“That’s one big Twinkie…”

The Taxman Cometh…Finally
I literally just finished my taxes about twenty minutes ago and didn’t end up making out too bad this year. I’ll have to write a check for just over three hundred bucks, but that’s really not too bad when you figure that I didn’t pay any estimated taxes on my writing income throughout the year. I was a little disappointed that my charity donations didn’t even show up – I thought that the deduction was better than that, so I guess I’ll have to do some more research before I do it this year (not that it’s a bad thing to donate to charity or anything, but in all honestly, I did do it to help offset my expenses). Anyways, I’m not quite ready to mail them just yet – I’m going to go over them again tomorrow night when I get home to make sure everything looks ok, then hike on down to the post office to stand in line with the other half a million idiots who put this off ’til the last minute!

Next year I’ll do it on time, but at least maybe I can get an entertaining column out of it or something…

Fixin’ the Compruder
So I tore my server apart today and it’s now officially dead, as in it won’t even boot anymore and I really don’t care. Now that my taxes are done and I know that I’m not getting killed by Uncle Sam, I’m going to see if I can piece together something new as long as it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg. I figure I can do it for a few hundred easily, plus a little more if I want to add another hard drive because the ones that I’m using now are gettng pretty old. I pulled the My Documents drive and plugged it into my desktop PC in the meantime and I can’t believe how loud the thing is – I can’t wait to have it back in the closet again! Of course, for about $80 I can replace all three of the 80GB drives with a 300GB and have room to spare – I might just buy two and RAID them together to make future drive crashes a little easier to deal with … we’ll see tomorrow after I run some numbers.

The Art of Deception
I got the book by Kevin Mitnick earlier this week and this is literally one that I just can’t put down! Talk about intriguing – dozens of simply brilliant cons are analyzed as Kevin explains the finer details of social engineering and how even the most secure of protocols can be broken down when people aren’t thinking clearly. I know there a lot of skepticism about the hacking community and some people probably think that Kevin should still be locked away, but like it or not, the man is a genius and that really shines clear in this book. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking for an interesting read with a bit of a geeky flare.