This screenshot from my iPhone shows a breaking news banner at the top of the mobile version of the Washington Post website. The message reads: “Metro trains turning back at Cleveland Park, Friendship Heights” but curiously, neither their full website, nor any other (including WMATA) had made a similar announcement. Twenty or thirty minutes later, the banner was gone and I haven’t been able to find anyone else talking about this. Was this a fluke?

Screenshot from TurboTax website showing the site is unavailable

As of this writing (5:45 PM EST) the website is still down, and has been for at least three hours now. Some simple Google searches find other users seeing the same problems occurring over the past few weeks. I had planned to bang out my tax returns in an hour or so. Now it seems that I will have to wait until the site is once again available, or debate choosing a different tax preparation website.

The only thing keeping me from jumping ship this second is that my returns from last year are stored there, and that will save me a bit of time when the website becomes available again.

Update: As of 6:00 PM EST the website is back up and running. Hopefully they will be able to keep the site up while I file my returns.

In the meantime, here are a few things that have kept me busy lately:

• Studying for a Private Pilot’s License
• Taking care of my head
• Campaigning for a new President
• Looking into Grad School
• Working
• Picking a new President
• Attending the Inauguration

More on each of these items soon, I promise!

So a few weeks ago I was perusing the selection at my local Blockbuster and saw a rack full of DVDs from the first few seasons of Lost. Being that there was nothing else jumping out at me, and remembering that Josh mentioned being a big fan and trusting his taste in television programming, I took the plunge and after a few days I had watched seasons one and two.

I was hooked, evidenced by the fact that only moments after watching the season two finale, I had already purchased a season pass from iTunes for season three (the Lost Season Three DVD set doesn’t come out until December, 2007). Within a few days I had watched the entire season, and am now waiting anxiously for the start of season four (in February)!

So for now I’m stuck watching season three again, which since I already paid iTunes for it I figure why not! I haven’t quite reached the point where I add a Lost Season 4 countdown widget to my dashboard, but you never know what might happen in the next few months!

I’m a permanent Internet Explorer convert. Since I bought my MacBook Pro in July I have not used IE. I didn’t download and try out the IE7 beta, I simply wasn’t interested. Firefox meets my needs.

In that spirit, I’d like to dedicate this post to taking a tour of my currently open Firefox tabs. By the way, I typically have no fewer than 10 tabs open at a time, so get comfortable… this is going to be fun!

First, I always keep Gmail and my LiveJournal Friends Page open, so I can stay in touch. I’ve been working to develop my business relationship with Microsoft, and was reading about their Small Business Symposium. I have also been reading a NYT article about free stuff for your cell phone, and while I think most of it is pretty far fetched in terms of whether I would find it useful, I have been playing around with YouMail (coincidentally, the next tab that is open). If YouMail had a few more features, it would be an amazing alternative to using the default wireless carrier voicemail system.

Back on Sunday Nov 28, Erin and I waited in line at Best Buy starting at 4 AM to get the new Nintendo Wii. The store opened at 10 AM, and we walked away with our Wii around 10:30 AM. Boy was it worth it! We also met some cool people in line, one of whom recommended that we buy the new Zelda: Twilight Princess game. We bought it and started playing and loved it immensely, but got a little stuck. So after a few hours of being stuck we consulted a complete Zelda walk-through guide to get us unstuck. I kept the tab open just in case we got stuck again.

Oh, and can you imagine Bill Gates as our next president? You don’t make billions of dollars by being foolish with money or by being a bad manager! Of course, I wouldn’t be “fair and balanced” if I didn’t have a look at these awesome screen shots of the Mac OS that go all the way back to the beginning (that’s right, System 0.0 released 21 years ago). When I just refreshed that page to make sure it was still working, I got a “Bandwidth Exceeded” error, which means they should be looking at my web host, DreamHost, which offers transfers of something up in the 1-3 TB (terabytes) per month (which for about 99.9% of the websites out there, anything >1 TB per month = Unlimited). Oh, and I was reading today about how they are now offering their best hosting package for FREE to 501(c)(3) non-profits. That is definitely a sweet deal!

And that, folks, is all. Until next time!

After four hours of jury selection, I was chosen to sit on the jury of a case in which the defendant was charged with 15 felony counts. We had three days of testimony filled with police, forensics experts, and several witnesses who had all borne the defendant’s children but were unsure as to his real last name. There were points in the trial, especially when some of these witnesses started talking about their open and often interconnected relationships (read as ménage à trois), when I thought someone in the audience would grab a banjo off the wall and the courtroom would bust into an impromptu square dance.

I won’t go further into the details here (feel free to ask me offline) so as not to associate my identity with the case, I wouldn’t want anyone looking me up several years down the road. Suffice it to say that after three days of deliberations, we found him guilty on most of the charges. As the foreman, my fellow jurors reassured me that if they saw me on the news, they would know I had taken one for the team. They are all a great group of people representing a diverse range of backgrounds. It would have been nice to stay in touch with a few of them, but not being sure of the protocol there, nobody exchanged any contact information.

I’ve been told that as long as I remain a Washington DC resident, I will receive a jury duty summons every two years like clockwork. I’ll go ahead and mark my calendar and see if they’re right!

Minnie has been busy exploring the new place, and feeling bad that I didn’t get to take any pictures of myself navigating DC’s narrow streets with a 26′ moving truck, I decided to take one of her getting herself stuck in a window in the kitchen.

A special thanks to our friends who made the move possible (and we’ll admit it, a heck of a lot cheaper). So (in alphabetical order) Aaron, Chris, and Rusty, thanks!

Ok, time to continue on with the packing. Luckily we got rid of a lot of junk during the last move, hopefully this will be a lot easier!

• Men are dirtier than women, and women expect higher standards of cleanliness – This may be news to some, but I know for a fact that women are fully capable of peeing on the toilet seat too!
• Someone might see someone else naked – In general I’m only talking about single stall bathrooms with a lock on the door, but how many times do you go into a single-sex bathroom and see someone else naked?

And now my third, and in my mind deal-making, point is that people are obviously capable of sharing bathrooms among the sexes because they do it all the time on airplanes (and on trains, too).