Last night I fiddled around with my calculator and the 1040EZ form. I ended up with a number, to which I decided to try and get the same result on the on-line tax calculator.

Next two hours later, I did the following: curse and scream at my brain for being stupid to do math, and found another on-line tax calculator, and studied the two vastly different results displayed in front of me.

My calculation ended up with $200. The two on-line tax calculators gave me $500. I deemed myself too stupid to even get my income tax right. (Btw: these are not the actual numbers.)

Tonight, I had my dad do my income tax and see where the hell I went wrong with my calculations. He looked at it and came back and said that my calculations were right. I gave him a bewildered stare and asked, “Then how come there’s a huge $300 discrepancy from the on-line stuff?!”

His brilliant answer: The on-line calculators didn’t take into consideration on whether you were a dependent of someone or not. Since you’re a dependent of me, it cost you $300 bucks.

…Duh. *smacks forehead* At least I am not totally hopeless with numbers if I got it right the first time.

Unfortunately, right after I regained my intelligence back, I discovered something that thoroughly pissed me off for a bunch of reasons. These “adult” responsibilities are not cool. I screamed in the computer room saying, “I want to go back to college! I want to be an undergrad student again!”

Seriously. I want to go back to the life I enjoyed and loved in 2003-2007. Being a student was so much better. BLARGH!

Happy Birthday to me — well it was my birthday on the 19th. I’ve turned 23. HOMG. Two more years and I’ll be a quarter of the century old. O_O;; That’s a very scary thought. Anyway, here’s the obligatory birthday entry. Keep in mind that normally I would have blogged that day… but certain circumstances made me wait. Here it is, though, and the best way to describe my birthday in one word: Technology.

Fellow Capricorners Love to Spoil Me
My two new co-workers (the ones who I actually work with for 99% of the time) gave me a neat compact mirror and a hoodie sweatshirt along with some cash. Woot! It’s kind of funny how all three of us have birthdays in January. One was on the 5th, the 16th, and me, the 19th. Us Capricorners stick with each other, coincidentally.

Card, Cash, and Miyuk Guk
I woke up to the sounds of piano playing in my apartment complex at 10:00 am. I still cannot believe that any normal person would say 10:00 am is a decent time. NO. I stumbled into the living room where my dad greeted me with a, “Good morning! Did you fall out of bed or something?” I grunted in response and got some coffee computer time. I received a card from my parents, which is a bit odd since they never did that before. I’m not complaining, though. The card had $100 and 50,000 won. Woot! Then my mother fed me some Miyuk (seaweed?!) soup — which Koreans believe that people must eat that on their birthday for good health year long or something like that.

The First Mission: My Poor Ears
The first thing on my agenda was to meet up with Sarah and AJ at Emart to look for an mp3 player. After I sneakily hitched a ride with my dad (who claims that me working as a government employee has made me more cunning than ever!), I met them and a tagalong who AJ met at Yongsan Station, where we went a hunting for that elusive mp3 player. After visiting several vendors, who many weren’t approachable and friendly, I finally found a vendor who was very nice and patient. This is my new baby: Blaster the black mp3 player. I decided to call it that because when the vendor let me listen to the sound quality, the volume was bloody loud, hurting my poor ears in the process. The best part? It was 65,000 won, about $65. The website sells it for 99,000, so I really got a bargain. The funny thing is I was consulting Sarah about all this, and when I relayed the price to her, the vendor asked if I thought that was too expensive. I was amused and touched that he cared about his customer’s satisfaction.

Unexpected Side-quest
Sarah was looking for this game accessories, so we headed to the video game alley, which is next to this evil cell phone alley. Once there, we asked around and had no luck in finding what she wanted. However, we found something I’ve been wanting. This little bugger was being sold for 65,000 won, when I thought Emart was selling it for 100,000 won. Let’s just say the fact that the price alone convinced me to get it. Now that I have that in my collection, erm, HOMG I’ll be a bigger video game fanatic? I’ve already spent hours on Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and Cooking Mama with more games to try and be addicted to in the coming days. X_X;; Oh, and I calculated that I saved about $800 from trying these games where about half of them are ones I’d have waste by buying.

