All things considered, I think I'd prefer to be paying tax . . .

The good news:  With my parents claiming all five of us as dependents for 2003, it looks like neither we nor they will have any tax liability for 2003.  They'll get to pick up all five exemptions (worth $15,250), plus up to $3,000 of child tax credit, which will totally wipe out their tax liability, while our standard deduction (the only deduction or credit we get as dependents) wipes out ours.

The bad news:  This only works because we had so little income last year that what they were able to send us, plus paying off our car loan so that we didn't lose our car, added up to more than half of our total support, and because although the standard deduction for dependents is only $750, our gross taxable income for 2003 was only $330.

I keep telling myself something's got to shake loose soon.  But it keeps not happening, and -- honestly -- I'm so discouraged and so burned out on jobhunting that just the thought of another web search for job listings brings on anxiety attacks.

I hate being unemployed and stuck in this festering hellhole.  (Did I mention we've caught or killed four mice in the last 24 hours?)

Go Microsoft

And Microsoft screws the pooch again....

From a mailing list:

Speaking of bad MS products, I got bitten by a wonderful one today.  One of the subscription sites at $WORK has recently had a huge drop off in new subscribers.  We couldn't figure out why until we tried to sign up using IE6 on XP today.  Go through the whole subscription process, clicky, clicky, get to the last page with the large form, submit and it fails, no data actually gets posted.  Turns out that a month ago MS pushed out a patch via Windows Update to IE that makes POSTs send no data if (and this is the good part) it's on an SSL server and you take more than 15 seconds to fill out the page.  As of today they are STILL pushing out this patch, and while there is a fix in the MS knowledge base, that is NOT available via Windows Update.  I spent 4 hours tracking down this problem and getting a workaround in place today, and who knows how many subscribers we've lost because they couldn't register.  Wish I could send MS a bill for this.

Just for giggles and grins . . . .

. . . I offer the following excerpt from the documentation for my ICB client, ICBM:

( Clicky )