We're surrounded by tiny errors in the world. Heck, they're even built into our DNA. The vast majority of tiny little errors do no harm, and we don't notice them. We gloss over them, like a typo in a book. It's just that every once in a while, a tiny little error can occur that snowballs into something much greater. Like cancer. Or a massive, accidental security leak.

More eyeballs usually do make bugs more shallow, but only if the eyes know what to look for.

Well, since the fake returns are filed with forged W2s and such, you would still owe $3,000, but the scammers probably convinced the IRS that they should get a few hundred dollars back at the minimum.

I tried to efile a few years ago and discovered someone had already submitted a tax return under my SSN. So I had to send in all my tax forms and all my proof of identity in paper, along with a statement of fraud or something of the sort. And I had to file paper again the next year since my SSN was blocked from efiling due to the fraud alert.

Finally got the ability to file normally again last year. We don't qualify for the free tax software any more, unfortunately. I think we used the paid version of Turbo Tax.

You can tell when someone has done any kind of help desk work, because when confronted by "X isn't working" the first thing they do is inquire as to whether they've rebooted since X was installed. Everything from Active Directory changes to a Windows update can cause junk to break, and rebooting takes five minutes at most.

I did help desk work for three years and I still forget this lesson sometimes since I switched to software dev. DID YOU REBOOT should be stapled on everyone's wall in every office on the planet. Printed next to the help desk number. Engraved into the plastic of your computer monitor.

Ability is not the same as training. Every company has its own ecosystem of rules, and even someone who did the same job at another company will take a few months to catch up.

That's a princely amount anywhere outside of a big city, though.

Not necessarily good ones, though. A master's from most schools in India is worth about as much as a master's from Devry in the US.

If they're running Verisign, which is still pretty common around the web on large commercial websites, they were not vulnerable to Heartbleed.

I'm actually in a pretty good position to start applying hours toward PMP where I am now. I knocked out CAPM last fall. It'll still take me a few years to reach 2000 hours, though.

I'm trying to go the PM route and it's brutal. To get the good certification (the one that nets you that $150K salary), PMP, you have to have already been working as a PM for at least two or three years. And the training certification, CAPM, is a dime a dozen and every MBA on the planet is getting it these days. So like anything else, they only want to hire people who have already been doing the job for someone else.

Hey, it was enough to teach the very basic fundamentals of programming logic. I had a physics teacher who was totally okay with us using our programmable calculators to take his tests. His reasoning was that if you understood the formula well enough to write a quick and dirty program for it, you probably understood it well enough in general.

Debugging an acceleration formula program was the fastest way to learn that acceleration formula, period.

Because coverage is delayed a month. They don't want you getting insurance because you just broke a leg that morning.

Replacement. Too bad John Oliver's on HBO now.

At least when you do get a new job, if it doesn't have employer-based insurance, the exchanges can't prevent you from getting insurance because of your pre-existing condition.

Some of the initial proposals in what ultimate became Obamacare actually did include expanding Medicaid coverage far upward of where it is, or allowing early buy-ins of Medicare. Those ideas were swiftly rejected because, you know, socialism and stuff. And the private insurance industry would be shut out of the sweet sweet profits and we couldn't have that, no, nuh-uh.

Thus, the idea was nixed, and we're stuck with what we have for now. Thankfully, what we have is better in many ways.