The Expected Dinner and Happy Hour
Finally done in Emart, the three of us then went on base to Dragon Hill Lodge, where we ate at Greenstreet. Now we purposely chose that place to get the tiramisu monster. Unfortunately, they didn’t have it. *sighs* Oh well. Going to Bless U to get some drinks helped me get over my disappointment. While there, the three of yakked away, and AJ introduced Sarah to Dethklok and Metalocalypse or however you bloody spell that. Fun times. Great way to end the evening.

The Grand Finale: Hass the Cellphone
Remember my post before about me getting new batteries for my cellphone? That didn’t quite work out. The place I go to said that they’d give me a new cellphone for a great deal of $150 plus half of the activation fee to get a new cellphone on a new provider. This painful ordeal, was supposed to be my birthday present by Friday, started last Wednesday. I went there on Friday and they told me that the process is delayed since they didn’t have all the information from me. They told me to come back today.

When I got there today, they told me that the transferring of providers was hell because the company is a bigoted bunches towards foreigners in Korea. (*$@#_*_)#()#@ The vendor offered me another option: get one of their best used phone for $110 and take away the activation fee charges and keep the current provider and get a cheaper package deal. I succumbed to their offer since I was sick of all these BS. Because of the trouble I went through to get this phone, I decided to name the thing Hass, short for Hassle. The link is not the actual model, but it looks like that so there.

Conclusion
In less than a week, I spent $240, give or take, on techno gadgets. I probably spent another $60 on the dinner and drinks, so that’s about $300. Wow. o_O;; Welp, time to just work and make more money to replenish my funds for more stuff I want. XD

In the meantime, someone PLEASE get me away from my DS. HOMG. I cannot stay off of it. It’s really bad since I have a module I need to complete for work and finish editing a fic that’s due February 1, and that’s with an extension!

…AUGH! Aside from my addictions … Thank you for all your birthday wishes! I really appreciate them. :3

Unless you’re hosted on Dreamhost, most of you will not really know the whole story to the recent uproar occurring in the small section of the net.

This past Tuesday, I came home to receive a very scary email. The email was from DH Billing Team, saying that they’ve charged my account $170ish bucks or so. That confused me and then I saw that my hosting has been renewed to August 2009. My confusion went quickly to an appalled state. I actually thought someone hacked into my account.

Before I was about to send a panicky support message to them, I saw that on the support page, there was a notice that DH was aware of these incorrect billing issues. Then I went to their status blog and read up on the current status. At the time I read it, the severity issue was medium, but then after several people commented that the issue here was definitely not medium but high, they changed it. Apparently, something happened where instead of putting 2007 in the biller programme they had, they put 2008, causing many customers to be charged for the extra months and the grand total was $7.5 million dollars.

…Ouch. Anyway, they wrote up this entry to explain what had exactly happened. Now keep in mind that their blog is very sarcastic, so this entry was quite on the “funny” side. Well, many became unhappy with the “insensitive” and “unprofessional” approach to the entry. This entry, along with the previous issue of the severity issue, caused much wank.

While that was going on when I was asleep in ZZZ-land, DH went around fixing the said problem since when I woke up, I received an email that my previous charges has been dropped and whatnot. Now, apparently because of so many people’s response to the first blog entry, DH wrote up another entry to counter the previous one. This one is more professionally written and yadada.

As a paying customer myself, I can see why so many are pissed off about this issue. Quite frankly, though, aside from the initial “Oh, crap, I’ve been hacked,” it really didn’t faze me. I admit that it is a weird thing about me. In the past, whenever DH did run into a few issues, I never really got utterly and enormously infuriated with them. I mean, sure, I get the usual annoyed feelings when I can’t access my website or FTP because of downtimes, but I also realise that no damn hosting company is going to have their server up for 100% of the time. That’s bloody impossible.

So to follow that logic, I realise that DH is still a company, a company ran by humans, and we all know humans are NOT perfect, no matter how some of us claims to be perfect in every single way. Perhaps it is because of that notion, I’ve always calmly went along with their problems, knowing that they will fix it eventually. Or perhaps I’m just biased. I have been with them since 2001, and honestly, I’ve never had major problems with them.

Yes, DH perhaps should not have written that first entry — never mind the fact that I like their sarcastic and humorous entries — but you know… wank is just something I’ll never understand. People have the right to be angered by these incorrect billing issues, they have the right to be pissed off by the “unprofessional” entry, but to spend hours wanking about it? I just don’t get it.

