Those at fault shall remain nameless (because I signed an NDA)

What is pain?

Running out of laptop battery and leaving your power cable at home?

Wrong! Conan, what is pain?

To unwittingly have two HTML elements with the same ID attribute in a single document, to wish to modify one using AJAX-driven JavaScript, to have the other set to not display.

That is pain.

Taxes.

One thing I forgot in my recounting of last weekend was like I got myself right with Quicken. This is good, but it bears bad news. I can now easily call up a total of my YTD consulting earnings, make a naïve estimate of what this implies my 2007 income taxes will be, compare this figure to the size of my savings account, and grunt.

So this is actually kind of an FYI for my friends: I am going to batten down and try to cushion the impact as much as I can by spending as little as I can get away with until I know what I owe. So please don't be sad if I regularly excuse myself from fancy dinners and such for the next several months.

It's true that I foresee some fat deductions for myself - I've poured thousands out-of-pocket into the zero-revenue Volity Games, and this will earn me great pity from the IRS. But at the same time I've earned enough from consulting that it's not going to end up a wash like 2006 was.

This is, I hope, the objectively worst bit of fallout from it taking me months and months to realize that I was actually in business for myself and had to start acting like it.