Actually Impressed by Microsoft?

Amazing, yet true. Several months ago, I spent a bit of time searching for a decent converter program. Or would it be a conversion program? Whatever, a program to convert things to other things. No, I don’t mean like converting lead to gold, though such could probably be found on eBay. I don’t remember what I wanted to convert at the time. Maybe square feet to acres, or something like that. I found a couple of progs to do what I wanted, and quit searching. Tonight, I was searching for something to calculate download time from file size. I had a web page I saved from somewhere that did it, but decided to look around some more. And I found Microsoft’s “Calculator Plus”. It’s a replacement for the plain calculator MS gives you with Windoze. And it’s actually pretty cool. Besides calculator stuff (standard and scientific), it does conversions, including feet to chains. Doesn’t do rods, though, but everybody knows there’s 4 rods to a chain. Here’s the link, if anybody’s interested.

It doesn’t do download times, though. However, it does currency exchange, which may be of interest to those who get up too early in the morning.

Winter? Spring?

Since April Fool’s Day it’s been hard to tell whether it’s Spring or Winter around here. It seemed like Spring at first; in fact, an early spring that started back around the middle of March. The yard already had grass six inches high needing mowed two weeks ago; but I didn’t mow it. We had the air conditioner going. And then last week it was back to winter coats and furnace! It even snowed a couple days ago; not as much here, as south of here. South? Yep. Then it rained all day Friday and yesterday (Saturday) was cloudy, cold and wet. I thought I might escape mowing another week but, alas, it was spring again today. Beautiful spring. I mowed. But, first, I did taxes — though I didn’t file yet. Last year I switched from TurboTax to TaxCut, only because a free TaxCut disk came in a magazine and I figured why not try it. Same thing this year, but this year I’m rather less impressed with TaxCut. It had a goofy bug that came up telling me we had a $1.00 penalty for underpayment of estimated tax, even though we overpaid by $1500.00, and had it all paid in by Jan. 15. I figured it it out, I think, by fudging the date on the first estimate which wasn’t late to begin with but was after April 15, a year like this year where the 15th is on Sunday. For whatever reason, the program didn’t recognize that. Kansas has free online tax return filing, so I skipped Taxcut’s generous offer to sell me their state program. TurboTax does that, also.

Happy Spring, everybody!

Winter Time

It turned spring around here a couple weeks ago, set the clocks ahead, had April Fool’s Day, coming on Easter, and now it’s winter again. Very strange to look out a window, see sunshine, birds, grass nigh a foot high, green leaves and other blooms on the trees; and then you step out to get the newspaper and freeze yer buns. Reminds me it ain’t too soon to start gettin’ Christmas shopping done!

Becky went to Emporia to a baby shower, I stayed home and mostly slept. Had worked non-stop from Wednesday morning to Friday evening non-sleep, so had a little catching up to do. Was sort of nice, except now suddenly there’s only one day of weekend left and too much to do before Monday arrives! Just can’t seem to get ahead.

And only a week ’til tax return’s due. :tired: