Tax Time

Oh, Fun. Oh Joy…

Each 3 months I promoise to do things better… And I never do. So I am poring over receipts and bank statements attempting to gain order from the chaos. Ha. Doesnt work. I am not actually planning to close my books for a week or so, but it is still a headache. The worst is when I deposit four cheques at once and forget to do the paperwork. RIght now I have a cheque for $2,350 deposited but I dont know what it was from. If anyone here for some reason just deposited the money into my account can you stand up now.

MYOB has a few interesting missing ‘Features’ when it comes to reconciling accounts. It can sort by Transaction ID or by Date. It cannot sort by Transaction Name, or by value. Either of which would make it so much easier to reconcile accounts. Still that is what upgrades are for I suppose. Another good feature would be to be able to remove any entries immediately once they are reconciled. This would make it easier to see things.

Visual Studio

I found something out about it today…

“…since Visual Studio.NET uses case-sensitive filenames when looking up embedded resources”

How dumb is that… One more entry on the VisualStudio DUMB list.

PowerLine Broadband

SlashDot.Org is reporting that the Arrl, (Of which I am a member) has an article on Powerline Broadband in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA. Basically the experiment has been shutdown thanks to interference issues. Anyone who has read my posts on Whirlpool will know that I have been suspicious of this technology since the start. The problem has been interference with licensed services.

Think about it. The signal is being sent on an un-bounded conductor. There are enough problems with signals leaking from CoAx cables. But he we have what us Engineers call a ‘Transmission Line’ and like any transmission line, they will tend to radiate. And if the signal radiates it will most likely cause interference. The way that CoAx copes is that so little signal escapes because the braid operates as a faraday shield. The only way that Power Line BroadBand would work without interference is by having the signal sunk into the load, attenuating it. But this effectively causes problems decoding the signal, meaning more power and more signal.

What they are doing which is good is using wireless (802.11) for the final hop into the house. This works well in the USA where stepdown transformers are needed everywhere since the voltage is lower and therefore the currents are higher for the same power. This really means that four times the number of transformer capacity is needed, roughly… It is nice to live in a country where the voltage is a bit higher.