Income tax

Washington is on its way to introducing a personal income tax for the first time ever.  Fortunately it shouldn't impact me - it's being called the "millionaire's tax"because it proposes a 10% income tax on households earning over a million dollars a year.  Which I don't have a problem with - but I think a lot of people do (unsurprisingly, mostly Republicans).  I don't mind as long as it's not a gateway to imposing income tax on everyone in the state - one of the key benefits of living here.  It's one of the few states that doesn't have income tax - but makes up for that by having one of the highest sales tax rates in the country (10.6% where I live).  With the taxes and the Iran War, we now also have one of the highest prices of gas (petrol) in the country as well.  All this tax talk reminds me that I haven't done my tax returns for this year yet.  Which is always a "fun" way to spend a weekend, and something I need to do before the end of the month.      

AI Questions

We've got an all-hands meeting this week with the topic of "Scaling and adopting AI to transform how we work".  Horrifying.  In advance of the meeting, we have been asked a couple of questions to "help shape the discussion" and to create some stupid word clouds.  Here are the questions, and the answers I submitted:

Q. What word(s) come to mind when you think of an organization that is successfully utilizing AE?

A. Singularity

Q. What word(s) come to mind when you consider the AI change journey ahead?

A. Layoffs

It said that the responses were anonymous - I really hope that's the case.   I just checked the word clouds, and neither of my words appear anywhere.  Of course AI is going to ignore my responses.

Spring Forward

So now the sun sets at 7 pm, thanks to our clocks springing forward this morning.  Which should mean the start of nicer weather.  Nope.  Today was a rainy, miserable day - one of many coming up over the next few weeks.  And the day was made worse by losing power this afternoon.  There was no indication that this was coming, but something knocked out the power for my entire neighborhood for a few hours.  Maybe a convergence zone formed?  That is when westerly winds that are split by the Olympic peninsula converge and cause intense localized weather conditions.  There was definitely a brief period of quite windy weather during the outage.  Maybe that was enough to knock some trees down and take out the power?  Either way, the power cut has had one positive effect in that my TV signal seems to be a bit better now.  Let's see how long that lasts...!   

Oh yes, and a happy International Women's Day.

Cable TV sucks

I finally got someone from the cable company to come round to my house today to look at my ongoing cable box issues.  For the last few days, my TV signal has been noticeably bad.  Not bad enough to stop me from watching TV, but bad enough for the picture quality to affect my viewing experience.  The "technician" was here about 5 minutes, and all he did was swap out my cable box.  I've now got a wireless one.  But has it fixed my issues?  I'm not sure it has.  As far as I can tell, the only difference is that instead of my picture breaking up, now the screen goes black briefly whenever the signal drops.  So I think there is still a fundamental issue with the signal strength coming into my home - which I don't think the "technician" who came here even checked.  And if it persists, I'm going to have to see if I can get someone else out here.  Hopefully someone who actually knows what they're doing.  And if there is still a problem after that, then I am officially cutting the cord.  Something I should probably do regardless.   

This week

For the first time this week, I've actually managed to remember to write a blog entry before I go to bed.  Says a lot about my state of mind this week.  Totally fried by work.  I feel like they're wringing every drop out of me before laying me off.  And I'm getting into some bad routines and bad habits when I'm busy and stressed like this.  But at least the clocks change this weekend here - a welcome sign of longer daylight hours and better weather.  Though the upcoming forecast would tend to disagree - not a single sunny day in the next 2 weeks...

Downtime

A fun day at work today.  Loads to do, and our programming environment was down most of the day.  So couldn't and didn't get anything done.  Do we get any leeway in our timelines for a delay that was out of our hands?  Of course not. 

Nostalgia

I've just been watching a new episode of Scrubs.  I didn't think I'd be saying that in 2026.  And as far as reboots go - if it's even called a reboot when most of the original cast have returned - it's pretty good.  But it feels out of place - apart from the cast looking a bit older, it seems almost exactly like an episode that would have aired 20 years ago or whenever it was.  Not something that belongs to the America of today.  In the same vein, we've got new episodes of Malcolm in the Middle being released next month - again with most of the original cast returning.  It just goes to show that there are hardly any original ideas in Hollywood any more.  But I don't mind these kind of reboots if the original was good and the reboot is also good and does justice to the original.