Earthquake report

Nothing stupid to talk about except myself so far today. Last night at 4:37 AM we had a small EARTHQUAKE. I realized pretty quickly what it had to be and assumed it was New Madrid. It woke me up. At that point, having never been through an earthquake where you could REALLY feel things shaking, I had no idea how severe it was other than much larger than any other Earthquake in my experience. So I woke Cinda. She went to see if the earthquake had woken Clarisse up and stumbled because the house was shaking so much. Everything was rattling so I have no idea how much of the overall noise, and there was a fair amount of that, was the earthquake itself versus all our stuff rattling around. I asked Cinda if we should head to the basement and then remembered that in an Earthquake gas lines can be a major danger. So I headed to the basement anyway to make sure I couldn’t smell gas. By the time I got to the first floor, the shaking has stopped although some stuff was still rocking from the quake and making slight rattling noises.

Basement was fine. No smell of gas. Power worked. Internet worked. CNN and local station web pages had no reports. Cats were acting guilty like they might be in trouble for the earthquake. Cinda came down and asked me why I wasn’t checking TV and then she did so, but also found no reports. We wondered if maybe it hadn’t bee a quake, but I found the USGS page which said we had just had a 5.4 quake in Illinois. The weird part was it wasn’t at New Madrid; it was way over south of Effingham, near Evansville and Vincennes. Not what I expected. Cinda reminded me that if we had an aftershock, I should take shelter in a doorway. This is where I was dumb, because I knew that but forgot when the whole house was shaking. I filled out the USGS page reporting what I had felt and where I was located, logged out, and went back to bed about 5AM. I even tried to go to sleep.
See, there’s my Great Earthquake Adventure of April 18, 2008.

Pay me to save money

You know why e-filing and e-billing is so wonderful? It's because it's good for everyone. Easier and faster for me, saves money for merchants and banks. How is this you ask? Simple. Almost any business or entity's biggest cost is personnel and thus, anything which reduces the amount of personnel saves the entity $$$. When you use electronic means, the entity does not need as many folks to open mail, process mail, or do data entry (because a good e-system will take the data supplied and enter it automatically).

According to NPR this morning, the IRS's goal is to have 80% of people e-filing by 2012. The IRS charges you something like $10.00 to e-file mind you. Even assuming that they still had to process every check by hand (and not deal with e-financial transactions) and counting that they need to review the data once it is entered in their system electronically, they will save a lot of money if people e-file. That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have the privilege of paying them $10.00 so they can save money. Your government in action.

It's the equivalent of pulling into a gas station and paying more to use the self-service pump.

Until the IRS gets its head out of the sand, I'm going to keep paying less than a dollar to MAIL in my taxes and the IRS can suck up the cost of opening them, entering the data, and mailing me a check.

Monday

It's Monday... and how! So to add a bit of humor to pre-tax-D-Day Monday, here is an image from icanhascheezburger.com.