Three three major tax software providers (well, the three that I know about) all offer desktop software (download or CD purchase) and online services of their products. For a package including one federal return and e-file, and one state return, all three encourage people to go online (or discourage people from staying at home, depending on how you look at things).

Note: This is not meant to be a price comparison between the three vendors; only a price comparison between each vendors’ individual products. The market being what it is, the bundling of services inevitably vary from vendor to vendor.

Buying a CD incurs material costs over downloading software, but why does downloading software cost more than using an online service? It costs money to maintain an online service, and it costs money to store your information from year to year.

To be sure, it is probably worth some money to know exactly how people are using the products (which forms are most popular, which interview questions seem to take the most time, etc.), for the purposes of improving the product and gaining an edge over the competition.

However, the tin-foil-hatted paranoid in me also knows that it is definitely worth a lot of money to know the tax situations of the people using the products. One needs only to consider the value of a list of e-mail addresses (or even physical addresses and social security numbers!) of people in some ZIP code who are married, self-employed, holding multiple pieces of property, with some specific number of children of a certain age, and earning above some certain amount of money (all inferred from information in the tax return).

Even if 2nd Story Software, Intuit, and H&R Block never sell or give out this information, what happens when the companies hit bad times and go belly up on the auction block? I’m sure this data would be worth a lot on its own, outside of the actual tax software and service products. And then there is always the risk of some kind of security breach like another stolen employee laptop, or hacked server, or whatever the breach du jour happens to be.

There is an older writeup of TaxACT here.

Update: the unstated but obvious fact is that using an “online” service for filing means that there is yet one more party storing your tax records, which is one more party able to lose/release your data.

Since becoming Mac-enabled, I had become Workrave-less. I finally found AntiRSI, a similar program for the Mac. It doesn’t appear to keep a history of keyboarding and mousing activity (no more pretty graphs of office productivity), but it does provide smart reminders to take breaks every now and then, so it gets the job done.

And because it’s written natively for Mac, I have to admit that the eye-candy is much nicer than that of the relatively plain-Jane Workrave for Windows and Linux.

After three years of using Quicken 2004 Premier for Windows, I decided to upgrade to a more recent version. I had been underwhelmed with the “Premier” version (it promises extra bells whistles for tracking investments, but I didn’t really see any value-add over my Quicken 2003 Deluxe), so I went back to the Deluxe version.

I did a few things differently this time:

• I skipped retail and bought it on eBay last week ($49.99 retail, $20.50 for me on eBay).
• I had it shipped to my office address instead of my apartment complex. For the past few years, I’ve been spoiled by managed complexes with offices that receive all your packages. We’ll be moving into a house next month with no such luxuries, so I wanted to give the office shipping department a test run before I ordered anything more serious.

A retail CD with no box arrived in the office mail today, in a plain padded envelope. With some small amount of trepidation (What if it’s a fake? What if the CD has viruses on it?), I backed up my Quicken files, opened the CD, scanned it for viruses, and installed it onto my computer.

It was a very anti-climactic experience. Both the Quicken software itself and my data file were upgraded in-place without a hitch.

What differences did I notice from Quicken 2004 Premier?

• The online one-step update now runs in the background when launched, instead of completely taking over your Quicken session and preventing you from doing something else. This is nice. You can click “One-Step Update”, then go back to reconciling your bank and credit-card statements while other transactions are downloaded in the background.
• I can download transactions directly from within Quicken from more of my institutions.
• The color scheme is different, and you get to choose from a few different color schemes (green, blue, etc.).
• Following a disturbing trend, the UI features bigger fonts and bigger buttons, resulting in an effective loss of screen real estate. I understand that there is a legitimate need to increase font and icon sizes to compensate for the ever-increasing resolution of modern LCD screens, but I wish for once that software writers would cater to geeks like me who actually want to get work done on their computers.
• A few things here and there seemed a little slicker, like navigating between different areas of Quicken. Nothing astonishing, and nothing I can quite explicitly identify, but something noticeable. Or maybe I just wanted to justify the $20.50 as something not ill-spent.

What remained the same from my old copy of Quicken 2004 Premier?

• Initial installation is easy. It also leaves a smattering of cross-promoted products all over your Windows desktop. Enough already, I already paid you for the software, do you now have to sell me some extras? I wonder how much money Intuit actually makes from installing icons for MasterCard and CitiBank on the desktop after installation.
• Pretty much everything else.

In summary:

• My office appears to be fine for receiving packages.
• eBay appears to be fine for buying software.
• I will be sticking with Deluxe from here on out. Premier doesn’t offer me anything useful. It does offer more investment-related “advice,” but it’s not that useful.
• The upgrade from 2004 to 2007 might be worth the $20 purchase price, for increased compatibility with financial institutions’ online operations. For example, with Quicken 2007, I can download my Bank of America and Wells Fargo transactions directly from within Quicken. With Quicken 2004, I had to go to the respective websites and download my transactions myself. It’s admittedly just a small plus, but a plus nevertheless.

