. And by that time they've given up trying to make the instructions simple. I guess they assume that if you're calculating AMT, you can handle it. Anyway, now the main thing I have left is state tax. I'm hoping to precalculate my 2004 tax so I get my withholdings exactly right. Unfortunately, I keep finding I owe more. Ouch. I guess it's better finding out now when I still have six months to spread it over than finding out I owe $2000 next April.

I reached another milestone in the next version of the instrument service I'm writing. I can now read an arbitrary table using only metadata ("with one hand tied behind my back"). This last chunk of functionality was probably a couple hunderd lines of code, I was again in the situation where the main limitation was how fast I could type. Of course, last night I was stymied for a while because I couldn't figure out how to get the behavior I wanted from the interfaces I currently had (how to get from point A to point B so to speak). I spent quite a while hammering out a new set of interfaces, creating, scrapping, and moving methods around. Finally I got what I wanted, and from there it all fell in to place. Sometimes it feels like I can write more code in a single sitting before debugging and verifying it (and have that code actually work) than I used to be able to. It's due to more experience, I guess. Still, thinking about it, I realize that it doesn't apply all the time. Sometimes, it seems like I can spend ages rigging up test cases just to make a couple line change. Unit tests have their advantages, but they can sure slow down coding.

And somehow, I decided to write today's entry because I thought of something while I was trying to catch up on some of my comics. I don't remember what that thought was, but it probably had something to do with wishing I could keep up on the comics without having to slack off elsewhere. Sigh.