The Mandelbear's Musings

09:46 am - Sales Tax, and the bottom line

With sales taxes due at the end of the month, and a week of travel impending, it's a Good Thing that I was finally able to get started. I was able to get the data-entry for pre-orders done by starting with my shipping-label address list and editing in the somewhat smaller number of entries from my paper list. Sales to dealers, and non-preorder sales, were easy enough to add up by hand.

I have yet to break down sales by location for sales tax purposes, but that's all I have left to do this weekend. The bottom line is 390 albums out the door, and a gross take for the year of 4665. 80 out of the total were contributor, promotional, and gift copies -- anyone out there know how I treat those for tax purposes? There were a total of 195 pre-orders, meaning that there are 61 signed, numbered pre-order packages still available. All-in-all I've definitely made a profit on the project, so I'm a happy filkish bear at the moment. I may have to leave off some related expenses in order to convince the IRS that I've made a profit, but that's a problem for another day.

09:58 pm - OK, so much for that

All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.

The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.

22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.

22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.

Current Mood: productive

10:03 pm - Sorted

As near as I can tell, all the information I need for computing sales taxes has been separated from all the information I don't need, but will eventually need for computing income taxes. All of the receipts and other 2007 correspondence that I know about have been sorted.

I still need to go through the actual sales information, figure out what was paid for where, and fill in the blanks. Probably over the weekend. Yes, I should have kept better records. Dumb bear.

09:23 am - Getting it all together

Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.

The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.

11:37 pm - Album notes

I've actually been getting a few things done on the music front.

1. Went down to Stanford to see who to talk to about selling albums. Most college bookstores have a section for works by alumni. Stanford doesn't: it's owned by some chain that doesn't give a damn. I pledged them $50 this year; next year I'll just send that much more to Carleton.
2. Essentially finished with adapting the various make rules and perl scripts to the new directory layout. Track working directories now live underneath the corresponding album working directories.
3. My TrackInfo script is now capable of computing total time for a list of songs, so it can take over much of the work of the Setlist script. Eventually it should allow me to integrate setlists and the corresponding concert recordings.
4. Did some tracklist planning. There are definitely three albums in the queue now. Stop laughing.

I expect to have a web page with a tentative track list up by Monday, along with a couple of new scratch tracks.

10:43 pm - Travels with Ruby: Thursday before Loscon

So here we are at the LAX Marriott. I couldn't get the wired internet connection in the room to work; the wireless sucks rocks but it's better than nothing. I'll bug the hotel in the morning.

I've already bugged the hotel about the lack of an outlet near the bed for the facehugger: they sent up a bloke with a power strip, extension cord, and what sounded like an Aussie accent. I can haz facehuggr now. The Wofling has just put herself to bed. She very sensibly brought an air mattress this time (sharing a bed with her little sister is Right Out).

The trip, down US 101, was uneventful. It's much prettier than I5 and the traffic is consistently less (though it was heavier this year than I've seen it in the last decade of Loscons). About 7:30 including the break for lunch at Pea Soup Anderson's.

Annoyingly, I snapped off a fingernail unloading the car. Even more annoyingly, it was the right forefinger, which is what I use most for fingerpicking. And of course there's no superglue -- I forgot to pack it. Could have used it to extend the stub a fraction. I can get by, though. Won't sound quite as clear, but the difference is surprisingly slight.

The flower_cat, chaoswolf, and I had dinner with AJA and Kore; I hadn't really had much of a conversation with K before, so that was good. There was enough discussion of CD production and related matters that I figured I could treat it as a business expense. The Y.D. joined us briefly for desert; she'd already had dinner up in the Con Suite.

I should probably go to bed soon.

Current Mood: tired

09:45 pm - Fading rapidly

Yesterday I got up at 7am, walked five miles, had a big dinner, stayed awake all evening, and stayed up until after midnight. Not today: got up about 8am, walked only three miles, and I'm fading fast at a quarter to 10. Grumble.

Wonder if the difference was the cup of espresso I had with dinner last night. Hmm.

We did manage to go to Costco and sign up; we'd let our membership lapse when the flower_cat wound up her little flower business. Now I'm the one with a tax number...

03:55 pm - Questions for CD Duplicators

Note: I'm terrible with phone calls. I put them off for weeks, sometimes. If I don't have everything written out ahead of time, I don't remember what to ask, and leave out important stuff.

Note: I'm calling discmakers, shortstacks, and Oasis; I'm mainly interested right now in printed blank disks and short-run CDROMs with added audio tracks. Any other recommendations?

Current Mood: curious

06:18 pm - Shiny!

Elite Micro DVD±R
( must... not... drool... on... keyboard... )
For somewhat less than twice the price one can get this one, with twice the throughput and a built-in PC. Probably can't justify either of them at this point, but it's awfully tempting.