Kids today are so spoiled

I remember when I was a kid I would fight for my time on AOL to use AIM with my friends.  It was years before my dad caved and got a separate phone line for the modem (56K, only the best), which was a combined birthday gift for my sister and I if I recall.  Then I discovered free online gaming with the epic war RTS games of Red Alert: Command and Conquer.  It wasn’t until years later that sites like Amazon and eBay existed, and even with their arrival I spent years paying via check since systems like PayPal seemed sketchy to me.  Of course, over time the virtual shifted and grew.  I now have more online accounts than I can recall and PayPal and online credit card payments are the norm.  I think i’ve used maybe 20 checks in the past 5 years.  Today however, I came across a new internet payment option that just blew my mind – “Bill My Parent$”

I didn’t investigate the feature as it seemed pretty self-explanatory, but I imagined back to all the things I wanted as a child but could not obtain for economic reasons and this feature seems like a god-send.  Of course you’d deal with the wrath of your parents for the purchase later, but for less than $50 purchases (i.e. Nintendo games) they would just yell at you and then maybe take the game away for a while, eventually giving it back to you for good behavior since they are too lazy to bother with the return process that internet purchases afford.  So, kudos to the youth of today for obtaining this feature – however, it is one more reason my kids (product pending) should be banned from the internet.

Thank you Internal Revenue Service…

…for reinvesting all my my money into Social Security, National Defense (who is attacking us again?) and Medicare/Medicade that I will most likely never benefit from when I need it later in life.

I  just finished my first pass at doing my taxes this year.  Thus, being a single & childless consultant, working in two states, as a graduate student receiving a stipend and tuition scholarships is not an ideal situation for tax purposes I discovered.  As the figure above shows, 2010 was not the best year for me in terms of my tax return (I have removed specific numbers since its none of your business).  Yes, I could have payed taxes as I go given that I’m a MISC-1099 consultant for 50% of my income; however, the fact that UB screwed me over in terms of its billing/payment cycles did not help, nor did the fact that Adecco decided to switch to a different company midyear and take out less taxes than required for my W-2.

In any event, paying taxes are lame (which is not the same as ‘not necessary’) and a better system should be devised or I should have become a tax attorney.  For example, I’m a human factors consultant, for which having a Ph.D. in the field significantly helps me to find work and succeed.  However, I’m not allowed to write off my educational expenses as a business expense (am i?), which would save me tons* of money (*if it was in coins).

So i’m abandoning my 2011 new year’s resolution to adopt a new one that is to avoid having to pay extra taxes in 2012 (e.g., do better at paying as I go, getting proper deductions taken out, and itemizing business expenses).  My old resolution was to give up alcohol; so thank you I.R.S., you have just knocked one more individual off the wagon.

Pepakura + Howl’s Moving Castle = Huge $$ Savings

Ever since I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s movie Howl’s Moving Castle I have wanted a model of the amazing moving castle itself.  I even was lucky enough to find one in the bathroom of a bar in Japan I visited (“darts”) and saw that the models that japanese artisans created for their anime movies were quite amazing.  The problem with these models however is that they cost around $600 for even a small model of the castle on eBay and even more from specialty shops.  Subsequently, my original searches for a decent sized castle model left me with only a sense of failure and disappointment…. until recently.

I was browsing the internet for paper cranes (I think that was it at least) and I stumbled across the world of papercraft, aka pepakura.  Papercraft is essentially just paper models that you cut out pieces to and then fold (and sometimes glue) to assemble.  Ironically, I have 8 papercraft models of various random figures/monsters sitting on my desk that I’ve created and custom software that lets you design papercraft models using Solidworks files you create; however I never thought to look up more intricate model templates for download.  Anyways, while I was reading up on pepakura I came across the holy grail i’d been searching for – a large scale (26 pages of full-color pieces) model of Howl’s Moving Castle.  To my great delight the model appears to be a fairly decent scale, is full color, and is (in my opinion) even better than the $600 resin models you can purchase.  The best part?  Building the model myself will make it all the more enjoyable (and the download was free).

So i’ll be starting into my Moving Castle Papercraft next week hopefully (decided to have the parents print the 26 pages of color so I could get it on cardstock and not destroy my color ink cartridges).  I’m sure i’ll document the process and hopefully add a follow-up post once its complete.  Also, if you’re interested in creating one yourself you can download the PDF template for free (just Bing it) or shoot me a message and i’ll send it to you myself.