I did my taxes with TurboTax as usual, and was surprised to find that it no longer gave me the option of using the 1040-PC printout. This was the OCR-friendly format which usually fit on one page. A quick web search turned up the IRS Tax Topic 251: The 1040-PC Format. It was discontinued in favor of the electronic filing method. I’m not quite ready for e-file yet (and it costs money, more than stamps). Maybe next year I’ll feel more comfortable with it after if I don’t hear about any problems. For now, I guess I’ll be sending off a pile of pages like I did before 1040-PC.

Music news music news: Another eighties band is back in view: The Psychedelic Furs are back and on tour. And they’re planning for their hits to sound just like you remember ’em because lead singer, Richard Butler, says “I really dislike it when bands get back together, and they rearrange the material so much that you can’t even recognize it.” I like it when bands put a different twist on well-known pieces at live shows, but, yeah, completely distorting a hit is not the way to get your fans up and dancing. Joe Jackson is at The Fillmore Monday night (that claims to be a special acoustic show) and The Warfield on Tuesday night. Dogstar, featuring Keanu Reeves is still, as far as the billboard on Lawrence Expwy knows, scheduled to play at The BackBeat on April 15. And via Yahoo’s Weekly Picks, Wayne Studer, Ph.D. has written a Pet Shop Boys Song-by-Song Commentary. Find out the meanings behind songs you’ve never even heard (unless you’re a super-fan like he is, of course).

I’m not really sure what just happened. We were in a really long line at Blockbuster (though I’ve been in longer there). We gave the very outgoing cashier my rental card, the movie we were renting, and $5. She asked if I was “Lilly”, and I said “yes”. We expressed sympathy for her being short-staffed on such a busy night, and she asked if we liked free stuff (“well, uh yeah”). Then all of a sudden we were leaving the store with: my rental card, the movie we rented, the $5, a Charlie’s Angels DVD (to keep, for free), and a 30 day – 30 DVD rental card. The entire way home I kept asking “What just happened? Are you sure we didn’t give her any money at all? Why do we suddenly have this free DVD we didn’t want?” Huh.

Good thing I’m easily amused. I just saw a real estate listing for a home in Los Gatos that reads “PRICED BELOW MARKET: $4,100,000” Ha ha ha ha ha ah ha hah ahhh wahhhh! Another listing smugly touts the availability of electricity in that neighborhood (city-run utilities… although I’ve heard they are also subjected to PG&E;’s rolling blackouts).

NY Times article: People who collect paint-by-number art! “The paint-by-number concept was the work of two men: Dan Robbins, an artist who worked for the auto industry, and Max Klein, who manufactured paint.” There are collectors with over 500 paintings of this genre. I guess there’s a collector for everything. And that’s why there’s eBay. (I was planning to post this before I saw I could nip yet another link from Larkfarm: Le Salon de Paint-By-Numbers. Thank you Mike!)

A Nightmare sharing website linked to on Larkfarm made me remember my latest anxiety dream. I have recurring anxiety dreams (I’m always worried about something; it’s a bad habit) of the “I can’t turn the TV off and there’s the same thing on every channel” genre, or the “I am supposed to be on a plane but I’m late and I can’t find the right gate” variety. This one was brand new (out of the rut, into a new groove!). I was driving a car and looking at the left sideview mirror. All I could see in the mirror was the reflection of the side of the car. I could not see what I wanted to see, which was the road and any cars that might be coming. My hands were frozen to the wheel so I couldn’t adjust the mirror, and my eyes were pretty much frozen on the mirror as I tried to figure out why I couldn’t see anything except the side of the car when I wanted to see so much more.

We had more technical difficulties on Thursday, so excuse the hiccups.

From New Scientist, someone has developed software that can take English language statements and turn them into machine language. Creator Bob Brennan won’t reveal details about the system, called “MI-Tech”, until his patents come through. The key to it apparently is knowledge of the role of context in English. I wonder how significant his developments really are. One could picture a simple system that does what he claims, but then you start dealing with ambiguities and it gets complex quite fast. And I sure hope the patents aren’t going to cover obvious tactics.

A NY Times Magazine article on Charlotte Church revealed this tangential bit of information on the classical recordings industry: “When CD’s became available in the 80’s, classical music aficionados began going through their records and replacing them, album by album, with digital versions. The result was a decade of vigorous sales, during which labels merely repackaged the same music into ever more expensive collections and sat back to count the revenues. But now the changeover to disc is largely complete, and sales are down by nearly half, according to some estimates.” The result of this trend is the use of pop music marketing tactics. To me this means selling the fluff instead of the substance, which often also means appealing to the masses. But it also seems to take more money to push the fluff, leaving even less to spread around to those who aren’t a flavor of the moment. Anyway, classical music sales were probably saved by the release of CDs and would have dived sooner without them. Perhaps it will take a new technology to spike it up again (and that won’t be Napster). But if the fluff gets more people interested in the classics, more power to the ’em!

A co-worker was researching glass harmonicas (invented by Benjamin Franklin) and discovered the website for an actual manufacturer of the instrument. “In Europe?” I asked. No, to my surprise, they are in Waltham, Massachusetts. G. Finkenbeiner Inc. specializes in scientific glassblowing (lab equipment), but also makes glass harmonicas. You may have “played” on wine glass rims yourself. It’s harder to do on the cheap stuff you get at your everyday restaurant (and probably very bad etiquette when you are at nice restaurants with the expensive crystal). But you can often get a decent glass to “ring” with the right amount of pressure. An odd sidenote: the founder, Gerhard Finkenbeiner, has been missing since May 1999. His Piper Arrow is presumed to have crashed and they have yet to find the remains.