Doing my taxes….

Posted on by

I think there’s a lesson in here somewhere…

This week, I did our taxes. In the past, I’d handed that off to accountants, but we’ve simplified things and I was fairly confident that I could do it myself. The only complication was that we’d be filing jointly for Federal, but separately for State. No biggy, right?

I banged all the data into the basic TurboTax DIY web system, pulled stuff directly from banks and so forth, with no problems. But when it came to the State return, the system directed me to a dense page in the online help, which told me that I’d have to prepare two complete sets of returns – one joint, one separate – and file the Federal from the first and the States from the second. And because #reasons, I’d only be able to file by mail.

This sounded tedious, and error-prone. The obvious answer: upgrade to the premium TurboTax service, and let them do it for me. So I clicked Upgrade, and started a web chat with a Product Expert. (Not the Preparer, just a gatekeeper.) She told me I’d have to begin by uploading all my documents into the Checklist. “But I’ve already entered all the data, it’s in the system.” “Oh, no, we can only see the stuff that was imported electronically. None of the data that you typed yourself will transfer to the new return.” When I pointed out that this was crazy, she offered the following: “OK, I can drop you out of Full Service to let you get at the return you’d been working on. Then I suggest you screenshot each page. You can then return to Full Service and upload the screenshots, so that your Tax Preparer can enter the data.”

At first, I resisted. I tried to enter some of my data using the Full Service checklist, but it was completely useless. For example, there was a checklist item for Social Security income… but it only allowed you to enter one SSA-1099. If you have several, you’re SOL.

Reluctantly, I did what the Product Expert had suggested. I retraced my steps through the DIY web interface, and built up a folder containing 45 screenshots and 6 other documents, like photo IDs. I switched back to Full Service, and started to upload the files, to prepare for the call with my Tax Preparer.

After I’d uploaded 22 files, the system refused to upload any more.

First, I had a stiff drink. (I’ve moved from single malt Scotch to Bourbon recently.) Then I cancelled Full Service, and bought a copy of the Download/CD TurboTax Windows application. To my surprise, it successfully imported all the data I’d entered into the online service. I finished the whole Joint/Separate stuff in about an hour, with no significant issues. In part, this was because the UI of the Windows application was vastly superior to TurboTax’s web based services, and I had full control over the various versions of the return. The validation and issue resolution UX was crystal clear, highlighting each problem by showing the exact tax form fields involved. (In the online version, you have no visibility whatsoever into the relationship between the on-screen dialog and the resulting tax form entries.)

So what are the lessons here? It’s instructive that the only smooth data interchange occurred when I imported web data into the desktop app. I can imagine the desktop app team thinking, “These online services are likely to be problematic: let’s make sure we can always give the user a way of recovering by moving to the more reliable, old-school desktop environment.” Yes, there’s always a risk that the old desktop app will become an orphan in the world of web and mobile solutions, but I think TurboTax has managed to avoid that…. probably because accountants tend to be conservative. (And a good thing too!)

The timelessness of privileged anxiety

Posted on by

Facebook’s current outage is a great impetus to do more with my blog….

There’s a great little piece in today’s Sift that is worth highlighting:

Conservative rhetoric seems to be timeless. I ran across this quote in the book Freedom: an unruly history by Annelien de Dijn (which I will say more about after I finish it). Cato the Elder, speaking in 195 BC in favor of an anti-luxury law that the women of Rome wanted to see repealed (because it specially targeted women’s jewelry), warned against allowing women to have a voice in government:

The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.

We still hear that point today from every overprivileged class, directed at every underprivileged class. Whether the subject is women, people of color, non-Christians, gays and lesbians, non-English speakers, transfolk, or what have you, the message is the same: There’s no such thing as equality. So if men, Whites, Christians et al. stop being the masters, they’ll become the slaves.

In spite of Cato’s efforts, the Lex Oppia was repealed. But Rome never did become a matriarchy. In more than two thousand years of testing, Cato’s they’ll-take-over theory has never proved out. And yet we still hear it.

What I’ve done

Posted on by

My friend Deirdré Straughan recently posted a short rant on FB in which she said:

My career – the entire span of it – is something to be proud of. I have never stopped learning and innovating, and I have worked hard to make things better for customers since long before Amazon came along.

So I have updated my resumé to include ALL my experience. With dates. This is who I am and what I’ve done.

https://www.beginningwithi.com/resume-deirdre-straughan/

This motivated me to finish off a piece that I’ve been kicking around for a few months, and published it here on my blog. I’ve chosen a narrative style rather than a resume, and I’ll probably revise it occasionally to add more details. Anyway, this is my career, this is what I’ve done over more than fifty years, and like Deirdré I’m really proud of it.

Blog reactivation

Posted on by

As the subtitle above suggests, I’ve had a blog for many years. When I was working – and particularly when I had a job that required an active presence in social media – I blogged very frequently. My recent gigs required me to keep a lower profile, and coincidentally I refocussed much of my personal commentary on channels such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result, this blog languished – it was practically moribund.

But now I’ve retired, and I feel no constraints on what I might write professionally. Furthermore, I find that I’m spending longer on Facebook than seems entirely healthy, and I’m sure that some of my friends and family are getting a bit tired of my political postings. So I’ve decided to try to switch back to blogging, and limit my engagement with Facebook. We’ll see how successful I am.

Here we go….

