Checksum Arcanius

Today, I submitted my transfer application for admission the the University of Washington for Autumn 2005. Yeah, its almost two months late, but an application with a plea is better than no application at all, as I see it.

Next step is to apply to the BioEngineering department, my first choice major. Apparently, besides being the #1 program in the nation, it is also the most competitive at the UW. Good times.

Come join the Libertarian Party of King County at the Bellevue Azteca resturant for the April 2005 Liberty Forum. Speaking will be King County Councilman David Irons, who has announced his candidacy for the position of King County Executive, hopefully to oust Ron Sims.

I recieved a somewhat disconcerting message in my email today –

Dear RYAN MCELROY,
At this time, you must check the electronic file (e-file) status for the tax return filed using this username: _______

Well, I investigated and I learned that the IRS had rejected by tax return because there was an inconsistency between some W-2 information I had enterred and the records the IRS had on file. I carefully looked over my two W-2’s (From Blockbuster and Microvision) one time, and compared them to the information I had entered into my return. I didn’t find anything, so I repeated the process a second time. Then a third time. Finally, I noticed that I had the second number in Blockbuster’s Federal Tax ID wrong. It had remained hard to notice due, I believe to its position in the number.
After patching up the mistake, I resubmitted the tax return. The e-file process really is amazingly painless. I can’t recommend it more wholeheartedly.

So, I just finished reading Heinlein’s Space Cadet, which is notable not because it is anything extraordinary, but becuase its the first book I’ve actually finished in a good while, and I did it in a fairly striaghtforward manner (ie, no long pauses in the middle). The other two current works, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I have been working on for more than a month (no progress in about a month), and Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, I have been working on for more than a year (although I recently made some progress on that one).

Sigh…

For a while now I have been meaning to pick up on my game of Half-Life 2. It had lagged for quite a while due to the fact that I mostly only played Counter-Strike on the computer, and just never got around to started up the game again. Well, today I did start up the game again, and I had forgotten how nice it is as a single player game. I was able to advance a fairly good ways, although I ran into another (this is the third) place where I found an alternate olution that clearly should have worked but was disabled by artificial game boundries. These things I find very annoying in a game that is otherwise so well done.

Nevertheless, I have now met the giant city-eating machine up close and personal, I have found that ant lions are pretty good pets to have around (and I even feel bad when I send one into a booby trap… but not that bad). On the other hand, this new thrust into Half-Life 2 means I’m still not done with my UW personal statement for my transfer application… not good. So, I stopped just now, and its back to the grindstone.

Seattle Times Special Report – Airport Insecurity

I remember predicting back when the TSA was formed in 2001 that it would solve nothing. That it would just create another false sense of security. And, it appears, for once I was right.

After traveling via air in the months following 9/11 – through Salt Lake City, where the Olympics were about to happen and security was supposedly higher than in other airports I found that there were appaently numerous other ways to get weapons or almost anything else aboard a flight. I am completely untrained, yet I’m almost certain, given some time, that I could do it. I even tested the system a few times with things that wouldn’t get me into any real trouble. Although I got caught once (ended up having to check the bag, and almost missed my flight), even that experience didn’t instill much additional confidence in me for the airport safety infastructure.

One thing I’d like to try sometime it to make a thin insert that will give a x-ray image that looks like a gun, and then slip that insert into the sleeve of binder. Then the screeners would keep seeing a gun in the x-ray machine, but they can’t for the life of them find the gun. Oh boy. What fun that would be. Until I started getting raped in the jail cell.