less than this

I've just made two new T-Shirt designs up in my CafePress store, using their recently-released black shirts. I mostly just design these products because the ideas come into my head. Buy them if you like them, ignore them if you don't.

One design is a little hard to see and read, but that is the point; it's black text printed on a black shirt. With time, as the fabric inevitably greys out and the ink remains black, the humor will only become more and more apparent; this is a shirt that becomes better with age, like a fine wine. "my other shirt is BLACK"

The second shirt, designed in the last few moments, is just internet humor. More than that, it's only a first attempt. If you can think of a funnier was to put this concept on a T-Shirt, let me know. I can put it on a shirt, you can put it on a shirt, whatever, I'm not a capitalist, I'd just like to see the idea on people's clothes. "Ask me about my weekend!"

That's all for now. Enjoy!

So, my sister called me at 5PM to let me know she'd been handed her W-2 form (I didn't work today) on her way out of the office, so I went online and grabbed a copy and printed it out and went online and found a place to file Federal for free and I'm sure I could have found a different place to file State for free, but I paid the $10 so I wouldn't have to go through the 'interview' a second time, and yadda yadda yadda, and I'm e-filed! And if/when my returns are accepted, both State and Federal will - like last year - electronically deposit my refunds! Yay for the internets! I printed out hard copies of everything to file, and that's that, I just wait for the email confirmations and then the money.

How much money? Well, enough that the road trip I'm planning to take in February is much more comfortable, and enough that I can afford to buy the list of art supplies I've been putting off buying because the total is now closer to $150 or $200 than $10 or $20... Let's see... Adjusted gross income for 2005: $21,404, blah blah blah, Federal refund: $814, State refund: $447. So I guess my withholding is set too high, but I think I'll leave it where it is for now. And put most of that money towards paying down my highest interest debt.

My grandmother has finally been released from the struggle and pain and confusion she has been in these many years, and has gone home to heaven.
This is a huge relief for all of us, is surely a joy for her, and should take a mighty amount of stress off my grandfather, whose cancer will probably allow him to join her this year.

Memorial services will probably be next Saturday in Pine, but if you want to attend please contact me for specifics.

This just in... I can't breathe caramel very easily.

...and it leads to much choking and distress to try.

I forgot something I wanted to put in that last post, a bright point.

In my time off, I actually had a use for the Taguchi Method of experimental design! It wasn't, perhaps, the most complex thing I could have used the method to solve for, and the end result was that I proved that my intuition was correct and about half the people posting about this thing on the camerahacking forums are idiots... but it worked. See, I wanted to set the cameras to have the best possible image quality, and there are several different settings with several different options and some people said the best quality was one way and other people said the opposite and a handful had random weird choices they preferred. To test all the combinations of settings individually would have meant shooting not less than 32 videos (and re-setting the camera's settings after each one) and then judging all 32 videos' quality individually (preferably twice, in two randomized orders of playback, to remove bias). I used the Taguchi method to design the experiment, I shot 9 videos and my result was surprisingly conclusive. Not to mention that watching all 9 videos twice (with my brother giving additional, independent ratings to mine) took less than a quarter of the time it would have taken to watch a full set of experimental videos. Yay!

That is all. I just ... I spent a while a year or two ago putting Taguchi into my brain and have never had anything to do with it, since I'm not an engineer and don't work with large data sets to solve problems... So I was glad to have something semi-useful to do with it. Even if it did just confirm what I intuitively knew before I ever had the camera in hand.