Until DH really tick me off to the other galaxies, I will stay with them. I like their services. I like the ease of their system (I’ve tried that stupid CPanel thing on other people’s domain — and I can’t get used to it.). I like their snark-filled newsletters and blog entries. I have not been displeased yet, so no point in leaving a host that I’ve respected for years now.

The TC version.

Have a list of stuff you want, which in my case is:

* Digital piano 88-key Electric keyboard that comes with a pedal, has weighted keys, sounds like a damn piano, and comes with its own sound system installed in the machine instead of hooking it up to a separate amp. This requires me to go to Nagwon with a musically-inclined uncle. The best part? After years of pestering for a digital piano, Daddy relented and convinced me to just get a keyboard, and he will get this for me as a birthday present.

* An mp3 player that’s not a bloody iPod. This shall be my birthday present to myself. Time to go with friends to Electronic Market and hope I find a decent one. Preferably 2 gigabytes flash drive that plays mp3. I have no need for a multi-media player that plays everything nowadays.

* Two trips to Japan in May and August/September. I am hoping the one in May will be considered a graduation present from my daddy. The one occurring later will be paid by me.

* Pre-order stuff online. I’ve decided to place an order for two games, Apollo Justice and Professor Layton, for the DS with a manga.

* Go use a $25 giftcard at a bookstore in Itaewon. Unfortunately, the three books I want will not be entirely covered by the card, so I still have to fork over some money. Oh well. At least I saved like 75%? XD

* I bought two new batteries for my cellphone. Having spent $76 bucks on it, I wonder if I should have just gotten a new phone and go through the hassle of obtaining a new number and getting used to the new system. Really, though, the only thing wrong with my current cellphone was the stupid batteries.

After listing the stuff you want, study the list and try to figure out how much you are spending and saving at the same time. Hopefully, you will have figured out what you saved and spent. If not, you will be just like me, scratching on the top of the head and going “Phwee?” like an idiot.

Two major things happened to me today.

At 1:30am, I beat the third game in the Ace Attorney series, also known as Gyakuten Saiban 3 or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations. My verdict on the game?

Definitely better than the second instalment, meaning it was just as good as the first one. I loved how the game tied up the past, making it feel like a real series… I mean the second one had set some stuff in motion for the third part smack down, but the third just really brought it together.

Godot was an amazing addition to the cast. Playing as the young Mia was awesome. She’s definitely my favourite from the Fey clan… especially compared to Maya, who I just cannot stand. It was great that they brought in Miles and Franziska; without these two, I felt like the series would not have been fully complete! But the biggest thing that got me was just how EVIL the main antagonist of the … entire series is, pretty much. I mean, that character, to me, is even more evil than Lord Voldemort.

…BUT WHY DID IT HAVE TO END?! GUH. I was glad and unhappy when I beat the game this morning. Such a great series. I just hope the fourth instalment will be just as good as the other three.

So that was this morning. Fast forward sixteen hours later at 5:30pm. Dad picked me up, and I saw that I had some mail. One of them consisted of my new credit card. My first credit card. The first card that I owned to scare the living shite out of me.

Yes, I’m afraid of credit cards. I honestly did not want one. I even decided that these cards are even more sinfully evil when I was trying to sign up for one. Basically, my bank gave me a HARD time by telling me all these qualifications that I had to pass. $#)*)$_#)$ But that already set my mood for my future plastic card: despair, anger, frightened, and confused.

Despair that my bank gave me hell to get a damn card. Anger that it was a pain to get it. Frightened because I’ve heard enough about credit card debts to prefer debit cards. Lastly, I’m confused on how the hell I’m suppose to pay it off. X_X;; I know I do it online, but until I actually accomplish it ONCE, I will be confused by the process. Oi. I hope I can figure it out without mucking myself and looking like an idiot.

Interestingly, enough, my credit card has a point system on it. A system that I honestly don’t quite get except for the part that every dollar I spend, I earn a point. Honestly, the whole banking process just confuse me. Something tells me I should have taken some financial courses in my educational career… but then again I have a feeling I’d still be a financial and economical moron despite taking some courses. Economics, politics, and math: my three worst subjects ever. Oh, and PE.

Yes, I be weird.