Income sources

Sunday night I was over at my parents house. My brother and his wife were trying to do their taxes and having trouble classifying things. Our Dad printed a copy of Publication 525 and found this great little bit on page 32.

Stolen property.
If you steal property, you must reports its fier market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner.

I already owe enough taxes. It's a good thing I didn't steal anything last year.

Interesting news about bad behavior or "I'm shocked! Well, not that shocked..."

Last friday morning at 11:01 I got an interesting text message from Bob.

"Sarahbellum has been asked to stop blogging by the company. See her blog or mine."

I worked with Sarah until just over a month ago. Now, I really don't like working for companies that show signs of retardation and I must say that Protherics is just such a company.

I am not surprised that they asked her to stop blogging. It fits right in with their general way of doing things that can be best summed up thus:

"Lets not tell anyone what's going to happen and when we decide to roll something out lets do it so fast that we can't take time to avoid mistakes."

I don't put up with this kind of retarded behavior in the companies I work for. If a company starts getting too retarded I start sending out my resume.

I must admin though, I am biased. After all, I did leave.

Thorw a snowball day!!!

I just noticed Bob's post commemorating throw a snowball day.

Today is the 237th anniversary of the Boston Massacre where some people threw snowballs at British troops and were shot in return.

Some part of me wants to go throw a snowball at some TSA people. Nothing like a reenactment involving the latest oppressors to celebrate those that misbehaved before us.

If you think about it this isn't so different as it may appear. At the time they were throwing snowballs at representatives of their current legitimate government.

I wonder how fast would I be beaten and tried as a terrorist if I tried throwing snowballs at TSA staff today?

Preparing for fab

This last week I've been working with my favorite circuit board design software. It's no secret to many who know me that I'm a serious nerd so it should come as little surprise that I'm finally getting one of my projects I've worked on fabricated.


It's a power control board. I'll hook it up to a computer serial port and issue the PIC16F688 commands to enable and disable power through any one of the 4 relays on the right side of the board.

I've never done this before. In fact... I'm not even sure it's going to work. Sure, I'm confident enough to spend $78 for a run of boards and $35/board on parts, but really, do I KNOW it's going to work?

Keep reading to see how Shaun's first steps into embedded design go.

Trust

I have been talking to a fried who has had some legal trouble within the jurisdiction of holaday city.

Between this and the legislature being in session it has caused me to ponder what is going on with our laws. They're pretty messed up.

I think it's a matter of broken trust.

We as citizens need to be able to trust all three branches of our government.
We need to trust the legislative that it will pass laws for our benefit, but not to the point of controlling us and our behavior.

We need to trust the executive that the police officers that are doing enforcement are doing so for our benefit and not for selfish reasons of having power over others.

We need to trust the judicial that it will take the time to understand the intent of the laws and that there may be real justice for all; both for the accuser and the accused.

Finally, these branches of government need to trust that the people they serve (for they exist only to serve these people) are capable of doing what is best for their own lives or living by the consequences of their actions.

I have come to the realization that what really has gone wrong is that this trust is broken.

The legislature doesn't trust that we can be aware enough to be responsible for our selves so they pass laws that make decisions about personal liability criminal infractions.

We no longer trust the legislature that they are listening, and that our representatives understand the proper role of government.

We no longer trust our law enforcement that they will respect our rights as citizens.

We no longer trust our judges that they will, with full fairness, consider the law or even be available without great expense.

Most of all, we no longer trust each other.

How many of us are there that will have a conversation with our neighbor before seeking for remedy by calling the police?

How many of us seek to change annoying behavior by having a law passed?

How many of us will try to force someone to change because we think what they are doing is foolish?

I firmly believe that every person has the ability to determine for themselves what is right for them. I also believe that it is not the place of government to stop someone who is on a path of self-destruction; it is possible that trying to force them to stop may perpetuate it further. It is the place of the people in the community to reach out to those that are harming themselves by their actions.

I don't think people in this country understand what it means to be free anymore, or what it requires. Many don't believe they can allow others to be entirely free because they don't trust anyone to use freedom responsibly.

The trust in all directions has been broken.

Ward websites

I'm the ward website administrator for my ward. This means I'm supposed to update the calendar and do other helpful things.

Today there was a training meeting where we discussed the proper use of the ward websites. I being the restless person that I am decided to figure out how to automate exporting the calendar. It took about an hour.

Here's how I did it. wget is a wonderful tool. It's good for downloading web pages.

wget --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt\
--post-data="username=&password="\
https://secure.lds.org/
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt\
"https://secure.lds.org/?monthIndex=&currentYear="

You find the loginForm target path by looking at the source of https://secure.lds.org/units/

You find the path to the calendar by observing the calendar link target.

The monthIndex and currentYear variable are required. You will end up with an error page if you don't supply them.
I generate their values using the date command:
MONTH=`/bin/date +%m|sed -e s/0//g`;
YEAR=`/bin/date +%Y`;

The sed command is meant to strip the leading 0 off of the month number.

The final thing I do is
grep `date +%m/%d/%y` calendar.csv
This returns the list of records for the current date. This is going to allow me to generate an RSS feed so that I can see each activity on the day when it comes up.

I just won't be able to tell you where the feed is. I have to keep it to myself because this data doesn't have easy public exports (like RSS feeds and ical subscriptions) for confidentiality reasons.

However, this does not diminish the coolness of the hack.

I can supply the shell script (passwords removed) to anyone interested in downloading their calendars in an automated way.

Disclaimer: This is in no way supported by the LDS church. If you use this information to automate the downloading things from your ward website it is up to you to act responsibly and not break the terms of use. This information was obtained by viewing the source of the main login page and reading the wget(1) man page.

Moving

This week I decided to rent a room and move in with my grandpa.

The first thing that this means is that I need to go through my crap and throw a bunch of it away.

The second thing it means is that I'm not going to run for holladay city council this year. It probably would have been fun, but I don't think I would have time with my job at backcountry.com. Either way, I can still run for state legislature. I could support the de-retardation of our state's laws.

It's still 6 weeks away, but it should be exciting.