Good Day In Hell

No school, no classes, no work. It's a good day in hell. Since I had extensive plans for today, all bollixed up by the weather, I thought I'd spend my morning learning how to use one of the cool new tools Apple has just made available in Beta for developers. I "wrote" a trivial DashBoard Widget to pull RSS feeds down from this site. You can now get your occasional news from my blog without having to visit my blog. If you own a Mac, run OS X 10.4.3 or higher, and can't live without my site, you're just the candidate to play with my new widget. Contact me back channel if you are interested.

On the PERS front, I keep hearing from more and more retirees that they have gotten their invoices for the 1999 payback and actuarial reductions. From what I've discerned from the invoices, PERS seems to be running a bit ahead of schedule as many "ordinary" window retirees are getting invoiced. The last few people I've heard from retired in the latter part of 2002, so that must mean that I'm on the list to get my invitation to repay soon. When I do, I'll share with all. To reiterate a point I made awhile back, unless you can prove that PERS miscalculated on the repayment amount, there is no current venue that I can think of to contest either the method of repayment or the fact of repayment. Both of those are current subjects of ongoing litigation and I'd hate to see any single member waste financial resources beating heads against stone walls. I'm not caving into PERS unless I can demonstrate they have miscalculated my repayment amount. While I don't expect to be treated appreciably differently, I expect that they'll double check my invoice more than twice before placing it in the mail. I don't expect to see any calculation errors and I'd be stunned if there were. I can imagine a few others whose numbers will be run carefully as PERS knows full well that these people can and do run the numbers very carefully and are rarely wrong. If you have any questions about your invoice, there might be a group of us willing to help you check the calculations, but no guarantees at this point. Our group hasn't formed yet. It is just an idea gestating as we get closer to the big mail dump.

Enjoy your snow day, unless you're reading this from Phoenix, or Hawaii, in which case we already hate you so don't read :-)