Jen and I are gathering all of the files we need to do our taxes, and one of those is the 1099-G, which reports on our state refund from 2022. We need this for our 2023 taxes, so I did a search on the Maryland.gov website to log in and download it. The site I was presented with looks similar to stuff I built back in 1999, optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.0. Hesitantly I registered to log in to the site—which seemed to be asking for a lot more information than necessary—and after some fits and starts (anytime a website offers a field to create a new password, the rules for the password should be clearly spelled out next to that field) I hit ENTER and expected I’d be able to see my records and download them. Nope.
It then sent me an email from “Office365.messaging@microsoft.com” with a mysterious attachment named “message_v4.msg” and a button linking to a a pre-populated “protected message”. Not dodgy at all. Knowing better, I clicked the link and was sent to a prepopulated Sharepoint page with boilerplate text requesting the state send me my record via mail and a signature field I couldn’t fill out. It took me a couple of minutes to realize I had to click a tiny button to then generate a reply window where I could enter my name, and it then required me to photograph the front and back of my driver’s license and attach them to the message. WHAT THE FUCK. At this point I knew my personal information was compromised. I hit send and was rewarded with a noncommittal screen which may or may not mean I was successful.
I’m pretty sure there’s a passport factory somewhere in Africa now pumping out dupes of my ID for doing crimes, and my SSN is all over the dark web being used to buy fentanyl and viagra. We will probably never see this 1099-G and need to file an extension for our taxes. I cannot believe this is the SOP at my state government, and that there is no portal that contains all of this information readily. But then, I also know that our local governments are being strangled by budgets and partisan fighting, so I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.
Huh. A couple of years ago I paid for a MotorTrend+ subscription so I could watch Roadkill, the original “Will it Run?”-style TV show, and they also had Dirt Every Day and Top Gear US among other good shows. Most of the rest of the channel was cable-TV dreck—Reality TV-style customizing shows that were irritating when they were on cable 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I felt pretty good about my subscription, because I liked the three shows mentioned above. I let the subscription lapse after the first year and considered renewing it, but then they watered down Top Gear US and got rid of the hosts I tolerated. Then they axed Dirt Every Day. Now it turns out they’re bleeding cash and are shutting down the streaming service and moving everything to Discovery+, where I will not be subscribing. I feel like we subscribe to enough services as it is, and seriously, if we didn’t use Amazon Prime for online purchasing, I would cancel that subscription, because their streaming selection is straight garbage.
Jesus, I can’t believe this song is almost thirty years old, and somehow it got stuck in my head all week:
Ah, the days of frosted hair and puka shells.
Also: tangentially related: the time the guy from Creed got in a fight with the band at a bar in Baltimore. Good times!
This article is an exhaustively documented dive into those “product reviews” that come up in Google searches which all seem to feature the same photos, quotes from the same authors, and link to the same crappy products. The TL;DR:summation is that private equity firms have bought most of the old trusted media entities, turned them into zombie digital properties, and are trading on their old brand names to game Google’s search rankings and fool consumers into buying shit products that don’t work well. Worse, Google seems disinterested in fixing any of this.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time cleaning up my long-neglected YouTube “channel”, which until recently has just been a CDN for videos I’m embedding elsewhere. I’ve made the realization that I need to add a lot more context around anything I post there, meaning each video needs some kind of voiceover, title card, and description so that they stand alone a bit better. I posted the latest Travelall update yesterday and within six hours I had sixty views—which is peanuts, really—but you’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose. As I’ve done work on WRI’s channels I’ve picked up some tips and advice on how to raise visibility, so I’m putting those into place to see how things go. Strangely the Hudson video has 11K views which look to be completely organic based on the stats I’m seeing. I guess Hudsons are more popular than IH.
When I had that out, I cut a larger square out to get things ready for a proper butt-welded patch. The other thing I had to do was to try and bend the rear edge of the fender outward and back into original position. At some point somebody really bashed it inwards so it never looked correct when it was hung on the truck. I was able to get it mostly back into place, and used my everyday hammer to do some dent removal. At this point I want to get an actual bodywork hammer and bag to pound out the larger dents instead of trying to hide sins with filler.
Once I had that cleaned up, I cut down a section of metal and tacked it into place. I’m going to have to finesse the bottom edge a little bit—or grind this off and re-orient it further down—but it looks like it’ll go in pretty easily.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
As someone who has a collection of tube radios, I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. The author has a huge collection of tube amplifiers, and was looking for a way to resurrect them. He bought a device called a variac, which is basically just a power transformer with adjustable input. In the article he explains how he used a variac to slowly bring the capacitors inside old tube amps back to life by slowly increasing the voltage applied; this sounds like another interesting project.
I stumbled across an article about antique refrigerators the other day and followed a link to a parts vendor I wasn’t aware of. Looking through their storefront I didn’t see mention of my fridge but figured I’d email to see if they carried the gasket I need for the IH; within a half an hour a nice lady wrote me back with a link to exactly the gasket I need. I’ve got to get out to the garage to measure how much I’ll need, but I know where I’m going when I’m ready to replace it.
Driving the blue CR-V almost exclusively for the past couple of weeks, it put the current condition of the silver CR-V into stark perspective. I took her out to get some supplies this weekend and became acutely aware of how how poorly the windshield wipers worked, filthy the interior was, how lousy the tires were, and the fact that an exhaust leak by the muffler has been heating up the plastic in the wheel well and melting it slowly over time. Before finishing my errands, I stopped in to the auto parts store and grabbed some new blades. At home I backed her up to the garage and spent a good half an hour vacuuming out the cabin and emptying out accumulated trash, which made a big difference inside. This morning, with a fresh paycheck, I ordered four new tires to be delivered to the garage down the street, and after they are balanced and mounted, I’m going to have them hunt down the exhaust issue and pray she doesn’t need an entirely new exhaust system. Eventually she needs to go in for a clutch, which I’m saving up for a little further down the road, but with new tires and a less flammable exhaust she’ll be in better shape.
Later on Saturday I cut out a section of 1/16″ 3-ply luan and laid it under the rear cabin floor of the blue car to reinforce that area. Knowing we’ll be loading her up with lots of cargo in the next couple of years I don’t want to be worrying about breaking anything. I also ordered a set of floor mats for the whole car to cut down on the wear and tear on the carpet, seeing how rough we’ve been on the silver car for the past fourteen years.
Meanwhile, our plates and paperwork came in at the dealer, so I’m going to head up there tomorrow night to pick those up.
I was surprised to see a medium-sized USPS envelope arrive in the mail yesterday, addressed to your humble correspondent; inside was a shiny new US passport featuring the new, terrifyingly bad portrait we shot here at the house where my hair looks like it’s falling off the back of my skull. I was fully expecting either a letter beginning with the words, “We’re sorry, but your application could not be processed…”, or just radio silence until the night before we’re scheduled to board the plane. It’s always great to be pleasantly surprised by bureaucracy!
I finished up a bunch of Scout II designs and posted them to my Instagram channel and to a couple of Marketplace groups, but so far there have been no bites in the storefront despite the Insta post getting a ton of likes. I would really like it if this made back some money; it was a fun exercise but I’m going to pump the brakes if I don’t make a lot of sales. Jen and I have been cranking out on a freelance project for an old friend where we’re both spending a ton of time in Illustrator—it’s time-consuming but can be done easily while playing a movie on Netflix on the second monitor—and I’d rather be doing that for guaranteed money as much as I like illustrating trucks.