County assessor's letter arrived today, looks like they are doubling my property tax. Boo. Hiss. Turns out they re-assess any time it is sold.

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Got to work just in time for what was billed as a hands-on demo of a very complicated video analyzer. It was nothing of the sort, partly thanks to the two bozoids from upstairs interrupting the sales engineering rep before he even showed his first slide.

It was a disjointed, scattershot presentation with a lot of interruptions. No actual hands-on, and the presenter talked so softly and with a thick accent it was mostly useless. His marketing rep (identified easily by her Apple laptop) spoke louder and more clearly, but it is apparent this is an amateur company and we are using their product strictly because of a low price point compared to the professionals.

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Finished my digital signal processing project and wrote it up. Customer description of the issue was wrong, much worse than the actual issue. In short, some versions of the product pretended to allow you to add a text crawl or overlays or change the resolution of the video on a trigger or a schedule, but when you looked at the output it wasn't there. But any pre-existing ones continued to work. Most of our customers don't change those after they put them in place.

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Got my nails done. Had to wait 10 minutes for the owner to get back from dialysis. Would rather have it done by her little sister, but she was booked. No time for lunch but a snack at the bakery a few doors down.

Back at work, not much to work on, so I researched telescopes, and ordered one which looks much better for photography than the one I have. Two main points" f/5 compared to f/12.1, eyepiece is at the top on the side, not at the bottom middle.  Also has a unique tripod built for scopes.

Meanwhile I need to organize all my lenses and put everything in the carrying bag, and think about putting it on eBay or Craig's list.

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Costco on the way home. Spent almost $150 and am pretty sure I'd have done better at Safeway. Prices at Costco are skyrocketing, but the requirement to buy in bulk remains.

Home, heated some canned dolmathes from the produce store and three pork buns from Costco. Watched two episodes of TMZ. I am soooo behind on my Tivo watching.

Took the second load out of the laundry, could only find 5 of 6 socks. These are my black socks for the show. #6 showed up on the floor as I was hanging up my shirts.

Email from baby sister, she will be here Saturday. We may have time to do lunch. Pissed because she is flying into SFO not SJC, and wants to go to the farmer's market, as if she will be able to bring anything back home with her. Original plan was a bike ride. Looking forward to seeing her & her husband, they are both acoustical engineers with lots of Navy experience, and I am eager to pick their brains about the search for the Malaysian airliner. Due to the nature of her work, we can't mention stuff like that in email, let alone FB.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Leave at 5
Show at 7:30

Last things first. Just watched Miley Cyrus' latest video for her song-like object called Wrecking Ball.
( Cut because I care )

I watched it because I saw on CNN where Cher of Miley's MTV awards shenanigans "her body looked like hell". I thought her body looked like heaven, and CNN said I could see it naked in her video, which is the best way to tell how a body's body is. And I am here to say Cher never looked half as good. Miley doesn't dance in the video, which is probably a good thing. The song is whiny and repetitious and more of a sound loop than a tune, but oddly enough her harsh singing voice sounds a lot like Cher's.

Aside from Miley, the video has issues. There are poor edits, major lip sync problems, continuity is sorely lacking and the images don't match the words. On the plus side, the videography is stellar, lighting is excellent. Makeup is a tiny bit overdone in the close-ups but fine in the long shots.

I wouldn't buy the CD or the DVD, but I'd sure watch more of her nakedness.

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Started the day once again at the doctor's having my blood pressure checked. It was still high, but in a weird way. The first time the diastolic was okay but systolic was high. Second time it was reversed. I told the nurse the new meds put me to sleep, but she didn't pass that on to the doctor because tonight the doctor said to double the dosage. I won't be doing that.

It only took 5 minutes to run the test - it is supposed to take 20, they didn't do it right. That was enough time to go to the car wash, which the care sorely needed. Not that the car has sores.

