It’s everyone’s favourite season this time a year; I would be referring to the tax season for us Canadians. Filing is due by the end of April and everyone is now rushing to do their taxes since we all love to prorastinate so much.

I started doing them a few days ago and spread over this tiresome chore for the past few days. It’s better if you do it that way as you won’t get frustrated at doing it so much.

I’ve been using Quicktaxweb for the past 7 years now and it’s great. It saves me from having to look through previous returns and filling in numbers here and there. Moreover, it calculates everything that needs to be calculated and puts numbers in places you never knew had boxes! Essentially, all the anal little details are done for you by the good folks at Quicktax. I think the $24.95 is a small price to pay for such a stress-relieving product.

Do I know exactly what it’s doing? Well, not really.

Do I care? Sure I do! The online software allows me to check over every little detail on screen to ensure that I put in the correct values, and that the program calculated everything properly. It even gives me hints on how to reduce my taxes and make my money stretch.

Fortunately for this year, I will be getting some money back. That’s reassuring gas I could sure use some right about now. Had I put my RRSPs against my income this year, I would have nearly doubled my refund… but I’ll save them RRSPs for another year when I make more money.

So my headache for the year is over… at least tax related… unless of course I get audited, in which case you’ll yet find me pulling my hair out all over again. Urgh. I sure hope I don’t!

Looking Up in NYC #1

I uploaded this photo on my Flickr account on Sunday evening. When I woke up on Monday morning, this image had already passed the 400 viewing mark. I was a little perplexed as to how this image got so many views.

The day went by and by night time, it is now less than 5 views away from surpassing the 1000 view mark, which will be my first photo to accomplish this feat.

While 1000+ views may not be so difficult for some, it’s quite interesting for me to know which photos attract various people. As it turns out, this photo made it in the top 15 of the interestingness page on Flickr for April 23rd, 2006. I am guessing it’s the different lighting of the buildings that made this photo stand out from the crowd. This was due to the spotlight that was shining on the white buildilng, which made this structure outshine the rest. This is actually what struck me at first as well, and hence took the photo.

Yeah for me!

Not only is my entire family’s birthday within the first 11 days of May, the coming month will be very busy as I start to concentrate my efforts on getting my U&I Magazine more established within the photography community.

Contact – the month long photography festival – is the largest of its kind in North America. Silly me, I missed the deadline to take part in it as an exhibitor or advertiser. The best thing I can do is to support my fellow friends who are being exhibited in the festival.

The Photobloggers meetup is also being held in mid May, which is going to attract photobloggers from out of town. They will also announce live, the winners of the 2006 Photobloggies, which is an annual awards presentation celebrating the best in photoblogs from around the world. On this same day – and location – I am also planning on launching my Spring 2006 issue of U&I Magazine with perhaps some specials for the big event. My summer issue may also heavily focus on photobloggers from around the world so I’ll be sure to give everyone a head’s up on that.

This will also be the month when I start doing some more administrative work in terms of trying to get some distribution and advertisements for upcoming issues. I’m rounding up contacts as I go along and hopefully these will all lead to something substantial.

I would love to get more exposure for U&I Magazine as I know it’s something of value to many people around the world. By the summer’s end, my goal is to have something substantial completed – or at the very least in the final stages of being completed. This will be a lot of work on my part, especially doing this with a full time job. But this is what I am thriving for right now, and so this is what I will do.

Of course all of this won’t be possible without the occassional break from work. So my friend from Brazil will be visiting for the first three weeks of May, and so I will do my best to juggle all of this together.

All I can say is, this should be fun!