According to a news report, California may issue some sort of IOU instead of cash for state income tax refunds.
If you expect you’ll be getting a refund from California when you file your 2008 state income tax return, be prepared: you may instead receive a “registered warrant.” Translation: an IOU.
California is rapidly running out of money. Blame it on the state budget deficit that continues to bleed billions of dollars from California’s reserves. Facing inadequate credit to make up the difference, California’s Controller John Chiang warns that by the end of February, the nation’s most populous state may not be able to pay some of its debts, and instead be reduced to issuing those creditors IOUs.
That’s remarkable. The State Assembly has run this state into the ground, spending way too much and giving into the unions and special interests. It’s finally catching up, spending more than we have. The size of the state budget has increasing disproportionately to revenue and population for the last several years. The politicians are incompetent, and the eceonomic mess is unmasking their idiocy.
Boston.com’s
Tellico gets mentioned as one of the 45 or so software titles on the whole openSUSE 11.1 feature list. Maybe they have some sort of user tracking that tells them Tellico is popular?
The feature list seems to come from a wiki feature list for 11.1 so maybe someone just added Tellico there. In any case, that makes me pretty excited!
I downloaded openSUSE 11.1 but haven’t installed it yet. With the end of year Christmas activities, upcoming nuptials, and family travel, I have far more important things to focus on. :P
Out of Discover Magazines’s top ten astronomy photos of 2008, my favorite is the video of the moon circling the Earth, taken by EPOXI (nee Deep Impact).
The announcement that MSL was being delayed until 2011 hit folks at work pretty hard. Though I’ve not worked on the project, I know many people who have and they were all hoping that somehow, the mission could find a way to proceed to the 2009 launch. But there was just too much delay piling up.
I watched the press conference, with the announcement. The reporters seemed to really be asking some tough and pointed questions of the NASA leadership. Coming on the heels of Alan Stern’s NY Times editorial on NASA’s budgets, the fact that the MSL delay will cost $400 million was understandably questioned.
Heck, I wonder the same thing. Why can’t the planning be more on track? Why can’t the cost predictions come closer than they do?
I think for a lot of the smaller missions, they do. And since those missions are less visible, people don’t realize how well they do. When you only have $100 million to work with, you’re much more quick to sharpen the pencil and shave off instruments or requirements that you can live without. But hey, that’s why I’m an engineer and not a manager! I don’t want to work with dollars!
I just came across a (somewhat old) review of Tellico that focuses on importing and working with music collections.
Then I discovered Tellico. It was designed for the KDE desktop environment, but so far I have not encountered any problems while using it in Gnome (Linux Mint 5.0, Elyssa). I was finally able to import my windows based data into a new program with relative ease. All I had to do was export the Windows data as a text file and then import it into Tellico. To be fair, there are quite a few other Linux programs that offer the ability to import text files, but their interfaces were not nearly as easy to use or as straightforward.
It’s a very step-by-step review of importing a file into Tellico.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day for yesterday was a beautiful shot from Mt. Wilson of the Moon next to Venus and Jupiter.
Credit & Copyright: Dave Jurasevich (Mt. Wilson Observatory)
From reading a review of Tellico (in German), I came across a link to Bauble, a botanical specimen database. That’s pretty cool.
No, Starbucks, you don’t get to rename anything you want. It’s actually called a café au lait. And no, I don’t care what wikipedia says..