I've been threatening to mess around with Asterisk for a while now — it's the voice-over-IP hotness at the moment. Well, with taxes finished unexpectedly early and a professional motivation for getting it under my belt, I took the plunge today. Signed up for a $5/month DIY account with BroadVoice, compiled the tarball (@Home is for the weak!) and immediately ran begging to the #asterisk IRC channel for help.

Well, I eventually got it figured out. Disappointingly, the text-to-speech project Festival is already installed under FC4, and not in a way that Asterisk can use. However, there's a handy little hack out there (bottom of this page) that lets you get away with generating then throwing away WAV files instead of actually streaming sound from the Festival server.

All of which is to say that, in a new feature that will doubtless make your life much richer and easier, you can now dial a phone number and have a robot read you the latest RSS headlines from this blog. I know, pretty useful. Give 202-318-0196 a ring if you want to hear what a wasted Saturday sounds like.

This may not stick around that long — it's just a proof-of-concept science project. And yes, I realize how stupid it is.

As usual I waited until the last minute to do my taxes this year. I've just finished them a moment ago, and this year's experience was the smoothest yet. Allow me to share some of the sagacity that allows me to so effectively flit through the paperwork:

1. H&R Block's online tax prep thingy is pretty great, and gets progressively more great every year as more and more of your data collects in it. Well, except for this stellar moment in interface design:

   

   The original field? That contains sensitive financial data. We'd better keep it secret. But the confirmation field, where you're supposed to enter the exact same data? We'll just leave that un-obfuscated. It's like not accepting a xerox of a form, I guess.


2. If you have income that you don't know how to claim, it's probably best to just ignore it and pretend everything is fine.


3. Catherine learned last year that if you try to file part of your year in Virginia and part in DC, the city government will a) not let you file online and b) eventually present you with a bill for thousands of dollars that you pretty clearly don't owe. Moral: the DC tax office doesn't like to be bothered. They are like a hibernating bear, DO NOT DISTURB THEM. Just try to creep by quietly.


4. Most importantly, remember that your tax preparation will be easy and worry-free if you simply begin the process resigned to doing it incorrectly.

Worry-free for a while, anyway.

Dear, sweet IRS agents: the preceding should be considered a joke, and totally not admissible in court, I hope. Of course I conscientiously rounded up all of the forms surrounding the $5 in savings account interest I made this year, and the three days-or-so worth of work I did at my new job in 2005. And the apartment in DC? I'm just house-sitting for Charles. While he's home. Hey, shouldn't you be auditing poor people?