Ogden Nash, who is my favorite poet (hey, there is a REASON I specialized in statistics and not English lit, you know) once said that the worst kinds of sins were sins of omission because sins of commission you at least get to have fun while committing them. So, if you paint the town red, leave your wife and eleven children to sleep with a super-model or embezzle all of your company's money and live high on the hog until they drag you away in chains, at least you had fun doing it. If you fail to pay your taxes, on the other hand, there is no fun part, there is the just the being dragged away in chains part. As Nash said, no one runs into a bar and shouts, "All right boys, the next round of unpaid taxes is on me!"
Not only did I spend a ton of time in the past few weeks collecting all the documents for taxes, entering it in line 267, Box A but only if you had a smaller amount than $1,432.27 in line 36, Box C of Form 812XYZ-q23, but it has been the same on this website.
We are being profiled on Idea Cafe starting on April 18, which is pretty cool, and in preparation, I have been trying to spruce up our website, which is one of my 34 tasks I try to do every day. I did read a suggestion from someone that your to-do list should be no longer than eight items, one for each hour. I don't know what kind of business that person runs, probably selling leaves to sloths in Costa Rica. Honestly, I really did think that I had misread it at first and that it said eight items per hour.
Fixing the website is a daily activity because we have literally thousands of documents and hundreds of pages, written over several years using various types of software. We started in what seems like the last century (actually, I think it was, in the 1990s) using Netscape Communicator's free web design software. Outgrowing that, we switched to Adobe GoLive which was then renamed CyberStudio which was then taken over by giant ants who ate all the people. No, I got that wrong. It was discontinued since the same company bought Macromedia which makes Dreamweaver. In the interim, I tried using Rapidweaver which is really nice for creating a mock-up of what you want a website to look like. Unfortunately, if you look at the actual HTML code, it appears that it was written by hamsters. Sorry, Rapidweaver people. Your software is really, really cool for some stuff, like the photos of our vacation in the Bahamas. And is really not a good file structure for maintaining unless the words 'good' and 'maintaining' can have entirely different meanings than those with which I am familiar. So..... ta da - our Intranet is now up, no longer in Rapidweaver and 90% of our website has been converted to Dreamweaver as I rapidly became conversant with CSS, snippets, templates and other good stuff. Unfortunately, like the taxes and the mailed letters, much of what I have done is not really visible.
So, I am off, to pick up my dry cleaning, pack, teach my children's judo class and fly all night to Miami from where I will be telecommuting this week. Why? Because I am also the Director of Development and Vice-president of the United States Judo Association. I needed another thing to do like I needed to be shot in the leg. So, why am I doing this? That's another story.
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