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Work was way too much fun today. After they took away my test machine, they had the gall to ask me for the test script I was using. This after running it more than 10,000 times and proving it had nothing to do with the customer's issue. First time I have ever raised my voice at this office. Unlike them, I document everything I do on the bug database, if they had bothered to actually read the bug docs they would see the script was right there.

Lunchtime was manicure time. Michelle was having allergy problems, and she got trapped into helping a wedding party who all wanted pedi/mani, so instead I was serviced by the very young-looking waif Tiffany. She did a very good job, and is pleasant to look at, but not the beauty queen Michelle is.

Since it was only a little jog way from on my way back to work, I went to the small Asian grocery on Lawrence to buy moon cakes (today is the day). They were almost all sold out, I think it was actually last night. Bought two tins at $20 each, one from SF and one from Sandy Eggo. At check-out each got its own re-usable shopping bag with the bakery's logo. I also bought a couple of pounds of longans, which will be devoured in the next couple of days.

Home after work, let the cats onto the patio for a bit. Watched football until it was time to leave for band practice.

This time I remembered to glue in my teeth. Used the new old horn, and have to say it does not sound as good as the old new one, but the mouthpiece is better for high notes. It's really small but still a trombone/baritone one. My lips did not hurt tonight, I chalk it up for playing all summer. One more rehearsal and one more concert and we're done till next May.

Home by way of 99 Ranch, to see if they had an moon cakes, but they were closed. :-( Will try them tomorrow maybe.

Finished watching the game, except Tivo cut it off with 3 minutes left on the clock. After I told it to add an extra hour. This time it didn't matter.

Dinner was a hodge podge after digging out the freezer. I have about 4 lbs of ham in there, sliced, from last Thanksgiving. Or maybe it was Xmas. Found three frozen matzo balls which I didn't know were left. So I made matzo ball soup with ham bits. Also reheated a small serving of corned beef and stuffing. And had some ice cream.

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Sold the OEM radio/CD fr5om the new Corolla on eBay to someone in Manteca. Looks like a resale business, actually. Only got $100 for it, which is a shame, but since I got it for free with the car, that is fine, we both win.

In other windfall news, in the mail today was a check from the state Controller, it was the refund for overpaid capital gains taxes. When Google bought Motorola Mobility they gave us a formula to compute how much $$ we had lost on Motorola and Motorola Mobility stock when those two companies split. I had sold all my MMI stock last year, and my cost basis was a guess. Google's formula said I had lost around $30k, when I had guessed $8k. Not the actual numbers, but a reasonable facsimile. The IRS allowed me to amend the return online, and the refund from them took less than a month. I got it May 8. California doesn't allow that, and they don't do direct deposit for revised returns. I had to mail it in and wait for a check. Amusingly, on the check stub it suggests the refund will be faster if it is sent online and direct deposited. 

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Deposit check
Moon cake?
Costco?
???

Drove downtown to deposit my final TiVo check and get some cash for next week. Friday morning my agency called and said they needed my hours so they could get a direct deposit in by EOD, some law or other requires them to pay on the last day of work. After I did so, she emailed back that they would UPS express me a check. It's that kind of crap and miscommunication which Harvey Nash has made itself famous for with me, I will not be using them again in what is left of my career. If I do recommend a replacement for me at TiVo, I'll send her/him to the main agency the company works with.

Went to Clocktower, had a pina colada smoothie and a cinnamon bun, and did some online research on the parental tax issue. Keep forgetting it is too warm inside and too bright outside. *$s wins. Went home still feeling drained, took a nap and woke up questioning whether getting dressed and out to Ellie's lecture was a better idea than staying in bed. Ellie won.

Tried to punch the venue up in the GPS, it was not there. Google maps on my phone found the place, but it did not have the address. I followed the phone's directions - turns out to be very close to Netflix. Wonder why I remembered it as being more downtown SJ?

