Monthly Archives: January 2008

Yikes! The big pig!

This Alpha Bits commercial was directly responsible for one of my most vivid memories of my childhood. My cousins Steve and Justin and I (and probably also my cousin Frank who died a few years later, but my memory of that detail is less certain) were staying over at our grandparents’ house, and we stayed up most of the night laughing wildly about only this commercial. Our grandfather repeatedly yelled at us to keep it down and go to sleep, but his attempts were very much in vain; a handful of young boys cannot be stopped.

It was good to be six years old.

When the three of us are together these days, that night always comes up in our conversations somehow, and it tends to incite raucous laughter for many minutes.

Dumbachusetts

It’s tax time again, and so I started looking at the various options available for free e-filing of my tax returns. (I will withhold any rants regarding the inanity of the IRS protecting the pay-to-file monopoly of H&R Block, Intuit, et al when they really want everyone to e-file because it saves everyone a lot of money, including the IRS, in the interests of brevity.) I stumbled across this lovely little nugget on the Massachusetts Free File Alliance page:

CompleteTax Makes Federal, State and E-filing Less Taxing!

CompleteTax is a convenient and secure way to e-file federal and state tax returns online. Simply log on to CompleteTax and complete a short, intuitive questionnaire – CompleteTax will auto-fill the appropriate forms based on the answers given.

Quick. Easy. Accurate.

FREE electronic filing.

Complies with latest tax laws to help minimize taxes and maximize refunds.

Automatically checks for errors and omissions (helps avoid penalties).

No software to download. Just point & click online.

Your password protected account keeps your information private and secure.

Free email technical support.

FREE federal on-line tax preparation and e-filing for Massachusetts residents if you have an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) between $12,000 and $54,000. State fee only $14.95. If you don’t qualify for the free offer, you can complete your federal return for $29.95 and state return for $14.95 and e-file them for FREE.

Let me highlight the most relevant stupidity of this:

State fee only $14.95.

Yes, you can file your federal return for free if you fall within the eligibility requirements, but your state return always costs $14.95. I learned before I was even old enough to set foot in a public school that $0 and $14.95 are not the same thing. So yesterday, I wrote a short note to point this out to our fair Commonwealth and let them know there was an obvious error:

CompleteTax is listed on the Massachusetts Free File Alliance web page, but the description of their service and eligibility clearly says that state returns are charged a $14.95 fee. That’s not free!

To which I received this very thoughtful reply:

Dear Taxpayer,

Thank you for your recent inquiry.

A number of independent software companies agreed to provide free services to Massachusetts taxpayers who meet certain eligibility requirements.

Unfortunately, you did not meet their eligibility requirements.

Thank you for visiting our website,
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue

Wow, thanks for reading my email, Department of Revenue! Oh, wait… you obviously didn’t read it at all, considering that you didn’t comment at all about the actual topic of my email.

I was so peeved that I wrote this back to them:

I don’t think you read my comment correctly. (Honestly, I don’t think you read my comment at all.) You list CompleteTax on the Free File Alliance page despite the description of their product reading, in explicitly plain English, that they charge $14.95. I’ll even quote the relevant passage for you, and emphasize the important parts, from the Free File Alliance page:

“FREE federal on-line tax preparation and e-filing for Massachusetts residents if you have an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) between $12,000 and $54,000. State fee only $14.95.”

I mean, unless the Commonwealth has a different definition of “free” than the one I’m used to…

I apologize for wasting your time by trying to help you. Next time, I will refrain from pointing out an obvious discrepancy in arithmetic that anyone with a first grade education should be able to detect and that a government office should have been able to proofread on its own.

I know it’s probably a little bit too mean and snarky to be sending off to the taxman, but god damn it, if something is advertised as being free, it should be free, not $14.95. If this were a regular company, they could be sued for false advertising, but this is the Commonwealth, not McDonald’s.

WTF, people.

This Film Is On

Briefly, I wish to mention my band. For those reading who are unaware, I am a member of The Woodrow Wilsons. Generally, I play drums (with brushes), though I do play ukulele on a song.

set up to record some basics.

Anyway, lately, and rather suddenly in my mind, we have gone on a really strange tangent in which most things are suddenly turned on their heads. For example, we are a pretty acoustic band and tend towards the quieter end of the dynamic range. This past weekend, we were recording some overdubs for our debut album and Chris said “Hey, can you play some feedbacky guitar noise on this song?”

For the uninitiated, the answer to that question when posed to me will always, regardless of context, be “yes”.

Then, last night at practice, maybe it was just a weird mood everyone was in, but basically there was just a general theme of us doing things I didn’t really ever expect us doing. We didn’t really play anything that we had already written; we worked on various new things and discussed a lot of ideas (mostly in terms of instrumentation) that I didn’t see coming.

I like being in this band.

Mac Office 2008

… comes with Microsoft’s new fonts that shipped with Vista and Windows Office 2007. I noticed when installing that there’s an option for Office Fonts, which includes Consolas, Calibri, and the others.

Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar

My glorious Telecaster, &c.

A couple of nights ago, I set up my guitar amp and effects pedals in an “always ready” state. This is the first time in probably 5 years that I’ve had an arrangement where I could just pick up an electric guitar and play it. It’s pretty fantastic.

Maybe I’ll actually start playing more!

Starting Anew

To begin 2008, I’ve decided to scrap all of my previous posts and start Ataxia over with a blank canvas. (Most of that stuff wasn’t worth reading anyway.) Certainly, it would be an interesting exercise to read back from the last decade or so (Ataxia’s embryotic form came sometime in 1998), but in many ways I’m glad all that’s available is 10 entries on the ol’ Wayback Machine because it doesn’t have anything from the ataxia.underworld.net or ataxia.neuropol.net days. I’m excited about what the future will bring. At the very least, as per this conversation from this evening, I will probably be myself:

[09:23pm] <maxx> have you been tape? [09:24pm] <tape> I have been tape [09:24pm] <tape> I am being tape [09:25pm] <maxx> and in the future it is most likely you will be tape