Let me preface this rant by stating that I have no affiliation whatsoever with any of the companies listed. I just felt like writing a blog post on why I’m no longer using TurboTax.

So, let’s begin by rewinding to 2010 (dealing with tax year 2009). I was a college student, had just scored an internship, and was actually earning enough money where I had to worry about filing a tax return. I tried out several sites at that point, including TurboTax, to see who would find me the biggest refund. I had a fairly simple tax return, I was just dealing with marginal income and education credits. Turns out that TurboTax, at that time, gave me the biggest refund and a decent cost. No issues, I was a happy customer.

Fast forward to 2011. I had to file my 2010 taxes. One of my credit card companies emailed me a 25% off coupon for TurboTax, so naturally, I returned there. They had saved my information from the previous year, automatically imported it where appropriate, and made the process nice and easy. Paying for the service, on the other hand, was a whole other nightmare.

First of all, I qualified for the free federal filing. Apparently at some point, I upgraded to the ‘deluxe’ version of TurboTax, which started racking up the charges. Of course, they only give you ‘upgrade’ options, with no way to downgrade short of contacting them. Oh, and the 25% off coupon I had from my credit card company wasn’t applying properly either - swell. So I contacted them and complained. They did some weird set of discount claim codes on my account (which still didn’t bring it to the correct total cost). The customer service representative assured me that I would be contacted within 24 hours to get a refund, and just to pay and file. Stupid me - I paid and moved ahead.

Surprise, surprise - I never was contacted and never did receive my refund. I never pursued it, as it was under a $10 difference and I deemed it not worth the hassle, but the bottom line is that I was lied to. Their website is predatory, always trying to rope you into higher cost services, and there is no way of removing additional features/costs (even if you don’t need them/aren’t using them). The only two options if you wish to go to a lower price tier are calling them and arguing for a while, or signing up for a new account and totally starting over. Not very user friendly, and, quite frankly, an underhanded approach to earning money.

Move ahead to today, when I’m starting to deal with my 2011 taxes. 2011 was my first full year of working full time, so I’ve got a bit more at stake in dealing with my taxes now. It’s still fairly straightforward - a W-2, a 1098-E for student loan interest, and some interest statements for savings accounts. I was originally willing to overlook my issues with overpaying for TurboTax last year, so I started the process. I got to a page where it asked me what product I wanted to use, and by the time I realized I could have started with the free option (and upgrade if necessary), it was too late. There’s no way to go back and downgrade whatsoever. I was partially attached because they have all of my tax history, making it easy when values from previous years are needed, but the site seems shady and, here I was, a year later, and they’re still trying to milk every cent they can out of me. I decided I was sick of dealing with their crap. I finished going through my tax return just to get some baseline figures (recall that they provided me the biggest refund for 2009).

I did some research, and decided to check out TaxSlayer. Nice and cheap, with only a few different options. I signed up and entered my tax information, and they came up with the same federal refund, and $2 for my New York state return. Nice.

So, unless TaxSlayer does something to make me feel cheated, I’ll be a happy customer with them. It’s much cheaper than TurboTax, and does the job just as well. TurboTax is a little better organized, and the website is more responsive, but I can deal with a little bit of slowness and a confusing-at-times interface. At least they aren’t trying to upsell me at every corner, offering no way to roll back once you accept an option that costs more money (even if your needs are fulfilled by a cheaper option).

Sure, TurboTax is kind of like a GPS unit, guiding you through your taxes (as they advertise). But using the service is kind of like going to Best Buy and…. buying a GPS unit. Only, while you’re talking with the salesperson, if you even show the slightest interest in ANY upsell/extended warranty/whatever that is offered, you are immediately locked in and cannot say no.

Bottom line? I’d stay away from TurboTax.

I’ve been playing a bit with Arduino lately. My current project actually involves creating some hardware to go with it. I dislike the heat, which makes riding my motorcycle uncomfortable at times in the summer, especially on the really hot days. I stumbled upon the concept of a cooling vest - one style of which involves flowing cold water through tubes in a vest to cool down the core of your body. All commercially produced systems using this, however, require that you load a cooler with ice to provide the cold liquid to circulate through the system.

This got me thinking. I don’t want to have to screw around with ice, especially if I’m on a long ride or something. How much cooler would it be to be able to cool the water in some other way?

I’ll go into more details about this project at a later point, but right now, I’ve got a peltier unit sandwiched between a CPU heatsink/fan and a CPU water block. This, coupled with a water pump, allows me to remove heat from the water. This cooled water would be stored in an insulated container, and used to circulate through a cooling vest. As the water warms up from body heat, it can be re-cooled by the peltier unit again. To bring this project full circle, I am planning on controlling every aspect of the system using an Arduino. As mentioned before, I’ll delve into deeper details on this at a later point, but things such as monitoring temperatures, controlling water pump speed and peltier output, and even estimating cooling capacity and power consumption are the target of this system.