Found the room no problem, Ellie gave a fascinating talk on Adaptive Optics, "Un-twinkling the stars", which is the work she does at Lick Observatory. The physics is similar to active noise-canceling acoustics but it is applied to flexible mirrors instead of headphone diaphragms. She's a superb presenter, knows her stuff, and the talk flew by quickly. I chuckled at the first line of her last slide - it said the advantages of Adaptive Optics was clear. She said the pun was not intentional. Dr. Ellie is a gamer and sci-fi fan and will be at Worldcon, and she mentioned she was looking for new filkers to listen to, so over on FB I pointed her to Mary Crowell, Kathy Mar and lemmozine. She would probably also like Tricky Pixie and its individual members, but I suspect she already knows about them. Ditto Vixy & Tony. Both of us have about 4 items per time slot we want to attend. I won't know till I see the size of the rooms whether the con programming folks have scheduled way too many events or if the spaces are so small they had to do it that way. And when does anyone have time to see Reno?

Late dinner again. Flying fish roe does not go well with wheat thins. It needs something not-crunchy to sit on. Reheated Chinese BBQ pork was a sufficient main course. Fudgesicle for dessert.

Plans for tomorrow:
Car wash
Coffee w/Janice

Woke up at 6, got on the computer around 7:30, played till 10-ish, breakfast was a cinnamon raisin bagel with light cream cheese and a hardboiled egg.  Got my butt out to the movie theater half an hour early for The King's Speech. which I'll review some other time. Enjoyed it a lot, the three leading characters were what acting is all about.

From there to Starbucks nearby, enjoyed the eye candy, which is plentiful near the theater.

The weather was a festival of clouds of many varieties, moving in different directions at different speeds. That usually means a cold front and rain Real Soon Now, so I went straight home and nibbled on grapes and cashews and channel surfed a bit.  CNN is once again trying to make the news instead of just report it, this time it's Libya. They play the same shabby cellphone video over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in a window as they interview people who have nothing substantial to say. At one point they put their "Internet technical expert" on to say sweet nothings about how hackers will always find a way to get news out of a country no matter how shut down the Internet is there. This is a 20-ish woman who is wearing black thick-framed glasses with tape on the camera side, wearing a very expensive looking silk blouse. I'll bet real cash pennies she's an actress, not a techie. The almost total lack of non-government news from Libya made her statements a lie. The anchorclown said something inane along the lines of it is hard to get news when the government is not releasing any.

There are 195 countries in the world, many more than the three being reported on by CNN are in the midst of various degrees of war, revolution or just plain bad governing. But CNN's format is to pound one issue into the ground 24/7 because it is easy. 

After an hour or so of flipping channels I decided eff it and went upstairs and took a nap.

Dinner was more home made chicken soup, this time I boiled up some more barley because I had not put nearly enough in the original recipe (it tends to drop to the bottom of the pot and burn).  Dessert was a banana-orange-chocolate smoothie. Yummy.

Looked at the calendar and realized it is after Feb 15, my brokerage info would be available to download into TurboTax, so I did my taxes. After importing the data, the refund indicator went from getting fed and state refunds to owing the IRS $8500 and California $1400. Stupid TurboTax did not import the cost basis for two tax-free mutual funds I'd sold. After those bits were entered by hand, the refunds came back.

Funny story, that. When my inheritance came through, I invested most of it in a pair of tax-free funds which my father had held. But I forgot that he lived in WA State, which has no income tax, and those funds were taxable in California. So a week later, when this revelation came to me, I sold those two funds and invested the same amount in two California tax-free funds. In the week which had passed, the price for the funds had gone up, which made them a short term capital gain. I think.

Anyway, taxes are filed, and we'll see what the IRS and Franchise Tax Board say about Turbo Tax's math.

Plans for tomorrow:
Scan the job listings
If she calls/emails, tell the trainee recruiter in LA not to bother with the Cisco job, it's too late now.
The rest depends on the weather.