LOCUS DEMENTIA

Before you read this, you need to download the accounting spreadsheet from IRS: IRS Accounting Spreadsheet You want to click on the "2010" link as that is the most current data. After you download the XLS file, open it and see the Table 29 "Collections, Costs, Personnel, and U.S. Population, Fiscal Years 1980 - 2010". For each 5 year span marked in the table: 1980 - 1984: 24% increase in tax 30% increase in IRS cost ($998M) 4% increase in population 1985 - 1989: 27% increase in tax 31% increase in IRS cost ($1.597B) 4% increase in population 1990 - 1994: 17% increase in tax 25% increase in IRS cost ($1.804B) 5% increase in population 1995 - 1999: 28% increase in tax 11% increase in IRS cost ($879M) 5% increase in population 2000 - 2004: 4% decrease in tax 15% increase in IRS cost ($1.497B) 4% increase in population 2005 - 2010: 3% increase in tax 16% increase in IRS cost ($1.955B) 4% increase in populatio...

I have a daughter who is a freshman at George Washington University. She has been in school for about 59 days now. For the last two weeks, we have gotten several appeals for more money on her "GWorld" spending card so that she can "eat." When she started school, her GWorld was funded with $1,000 and her Dining Dollars account was given $700. That's $1,700 to spend on food and sundries. After 59 days of school, and an infusion of $200, she is down to about $300 overall. We are able to get the transaction breakdown of her spending, which allowed me to come up with some metrics. Being female, she needs makeup and other girl things from a pharmacy store like CVS. To that, she spent $438, or roughly $7.42 per day. Being a hungry college kid, she spends most of her food money on carbohydrates and fast food from 7-11. To that, she has spent $745 or roughly $12.63 per day. Recently she discovered the magical elixer of caffeine, which comes in nifty packaging from Starbu...

The US GAO (Government Accounting Office) has published its audit of the federal reserve: Audit in PDF | Synopsis of Audit The audit shows the Federal Reserve Bank issuing $16 TRILLION in debt to banks and corporations around the world. Who authorized this release of US capital? The Federal Reserve Bank chairmen, such as Ben Bernanke. For the 340 Million happy citizens of the US, that $16 Trillion is about $46,376 for every citizen of the US. Remember back in the Bush Presidency where we all got a little check for $800, or $1200, or something like that as our "incentive" to go invigorate the economy? That little amount seems more like a slap in the face now. With $16T of cash, the US could have paid all of its debts and gotten China off of our back. Instead we continue to print paper with little regard to the consequences because the people in charge of said currency are not governed. We, the people of the United States, should be in charge of where our money is lent. ...

This is the configuration description for a Gateway 823 autoloader (LTO-3 8-tape loader): define tapetype GW823 { comment "Gateway 823 LTO3 Tape Autoloader" length 447129 mbytes filemark 6342 kbytes speed 38069 kps } This was generated using the amanda configuration utility against the loader and having the loader attached to an HP DL180 G6 with an LSI LVD SCSI card.

Today I noticed an odd little quirk about TSQL (Microsoft SQL) and SQL Server. If you have a smalldatetime, you only record date + hours + minutes. To get seconds, millis, and such, you need the full datetime. Well, if you are using "getdate()" to compare against the smalldatetime, then know that smalldatetime rounds the seconds UP to the next minute. The smalldatetime on 12:36:24.00 is actually 12:37:00.00. This caught me today in a query where I was doing a select looking for a record that occured after the last insertion time (smalldatetime) using "getdate()". That was always returning empty because the getdate() to smalldatetime conversion was giving me a date that was in the future thanks to the round-up behavior. To work around it, I had to convert(smalldatetime,getdate()) and then compare against my smalldatetime values. If you are inserting records with smalldatetime and using getdate() as the smalldatetime value, then those records will be recorded up to 1 ...

I was a subscriber to the AT&T Uverse service for a little over 2 years. In that time, we had experienced good service for the first year, and then it sucked. After 12 months, or there in, the service degraded quickly, and would stop working all together at times. At first it would die for a short period of time, usually when we were not home. Then it would get progressively worst, until there was an entire week of no service. We had technicians at the house trying to fix the service, but it would repeat the behavior quite consistently. On January 15th we finally gave up and switched to a lesser service, COX TV and Internet. In the past we had cable service and it was always reliable, but not as good as the AT&T digital service. COX doesn't have nearly as many HD channels, but that's not enough. We needed internet to be reliable, and AT&T couldn't deliver that. Cancelling the AT&T service was a nightmare. Try to find anything about such things on their web s...