January 22, 2004 Archives

Is it really sad when your Christmas tree has been sitting out until yesterday?

There it was, sitting on our dining room table (it's not a very big tree) being neglected for the past month or so (shows you how much we use our dining room table). Finally got around to noticing it again and deciding it was probably time to take the darned thing down and put it away for another year. Now we can use our table again! Like any other flat surface in my apartment though, it ends up being used as storage space.

The winners of the 2003 Stella Awards have just been announced! This is the real thing now, not the fake ones that have been making the rounds.

And the winner is...

Found my W-2 on my desk today. That means it's the start of that dreaded tax season. But, since I don't own a house, or have any investments outside my 401K, taxes for me are pretty simple. And I use TurboTax and E-file my return, so about all I have to do is enter numbers and see how much more I owe, or how much I get back. Pretty simple if all you need to do is fill out the 1040 or 1040EZ. And if you're expecting a refund back, it shows up in your bank account automagically in just a couple of weeks! It's the way to go.

Had a delightful Chinese New Year celebration at my wife's boss's house. Mostly people from the lab she works in, lots of good food. It's become a pretty multi-cultural lab since my wife started working there. Where else can you go to celebrate Chinese New Year, and have a conga line and salsa dancing break out? A good time was had by all I think. It was a good start to the new year.

Over at Dive into Mark, he talks about RSS Feed validating, and how even with feed validating services, there are still plenty of RSS feeds with badly formed XML. So there's this nifty feed validator that's simple to use, and offers suggestions to fix your bad feeds. Very neat. Worth checking out.