In the pursuit of this target, I’ve dumped a few hundred dollars buying Arduino parts and a bunch of miscellaneous sensors. I’ve begun to play with the system as a whole - which really isn’t too hard to pick up. My last foray into microcontrollers involved PICs and writing assembly code, so the familiar gcc compiler and community provided libraries for the Arduino family is a nice change of pace.

While playing around with Arduino, though, I’ve begun to think of several other projects that I may tackle at some point. They all sound fun:

A DIY weather station setup. Given a bunch of sensors, I could record weather data in my backyard, and even submit to Weather Underground. Bonus points for solar powered sensors that communicate wirelessly to a central Arduino brain, which can then use ethernet or wifi to report the info directly online, with no computer required.

An LED cube. They’re just plain awesome. Even cooler would be an RGB LED cube, though that presents some interesting issues (due to the fact that I want full PWM control of each voxel in the cube). Multiplexing a digital, single color cube isn’t a big deal, but when going to RGB in this fashion, you now have to control three times as much hardware, and deal in analog as well.

Remote car starter. Not the car starter itself, but an extension to it. Using one of the fancy GSM modules for Arduino, it would be cool to be able to start my car remotely over the internet. The only thing holding me back here is that my current vehicle doesn’t have a remote starter.

LED brake/tail light and blinkers for my bike. Use Arduino to control them, so I can add some attention getting features (such as strobing the brakes and/or blinkers when I tap the brakes). This was actually a project I was envisioning doing with some sort of microcontroller, before the cooler idea and before I knew much about Arduino.

A bright RGB light for my room. Doesn’t necessarily need to have individually addressable pixels, but it would be cool to replace the ceiling mounted light in my room with such a beast. The challenge here is getting the thing bright enough to light the room, and doing it affordably (these challenges rise from the desire for full RGB).

I’m sure I’ve had other cool ideas that I’ve forgotten about. These are the cool ones that come to mind right now.

Anyhow, look for more posts on this subject later. In tandem with my current Arduino project, I’ll likely be reimplementing community-sourced libraries for hardware interfacing that I’d like to see done a different way. This includes a library for text LCD control, for interfacing the 1-wire temperature sensors I’ve purchased, and a library for handling buttons for a user interface.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend working on the site for SantaHack 2011. It still needs some work, primarily the implementation of the voting mechanism and the assignment and entry info pages. I’ll have plenty of time to do those though, it’s not a ton of work. The important part was getting the base site up and ready.

Major kudos to Mark Oates/Zeox Design as well for all his hard work on the graphics/design for the site.

I’ve been doing a horrible job at blogging, as usual. I’ve gotten a head start on what would have (yet again) been a New Year’s resolution - going to the gym. I started going to a local gym with a friend - which is great, it gives somebody to work out with, somebody to be accountable to, etc. So I figured why not get started on what would likely end up being another New Year’s resolution - blogging more.

I’d like to attempt to write a blog post every night. That probably won’t happen, but it’s something to shoot for. Anything at least semi-regular would be nice. Anything goes here, programming, personal stuff, workouts, etc.

As far as the gym - my main goal is to lose some weight and get into shape. Bulking up a little bit is a secondary goal, but nothing I’m going to actively seek at the moment. I seem to have settled in around 200 pounds lately, and I wouldn’t mind dropping at least 50 of it (or less, depending on how much muscle I build, being that muscle weighs more than fat).

Wooters.us desperately needs some attention. This seems to be a recurring, tragic issue. It’s just hard to find the time to do it - I have so many other things I want to do as well.

And, on a closing note, I think I’m going to host a programming competition this month. I need to get in gear, and set up a site and everything for it, but I’m hoping for moderate success. There seems to be a void over at allegro.cc these days with Jakub gone, with nobody left to host ChristmasHack. So I’m planning on organizing ‘SantaHack’ to fill this void. More on that as it comes.

I haven’t posted a blog post in a while (almost a year, to be exact). Not sure why - the thought just never seems to cross my mind.

Not much has really happened over the last year. BAFIRC is more or less on the back burner, again. Wooters is in a gross state of neglect. It seems like I lose motivation to work on these things after working 40 hours a week. I did finish up with college, in December of last year, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I’ve continued on working at the company I began interning at a few years ago.

I miss programming as a hobby. Coding all day at work really drains on you. I don’t do much when I get home - I wish I did more coding, gaming, and such on my own time. The most gaming I’ve done in a while is playing Gears of War 3 for a while, but even that is something I haven’t done in a few days.

I think I need to start going to the gym. Not only to get into shape, but to give me something beyond computers to focus on, because, frankly, I seem to be losing interest. I’m considering finding something new to go back to school for, and I’m torn with wanting to work less and not wanting to earn less money. I may seriously consider working less and going back to school once I finish paying down my debt. I have around $20,000 or so in student loans, and I owe $9,000 on my car still - once those are gone, we’ll see where I go from there.