This post is relevant to you only if all of the following apply:

• you have a financial involvement in the United States of America
• your primary computer is able to run the Numbers spreadsheet application
• your 2011 income was well under some fortunate amount where you'd just hire a fancy accountant to file your taxes
• you have procrastinated as long as I have preparing your annual federal tax return
• you are not a buyer or processor of specialty oddball regulations

Download the 2011 Tax Year version of the Numbers spreadsheet I'm using to help me prepare my federal tax return.

IMPORTANT: you may NOT rely on this spreadsheet template for anything important. I am not a lawyer/accountant/federal agent/crook. See page 942 of the instructions.

We've been busy ballooning the past few days.

It's been a great adventure, one my family (including parents from out of town) has been joining in on. I'm especially indebted to my father-in-law, who's helped me figure out and even make very significant improvements to the balloon kit.

The images are starting to turn out a little better each flight. I started by lofting my Palm Prē 2 into the sky.

I found both a decent timelapse app and GPS logger for it, and it's an option for smaller helium fills due to its low weight. Unfortunately, most apps for this ill-fated smartphone platform are kind of half-baked, as I found when my phone ran out of battery halfway through the flight. The photos up to that point were fine, but the tracklog seems to have been stored in volatile memory only. Little bugs that could be worked around if the phone's fuzzy little camera sensor is adequate for the scenery.

But it turns out this balloon can heft my DSLR and GPS unit pretty handily. Bigger sensor, better glass, and more reliable location logger!

It was too windy, but we managed to get both a low-altitude test flight and a short, nerve-wracking full-string-length cruise in today:

One of the wind's few benefits is the occasional oblique shot — sometimes the camera momentarily defies gravity and gets whipped towards the horizon. Kind of scary to watch helplessly from below, and usually just results in blurred images, but now and then there's an interesting landscape photograph or two that winds up coming back down.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Our cameras have taken many thousands of shots in the last three days, and at least 0.8% of them seem to have turned out!

"You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"

Feynman then "went on to work out equations of wobbles" and it did work out.

I'm struggling with no such renown as Feynman, but the world I live in is still rather intimidating.

As analysts ooh and ahh over resolutions and stock buybacks, as the others bring their latest data centers online, and while so-and-so's multimillion dollar attempt to compete with really-is-great's dominant market share makes the news again — it's impossible to live up to it.

So who cares? My career has netted me an approximate financial worth of negative one house…plus a canister of helium!

This wannabe balloon experiment is ugly, it leaks badly, it's needed rescue from the trash once already. No honorary doctorate here. We're having fun:

Spring is here, and with it the wind and my balloon mapping kit!

Probably not the best combo, but dealing with a bit of gusty weather is just one of many things I'll need to learn more about.

I'd long been interested in messing about with something like Kite Aerial Photography to gather public domain orthoimagery. I never quite could believe that a kite would be very convenient for the task though. A big balloon seemed like a better idea, but I wasn't really sure exactly if or how to best accomplish that.

I also have a tendency to collect tools and instruments and spare parts for all sort of intended hobbies, but then they always end up on the back burner. Sitting at my desk or on the couch working on the big "make software better" project is about the only hobby that's been truly habit-forming, so I've mostly learned to avoid "investing" in gadget acquisition syndrome elsewhere. So long as my laptop stays running, I've got all the workbench I actually use. At least…until the kids are old enough to appreciate other hobbies — I've been telling myself to leverage procrastination talent against my microeconomic weakness.

Well two-and-a-half years old is enough to appreciate a big colorful helium balloon, eh? I jumped on the recent "balloon kit" Kickstarter campaign to kickstart a hobby that will require spending sunny Saturdays outside in the fresh air.

I'm still not entirely sure how to "accomplish" balloon mapping, but I've got a basic start on rigging up a camera and have already started pestering the local industrial gas supplier with newbish questions concerning just how I might fill our first airship with helium.

More details as this story develops!

I rode the train in and the bus back, visiting Portland from 10am on Tuesday to 10am Thursday. The weeks before had been busy too: I didn't even get a chance to join the local Tri-Cities co-working group, being heads down in client work and conference calls. Taking public transportation down the river to a very public town was a good reminder of how community matters — both the tech community and the wide world it should serve.

I was struck by how lovely life can be in a town like Portland — warm coffee shops everywhere, so much fine food and drink in every district, and such useful book and tech and music shops scattered all over, all bustling with interesting and amiable people. And how empty a city can still be — the streets are littered with people who have so blantantly lost or tossed every benefit of society except the worthlessness of its loose change.

So I'm grateful to the many people who helped Portland feel not-too-far from home during my time there:

• Rafa from Grafa Geographic Design, Tim and Ryan at Ecotrust, and Justin with Mapbox were all willing to share lunch and "geo" shop talk with a random stranger from out of town.
• The crew sent by Couchbase gave me a warm welcome to their conference tour, and even let me share some of the things I've been working on lately. It was great to meet some other new Couch and mapping enthusiasts, as well as catch up with what Chris and Tyler and Mikeal are doing these days.
• Big thanks to Ben who opened his home (and vintage electronics closet) and Liz whose promising upstart PDX vintage furniture rental company more-or-less sponsored my lodging (and whose husband I stole for not one but two late evenings of epic retro-nerdish conversation!)

Portland's a great place to get offline but stay connected. Though it's good to be back home, I was blessed to visit again.