Happy Leap Day!

Today is unique in that February 29th only comes around once every 4 years. While you don't really get an extra day to get stuff done, it is a fairly unique day and so you want to do something special to mark it. Writing in my blog is always nice but something I have done before. As I mentioned yesterday, I am working on my taxes and think it would be great to have a filing date of February 29th and so that is my goal this evening. I am almost done and so it is a real possibility.

So what unique thing are you going to do with this extra day in the calendar? Hopefully something worthwhile and memorable.

Taxes Made Easier

It is tax time again and I have started working on mine. One benefit of using software like TurboTax to help as you file your taxes every year is the ability to import data. Starting your taxes is a matter of loading information from the previous year and then you don't have to re-enter data that doesn't change very often like your address and dependents. You only need to review it.

This year I have made an effort to do as much auto importing of data as possible. W2 information is readily available and I have used that in the past. This year I have gone one step further and auto imported my stock brokerage data. Once I figured out the secret of having the tax program log into my account, it greatly simplified that section of my taxes. The secret is knowing your account number and reading the directions provided by the tax program to have it log in correctly. Don't worry, you don't have to provide your password.

One area where this failed is when I tried to auto import one of my interest statements sent from a bank. The amount is less than $25 as banks don't really pay much interest any more. I tried several times to find a 24-digit number listed at the bottom of the 1099-INT form only to get an error when I entered it. In the end I gave up and entered the bank name and amount. I should have done that first as the bank name and amount came to less than 24 characters.

I still have a few more nights of working on my taxes as I go through my spending to try and find all of my charitable contributions and possible deductions. As of now that may be a waste of time as the standard deduction is more than my itemized ones. Unfortunately I won't know until I enter all of the numbers. Last year it paid to itemize. If it doesn't this year, I may skip that step next year.

The major lesson I am learning this year is to take advantage of importing as much information as possible. That reduces the probability of typing mistakes and ensures I am not going to be audited, something I have yet to experience and never want to. Hopefully this post encourages you to try something new that helps streamline this painful and annual process.

Map Directions on My Phone

Last week I spent 3 days in San Diego for work. I am fairly familiar with the area but still needed directions to find the quickest way from the airport to my company's office. I loaded the directions onto my phone before leaving the rental car lot. I drove straight to the office and arrived 30 minutes before my first scheduled meeting. The system worked well.

There is one unfortunate drawback to using your phone to help navigate. We become lazy and overly reliant on our mobile phones to help us get around. Once I made it to my office, I tried not to use any smartphone directions for the remainder of the trip. That required that I try to remember other locations in the area. I had a rough idea of where my hotel should be. Instead of looking up turn-by-turn directions, I drove to where I thought it would be and found it without any difficulty. When it came time to go to restaurants in the area, I found excellent places close to the office or near my hotel. One night a group of us walked from our different hotels and met without the need to drive around.

When I first started renting cars long before smartphones existed, I would get a paper map from the rental car company and use that to get around. Now we have a much better solution but I wonder how many people rely on smartphone navigation when they should be able to trust their own sense of direction. If you are brave and feel you have good navigational skills, trust your instincts and see if you can't enjoy the scenery more.

Writing Your First Computer Program

I have someone that I am working with and we need to write a complex computer program. We have settled on Python as the computer language and we get together frequently to work on the code together. While I have done some programming using Python, I am by no means an expert. Basically I know enough to be dangerous.

If I had 30 years slashed from my age and just started writing software, I would start with Python as it is such a good language to do a lot with using a minimal amount of code. That makes the programs easy to write and easy to understand. The only problem is that there are quite a few libraries to learn. Without the help of the Internet to help you look up possible solutions, doing anything useful in Python might not be so simple.

My coworker and I have a rather complex problem we are trying to solve but have broken it down into very simple pieces. The first thing we want to do is take an e-mail address and modify it. It didn't take that long to write the code. Next we expanded our problem so that we passed in multiple e-mail addresses and did the same modification to all of them. Then we worked on saving the results into a database. We have continued adding pieces to our code to ultimately get the program we need.

Our code writing is an iterative approach. We focus on one task and make sure the task is completed as designed before moving onto the next item. When we got the code modifying e-mail addresses and writing them into the database, my coworker felt a huge sense of accomplishment and thought we could be done. Today I reminded him that there are still a few more steps we need to do before we can say we have completed everything.

Should you decide to give coding a try. Here are these simple steps put into an easy-to-follow outline:

1. Write down what you want your program to do. This is often called a specification or spec.
2. Break the task down into very small steps.
3. Write the code for each step in the process and test it to make sure it works before moving to the next step.
4. When you think you are done, go back to your specification to make sure you have completed what you said you would.

Interestingly enough, these are the same steps to follow in trying to accomplish any goal you have. They work for more than just writing computer software.