gofer articles

Taxes and all of those forms… Why don’t we face it, tax forms can more often than not be difficult to understand. There are a wide range of questions folks ask when they get or need to send out tax forms. One of the more general questions is, if you receive a W9 form request, exactly what should you do with it?

Well if you receive a W9 request then in accordance to the Internal Revenue Service you need to reply to it, provided that person looking for it is responsible to give you a 1099 form (this is an information return). If they are not required to give you a 1099 form (information return), well that is a entirely different story.

So what will happen if you don’t reply to the tax form W9 request?

If you do not reply to the tax form W9 request you will be subject to a fifty dollar penalty and furthermore future backup withholding. Backup withholding? you may ask, well if choose not to give the info needed to a required filer of an 1099 Form (information return, not to be confused with a 1040 form) they are required to withhold up to twenty eight percent which is remitted to the government.

Ah, a portable ice maker. At last, a sure-fire way of keeping cool when out of doors under a hot summer sun. You have a picnic, or a hiking trip, or even just a small get-together in the backyard and do not want to keep running back inside for ice – you need a portable ice maker.

It will not only save you trips and hassle, but save you from such things as running out of ice all of a sudden. Having one of these niffty little marvels of modern engineering will prevent you from looking like a bad thoughtless host. And nothing beats a portable ice maker at the beach! Like, booyeah.

It’s just what you need when enjoying the landscapes. It could even be a excellent conversation starter. Forget about helping to apply suntan lotion – give her the gift of perfectly shaped ice cubes and see what happens next! No, really, it works (with some individuals, but not all). After all, the water’s salty – but fresh ice cubes? Come one, you’ll be the king of the beach.

Make sure you get one with helpful functions for instance a low water light to remind you of refills. Some models will even reuse melted water right back into ice cubes. Make sure to get the capacity you need, too. Portable ice makers are fairly straightforward machines so you should have no trouble finding one that’s just right.

Take one to your next tailgating party. Need one for your RV? Portable ice makers are practically necessary on boats. These devices are useful in a number of situations. When in the market for one, you may find that the most important aspect of your purchase is simply the choice of color! That’s how simple it is to buy one, because that’s how straightforward they have become these days.

We really should have brought a backpacking tent along. Instead, being young guys we relished in challenging ourselves and flirting with danger. We cavalierly enjoyed our mountaintop landscape even as the sun was about to dip, and by the time we had turned home we could scarcely go another thousand yards before we noticed that we could not see very well.

Real hikers would have just quickly pitched or otherwise put together a backpacking tent but of course we didn’t have one since we are novices and in no way imagined we’d need to have one. This was supposed to have been a casual day-hike, after all. And yet, here we were at the end of the day and barely began on our descent. What we did not count on was how incredibly fast darkness could grow in a forest.

Though light was still in the sky, it wasn’t reaching us because of the thick canopy of leaves. Even during high noon the ground would be mostly shaded, never mind now, right before nightfall. And in one of the most incredible experiences ever, I saw my own hand disappear right in front of me, literally in seconds, melting away into the enveloping darkness like some movie fade-out.

Except that it was happening all to me; We were still practically two thousand feet up from the trail head; and also we did not even have a backpacking tent!

Thankfully, friends below summoned local volunteer park rangers and we were finally rescued. But not before spending six or seven hours shivering in the cold and dark! Though it had been a humid summer day, it felt more like late fall in rural New York at night. When I started to finally shiver and shiver I thought it was going to be the end of me! So never,never,never – ever – go hiking without a tent or sleeping bag.

Data recovery is an important part of our modern day world, with computers facilitating the vast majority of our lives on the internet and off. The loss of personal information and customer data would be catastrophic for any organization, and so data recovery software is a popular kind of insurance for many. But, more broadly speaking, data recovery or memory itself has been a favorite subject of science fiction, with many plots revolving around the uncanny sensation that we are nothing more than our memories – which, in a perfectly digitized world, would be nothing but easily copied bits of data!

Exciting as these considerations are, for an even more explosive idea all you have to do is combine them with old-fashioned notions of clairvoyance and déjà vu. First coined by New Age spiritualist P.M.H. Atwater (née Phyllis Johnston), future memory is conceived of as the phenomenon whereby one can know the future.

With plain old prophetic foresight now repackaged in 21st Century techno-speak, science fiction writers are busy exploring the nexus between man and machine, self and other, reality and virtual reality. The gist of it all is pregnant with implication: if we are nothing but our memories; if our memories are but bits of data; if technology can catch these bits the same way it manipulates all other data; then what does it mean to be oneself?

Philip K. Dick touched on these very questions in his short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Adapted into a kind of futuristic film noir under the title of Blade Runner, the theme concentrates on just what it means to be human in a world where very humanlike androids can be made.

Another movie adapted from a Dick short is Total Recall, involving a federal agent’s manufactured memories. More recently, the Leonardo Dicaprio vehicle Deception also explored the same what-if scenarios: what if thoughts could be planted? Never mind data recovery; seems like technologies will one day create the need for deliberate information loss! And indeed, there are any number of science fiction stories devoted to that topic, too…