Four Google WearOS Smart Watches

Posted on by

The value and usefulness of a smart watch depends on two things: the device, and the software. A few years ago I moved out of the Apple ecosystem, so my recent smart watches have all been based on Google’s WearOS, an Android-based system. Unlike Apple’s closed world, WearOS is intended to be used by many different device manufacturers, with different ideas about what these devices should look like. This is an interesting challenge.

I presently have four WearOS devices:
(1) Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro
(2) Skagen Falster 2
(3) Diesel Fadelight
(4) Michael Kors Bradshaw

These four devices have three different control configurations and two different screen technologies. Thus although all are WearOS devices, I interact with them in quite different ways.

The Ticwatch Pro was one of the first “second generation” smartwatches for WearOS, and I understand that Google worked closely with Mobvoi on it. It’s the bulkiest of the four, and has a two layer screen (a bright, colored, hi-res display and a low-power monochrome overlay). This gives it a degree of “always on” use without the color display draining the battery. It has two buttons, but no crown (clickable rotatable button). This means that every selection of a new application, or scrolling through messages or notifications, involves swiping on the screen. This didn’t seem like a particularly big deal until I got the Skagen; since then I hardly ever use the Ticwatch. Ease of use matters.

My second WearOS device is the Skagen Falster 2. It’s a lightweight utilitarian watch married to a cheap and cheerful yellow silicone strap, which works just fine. It has a crown and two buttons, and each button can be assigned to launch a specific app. (I tend to use button 1 for Google Fit and button 2 for Weather.) I really like this watch, and only gave it up because something even better came along.

Watch number three is the Diesel Fadelight. I really can’t recommend it. Physically, it looks like a rather chunky watch module snapped into a stiff clear vinyl strap. It’s not very comfortable, and the buckle is awkward. The Fadelight has a crown, but no buttons, so there’s no way to launch an app quickly. (Launching an app takes four actions: click to turn on the screen, click again to show the apps, scroll or swipe to the app, and click or tap to launch. On the Skagen, I simply double-click the assigned button.)

And then I got the Michael Kors Bradshaw, which has become my favorite watch. Firstly, it looks and feels just right: it’s got a navy blue aluminum case and multilink band, with an optional blue silicone strap. It reminds me of my old Citizen SkyHawk, which I wore for many years. It looks and feels like a classic. For controls, we have a crown and two buttons, like the Falster 2, and I was able to set it up to work just the same in a couple of minutes. Compared to the other three, it comes with an amazing range of faces. Some are the kind of “bling” that I would never use, but others demonstrate a tasteful and creative combination of style and function.

One more point: charging. The Ticwatch Pro uses a custom charging dock, with four contact pads. The other three all seem to use the same white magnetic two-pin charger, which mates with the sensor module on the watch which is set inside two contact rings. I’m glad to see some standardization emerging here. (It’s also worth mentioning that the dual display of the Ticwatch Pro didn’t prove to be a big advantage. With “tilt to wake” turned on, all four watches have 24 hour battery life, which is good enough for me.)

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends….

Posted on by

I’ve been blogging since the last century, but I really got going in 2003. (You can read the first few posts here.) I’ve moved from Moveable Type to WordPress, shifted my hosting to various sites (including grommit, our Solaris x86 box), and most recently to a virtual machine in the AWS cloud. I’ve spun up various parallel blogs – things like clueweaver.com and speakingofclouds.com – but over the last few years my blogging has fallen away to almost nothing, leaving an insecure, poorly administered WordPress site that was probably a magnet for botnets.

So things are changing. I’ve killed several sites, including Speaking of Clouds, and I’m moving all of the blogs which I run (for myself and others) to the managed WordPress service of A2. I’ve used them for various work projects, the Cumnor Hill Books site is here, and the price is right.

Does this mean that I’m going to resume blogging? Perhaps. The decline in self-hosted blogging has been widespread, as people have moved to FaceBook or Medium to share short and long form updates, but I have a hunch that widespread skepticism about big social media platforms may translate into increased autonomy for writers. In addition, much of my blogging was always related to my work, along with the technology and travel that were inextricably involved with it. Over the last few years, my professional responsibilities have been less… bloggable. I anticipate some changes over the next few months, and it would be good to get back into the habit of writing.

So welcome back….

Update on moving in

Posted on by

As we continue unpacking and getting set up, I’ve found one system that didn’t handle the move too well.
About four years ago, my storage system (for music, photos, videos, backup, VM images, and so forth) consisted of two Firewire 800 boxes: a WD Macbook Studio (2TB) and an 8TB RAID enclosure. Since my latest iMac didn’t support Firewire, I used a Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter. This mostly worked, although the RAID enclosure usually needed power cycling after I rebooted the iMac. Performance was decent.
When I got around to unpacking everything and setting things up on Saturday afternoon, I was met with a lot of noise from the RAID enclosure. Some of it was a failing fan, but there were other worrying undertones. And about 10 minutes after booting, the RAID system simply went away. Ouch.
Fortunately, all of the really important stuff was on the Studio. The RAID was mostly used for local backups and staging to Backblaze (my cloud backup), and I knew I could retrieve or recreate everything on it. (And I was willing to retire a few hundred gigabytes of VM images from OpenStack and CloudFoundry testing.) But I knew I would need more space than the 2TB on the Studio. After lunch, I headed over to the nearest Best Buy and picked up a new Seagate Backup Plus Hub. 8TB for around $200. Who would have thought it, eh?
So today everything has been consolidated on the Seagate, and both of the older units have been retired. I’ve reconfigured my Backblaze setup, and all of the laptops and other devices are happily backing up to the iMac again. And Firewire is history…