Blogs of a bunch of friends

28 March 06 - 10:13Tax time

I'll refrain from complaints about the complexity of the tax code and the discussion of whether or not tax preparers (be them people or software) are really needed by most people. Today I complain about tax preparers. It seems as if all software companies that make tax preparation software hawk questionable financial "deals" to make more money. Sure they wrap these offers up in warm fuzzy marketing speak, but in the end they are all bad deals. H&R Block offers instant refunds, only in the fine print do they explain "Credit provided by HSBC Bank USA, N.A., member FDIC. An account fee and a finance charge are charged by HSBC."

Intuit (makers of TurboTax) encourages you to spend your refund (which is of course primarily an overpayment of taxes on the tax payers part) on gift cards for various national chains. They do offer them at a discount (starting at 10%).

The preparer I have used the last several years isn't without blame. TaxAct provides an interesting way to pay for using the TaxAct preparation and e-filing service. I could only get this quote while logged into the service; "New for 2005: You no longer need a credit card to pay your TaxACT product fee of $15.95. You may elect to have this fee deducted from your federal refund. This service is provided by HSBC Bank USA, N.A. (HSBC) for an additional fee of $14.95 (which would also be taken out of your refund)."

sigh

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16 March 06 - 14:27Multiple Monitors

I have two monitors connected to my desktop at home. I have been using a dual monitor setup for over four years. More than one monitor has been possible with Windows since at least Windows 98se. Why than do I continue to find games that don't handle them properly? I'm not asking for the games to actually use both monitors (although that would be nice), I'm simply asking for them to not behave in a way that degrades the playability of the game.

I'm playing Command & Conquer Generals now and before I play, I have to disable my second monitor. If I don't, I have a very hard time scrolling the screen to the left. You see, you scroll around the map by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen (something done frantically in the middle of a battle). But unlike a well written game, this one doesn't restrict my mouse to the one screen the game is using. Instead, as I moused the cursor to the left edge of my primary screen, the cursor would continue onto my second monitor. Come on now EA get with the program.

P.S. Making me hear "EA Games. Challenge Everything" upon starting the game everytime does not encourage me to want to buy other EA games; it makes me hate the manager that put that in.

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16 March 06 - 14:05Mouses

Now I know that I am a little odd that I use so many different pointing devices on my computers (My desktop has a trackball, a mouse, a trackpoint, and a tablet. On my laptop I actively use the trackpoint and an external mouse), but is it really so much to ask for Windows to be able to maintain different settings for each device? For example, I want a good deal more acceleration on my trackpoints, and I want more speed for my trackball and mouse. Sure my desktop setup is waaay far from normal, but my laptop setup certainly isn't unreasonable. I use an external mouse at my desk at work, and everywhere else I use the internal trackpoint. Sure I can change the settings all the time, but that is a pain in the tuckus. Is it really so much to ask?

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07 March 06 - 12:00Hotlinking

About once a month, I go through the logs for my domain looking for people that are being abusive with their hotlinking. Any site that gets more than 50 hits gets looked into, at least briefly. If the image is behind a members only forum, the domain gets the privilege of seeing a replacement image. The same thing happens to those sites that use images in a way I deem as inappropriate. Usually a site only stays in my htaccess file for a month or two.

Some sites just seem to encourage a culture of hotlinking and thus have permanent entries in my block list. Xanga, Live Journal, and Myspace are the worst offenders. Other sites, like Quizilla have permanent blocks in my htaccess file because of a particular popular page. For some reason this "quiz" has several hundred hits a month.

I have been doing this for about a year now. In that time, I have found that one particular image is used more often than any other. For some reason forums and journals are fascinated by the uglieness of this dog linked from this page. The internet sure is strange.

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