All in all, not bad for $20.50 for a three-year upgrade. It’s definitely not worth $49.99 for a yearly upgrade. It’s probably not even worth $20.50 for a yearly upgrade.

Edit: Actually, it turns out I have to upgrade, because Quicken only provides online services for products up to three years old. See their sunset policy for details.

I just started a new job two weeks ago. Standard issue for engineers at the company is a choice of laptop: Dell (Windows) or MacBook Pro (Mac OS X). Already being very familiar with Dell and Windows, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to kick the Apple tires.

The hardware is very nice: bright widescreen LCD display, stylish silver finish, pleasant-to-the-touch keyboard, and the very retro one-button trackpad. However, I have been more annoyed than enthralled by everything else that is Mac:

• Everyone raves about the great UI, but while it might be good for completely novice computer users, it’s not so great for anyone who wants to actually get any real work done. Particularly annoying is the motif of a single menu bar at the top of the screen. If I move my application window down to the bottom of the screen, I still have to move the mouse all the way back up to the top of the screen to activate the menu. In Windows, the menus appear within the application window, so the menu bar is never that far away. The single menu bar at the top of the screen saves some screen real estate, but I’m more interested in getting work done than I am in watching my desktop background change colors.
• There is no convenient keyboard-able shortcut system to activate the menus: one must know either the undocumented Ctrl-F2 keystroke to reach the menus, or the pre-built shortcut keys for various functions (open, save, cut, copy, paste, quit, etc.). In Windows, the menu is easily accessible via “Alt”, and the “hot” keys are denoted with underlining.
• The trackpad is neat: one can pan around windows with one hand by holding one finger to the trackpad and using another finger to issue a scrolling motion. However, shipping the laptop with just one button? A single-button trackpad and single-button mouse might look more stylish, but Apple needs to just invent the stylish moral equivalent of a two-button mouse.

Anyway, there are already lots of websites out there that complain about similar issues (and just as many that tout the superiority of such “issues”), so I’ll just say that those are the top-three annoyances.

The whole suite of iLife applications (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) is probably fine and very nice, but at least for normal engineering work, I gave it a shot, and didn’t like it. So I’ve spent the past week getting my MacBook Pro to work and look just like my Linux desktop (this is where I will admit that I like the “OS X” part of “Mac OS X”). It has been a much more fruitful exercise bending the MBP to my will, than teaching this old dog the new Mac tricks.

I am pleased to report that MythTV commercial detection has been working very well for the past month or so. It works just about perfectly for first-run network prime-time broadcasts, and works OK for some syndicated content.

During the summer, a lot of crappy movies get broadcast on syndication, and I watch a lot of them. These are characterized by an over-abundance of TV logos (logos often persist through commercial breaks) and an under-abundance of blank frames (broadcast often resumes with neither blank frame nor broadcast logo, what I refer to in the above-linked-to article as “scene changes”).

I just need to implement a good scene-change detector for this last case of commercial-detection failure, and I should be good. It will also bring my new commercial detection engine up to feature parity with the “old” one, making it ready to merge back into the mainline MythTV code.

Automatically skipping commercials is nice for the most part, but it makes me realize that we often need commercial breaks as an excuse to get up and use the bathroom, clear the coffee table, get something to drink, etc. Having to hit the “pause” button to take these breaks (and then slightly rewinding upon resumption) somehow seems like more work than simply waiting for a normal break and doing things during the break. Now if only MythTV could somehow detect bladder fullness or coffee-table clutteredness and automatically pause, and then automatically un-pause when I’m back in the couch …

Since I’ve been watching way too many commercials in an attempt to automatically skip them, I may as well share some interesting tidbits of results from my research:

• A good, highly-rated prime-time show like Law & Order is approximately 35% advertising and 65% show.
• A slightly-less good, still-highly-rated prime-time show like any of the CSI shows is approximately 30% advertising and 70% show.
• A crappy guilty-pleasure prime-time show like “The Unit” is approximately 25% advertising 75% show (more like 65% show and 10% last-week’s recap and scenes-from-next-week’s episode).

So far, so good. A good show can sell more ads than a crappy show, but they can’t sell so many advertising minutes that people get annoyed and stop watching. However:

• Daytime soaps are an excruciating 50% advertising and 50% show (even lower than that, with recaps).

The soap viewers must have large bladders or be super-captive or have nothing else to do, or the advertising rate must be super-cheap. No matter how cheap, it still raises the question in my mind of what would happen if a network just could not get any advertising money for some time slot. Would they just go off-air, like some local stations do at night?

Making good progress; I can now detect (but not yet match) television logos:

MythTV has a feature to automatically detect commercials in recordings and then automatically skip them upon playback. The problem is that it is not very reliable. Often, commercials aren’t recognized, or non-commercials are recognized as commercials. Here are my efforts to improve this bit of functionality: