Mel in Hawaii

Yes, computer networking gear. They make a wide array of equipment from local 'switches' for departments for $100+ to high end telecomm equipment that easily could be $50k+. At that price it's either a high density switch, or a mislabeled division office router.

Boy this thread really grew after I left... I am back, but no more time to bake.. :-( Two more weeks and I get to go back and live the out-back lifestyle.

Not to mention if you efile. Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and do a full scan of your system.

Just tell them that your 'computer guy' sabotaged the computer right before he went on a trip so you would realize how much you actually need him. Hehe.

Hmm... as I sit in front of the fan resting a bit, I can almost feel the cold wind hitting me. Unfortunately, I could use a bit of cold weather right now to help cool me as I finish packing everything. Everywhere you look in my house there are more bankers boxes. Now if I just had more bubble wrap.

Uh, WELL I AM a geeky GUY/MAN... that also loves to cook. Why? I love helping people and I also love having people enjoy something that I have done for them. Cooking offers the best of both worlds in that I releive them of a chore that most would rather not do and yet I find relaxing and enjoyable, yet also get to watch their faces as they enjoy what I have made. Um, I am in the process of moving, so I won't be near any tourist places once April comes around (I get on the plane tomorrow). Sorry, I won't be able to visit, but I will be out in the boonies about a hundred miles from the airport busily working away. Recipes are like directions on how to get somewhere. No two sets are alike, yet they all seem to get you there in the end. I will post my recipe for cinnamon rolls when I need a break from packing, yet it is always morphing so if I post it today and then again in a week, it might have changed. Tom, that wouldn't be a 'Cinnabon' franchise would it? My kids enjoy watching them roll out the dough, but unfortunately theirs has eggs in them so they are off limits. So, after they watch at the mall for a while, we end up talking about making some after we get home.

Hehe.. I hit a sore spot.. Sorry guy/gals. AS for the cinnamon rolls, I make them too much. It got to the point that I had to stop for a while as the kids wouldn't eat them anymore. It's sad that when you make something so yummy and your son asks if you know how to make anything else... 'Why of course I can make something else, I just like these a LOT. What would YOU like me to make?' Every time I make them I change the recipe or the method a bit to see how it might turn out. This last batch was a hit as I had to fight the kids off so I could keep half the batch for someone. Instead of sugar in the dough itself, I used honey and then I only put half the normal amount of rolls in each pan and let them raise a lot longer. The combination of the honey, extra room and lots of time made for some really soft, melt in your mouth dough, although it seems I didn't put enough brown sugar/cinnamon in between as normally it soaks out the bottom but not this time. Hmm... maybe it's been coming out the bottom from being squeezed out and this time there was enough room not to get squeezed? I wonder. I am going to have to experiment with the next batch to see.

Amazing that you get upset at someone getting a second oppinion, but people advocate for that all the time. Getting a second oppinion from a Doctor comes to mind. Everyone is not an expert, and how are people to know that you are ALWAYS right? I know it hurts the pride on your part, but people are constantly being told to do that. Yes, I agree that HRB probably charge more so they came back to you, but something Greg Jackson once said comes to mind. "If you can't give it away, sell it!" His story was about an item that a furniture seller was trying to sell that they kept marking down and marking down and no one would buy it. Finally they jacked the price up really high and he could have sold it many times over. If your price is lower, somewhere back in the back of their brains they are going to questions themselves as to WHY it is lower. You may have the best resources behind you, do way more training than the HRB guys get, but still they will wonder as they don't KNOW that. To them the franchise probably adds a bit of unquantifiable value/quality that it probably doesn't deserve. Ok, I am off to grab a cinnamon roll that I just baked before they get cold... Ummm.. Homemade from scratch cinnamon rolls early in the morning.

Ray, some machines store copies of the outgoing faxes, most don't. Just think of the privacy issue if it did save a copy. At my last company, we had a photocopier that we could use as a fax machine too. Guess what, one day a lady in the office used it to fax something from her sideline job. Big mistake as the GM came in and was looking for something she faxed on it and found it. Amazing how after that incident, very few people used that machine to send faxes.

Here Here... But I don't think you need to keep your mouth shut.

Sorry, I only 'moderate/delete' pornographic emails. Political Humor or a person's oppinion is not 'bad' per se, as long as they aren't attacking someone for their views. I voted for the other guy, and I would have the same oppinion if you were pointing out McCain's faults. Besides, I was going to comment on the same thing. Seems every so often I get to open the newspaper and read about someone not paying their taxes until they get appointed. Is it me, or does he have a magnet for people who are not paying taxes when he is making choices. (Of course, how do YOU or I figure out who has properly paid their taxes?)

Where I live, the post office will return any mail that has the street address to the sender. IT doesn't matter if the post office box is listed on the next line, they STILL send it back. (Some postal emploees really have it in for you.) For the past 9 years I have been putting my PO box on there without any problems.

If he can't find a better use, tell him to take the loan and sink it into staggered CD's giving him a guaranteed return. If he doesn't want the no interest loan, there are lots of other people who would be HAPPY to have it. Personally, I would have it reduce my loan on the house to save me more money than he would get in interest.

Isn't this more of a liability issue than one of calculating your compensation?

If you are going to come here and complain, at least give us the error message so that some of the 'ex' employees might have a chance at helping. We really do care about every one of you even if we dont' work there anymore.

From the sounds of it, California should declare that amnesty program as if I remember what I read correctly they actually came out ahead the last time they tried that (receipts were higher than if they had the penalties tacked on minus the enforcement costs). But my memory doesn't work as well as it used to unfortunately...

My biggest problem is that I continually try to go to atxcommunity.com instead of www.atxcommunity.com so I have to log back in again (lost my cookie in the milk I guess).

I just wish you would take a bit inspiration from how Medlin presents himself. (Of course, I could benefit from immitating his demenor too most likely.)

Woo hoo, if you have the hardware sitting there ready... yup, PHP is a good tool for the web, but does that mean it's meant for a tax practice? I think you would have a hard time proving that one to me. That does move the processing down to the local lan and one server would suffice for even the most active office, but I dont' want to be their technical support team. Just wait until they throw a consumer 'all in one antiviral, firewall, and everything else they can cram into it, package' on the server. Hehe.. LAN operations doesn't make it seamless, a dedicated server makes the response time faster. If you put that server in SanFran or Miami, a dedicated server would still be almost instantaneous. Yes, I know what Citrix is as I have been using it for many years. I don't think it's the perfect answer and that video is so misleading in it's ease of deployment. Do you really have a data center sitting idle with 150 machines preloaded with Citrix ready to deploy your server? Ok, do you have multiple data centers all over the country ready to deploy your software? No, ok, you are going to outsource that to another company that is doing that for you? Ok, that's fine too. Now you have a security issue. Oh, you use data centers that have 24/7 security with keycard access blah blah blah. Ok, give me 5 minutes to sign up as a client, install my server and hack your servers from within their data center. Security issue right there and that took zero thought to come up with. A lot of projects find quality programmers, but Quality programmers willing to put so much effort in during their busy season? Building tax programs have SERIOUS time constraints that other projects just do NOT have. Good luck to you, obviously you want to blow me off as some neophyte tax guy (when I don't prepare returns for a living). You could have simply said that you were going to have each office install PHP (and associated database server) at their locations. Remember I did say that I hoped my assumption was incorrect. That's perfectly fine with me though, I don't need to help you. But I still think PHP is just adding another layer of bugs to your software. But if you are comparing 'last years software' then why doesn't your DEMO work? You took it down because you are waiting for your next version to come out?

I wrote a really long post and decided that it was too negative, so I deleted it and started over. rchinchilla, I do want to say something here, but want to temper it with the fact that I used to work at ATX (since way back in 92) and have seen the nightmare that is tax software development right up first hand (I was there during the card table days). I am also a 'competitor' of yours, perse, in the idea that I too have been working on a tax program to call my own but you won't see anything published on the web to this point as it is not complete enough. I bowed out of releasing a program this year as if you don't have a complete package, it is just not going to be good enough. First, I don't see how PHP can benefit the tax program with the exception that it would be web-enabled. This is fine for a product marketed at the home user wanting to complete their own return, but what advantage does it give a tax preparer? PHP can be a wonderful tool, but have you thought about the HUGE workload it would put on your servers? Let's just think that if you became a minor player in the tax field, and had 10,000 users (2000 shops with an average of 5 employees each). Remember that you aren't just talking about 10,000 customers coming to your website, you are talking about constant interaction with and trying to keep track of 10,000 tax returns and fully calculating the returns at the same time can really consume some major hardware. Think about it, when filing deadlines come up, having ALL of those users online at the same time is a very DEFINATE reality, not just a possibility. Efile servers can get overloaded from all the returns just being submitted by preparers, imagine having to calculate, edit, and create the efile too. The weeks before filing deadlines are VERY critical to tax preparers, if anything in the chain fails (their ISP, your bandwidth, your server, etc) there are going to be some really pissed off customers with quite a few who are also practicing lawyers. Scaling on desktop software is not an issue as each customer brings their own CPU with them. Second, tax software as open source sounds nice. But how are you going to find enough dedicated QUALITY programmers to do all those forms in the few short weeks you have between the time the IRS releases them and when the tax pros will be hounding you for them? Even the first week of January is too late for some people. The Christmas holidays are not a time that you want to be relying on a volunteer staff. Third, be careful of promising more than you can deliver. You are still developing forms, yet you claim that your calculations are checked against the high-end programs. I surely hope you are talking about last year's product. Tax pros are very good at nit picking your claims as most have many years of tearing apart IRS technobabble under their belts. Remember what I said about the tax pro/Lawyers, there are more out there than you want to run into. Sure, they may be great customers if you treat them right, but they can also cause you major hassles so be careful what you claim. And of course, remember about the privacy and ownership of the data. In a PHP system, I assume (and hopefully incorrectly) that you are thinking about plunking that data down into a database on your server. Better not be... Whoa nellie, that's a multi-branching biggie that I won't really touch here... But the data needs to be stored somewhere. Do you think that the tax professionals will want you hanging onto that data for them for next year? That data is VERY valuable to them as it represents an investment of time inputting it. If you go belly up, they still want that data around to be 'imported' into their next package. It better be on their own hard drives in a form that can be imported. Before you say anything, I am sure that you will likely see that I am a 'Moderator', but I don't censor/delete any posts unless you are posting porn. I volunteered to help aleviate that problem a while ago, but due to KC and Eric's hard work, I haven't had to. I had nothing to do with your other posts.

Actually I did have a wonderful birthday... My boss at work bought everyone lunch, HR got me a cake and we all sat in the GM's office as they sung me Happy birthday. Hard to believe I am still the youngest guy in the office. Two and a half more days of work left and we are all done. I can't believe it, the 10 years have gone by so fast, but those 2 last years waiting for the end to come seemed to be the longest. If this wasn't a 'community' I doubt I would have been here that long as I only seem to get to help on the occasional computer question nowadays if I haven't missed a chance to answer it due to the time difference between the mainland and here.

I don't know about current files, but the old ATX files used to use compression so it may be trying to uncompress each file to check inside it... But if it runs slowly, reboot the computer. If it still runs slowly, run an update on the Anti-virus software and reboot again.

I have been reading about the income requirements for retirement contributions and I am a bit uncertain about the following... After working for my present company for almost 10 years I will be getting let go on December 31. We have a severance benefit of 6 months pay for which we will get paid on our normal pay periods with normal benefits (life insurance, medical, dental, vision, flex spending, that kind of thing) with the exception of the 401k where all contributions to the 401k end on Dec 31. During this time period, we are supposed to available to be called back to work if the employer requires it or else we stop receiving the income/benefits. We also are supposed to lose the benefit if we take another job for a competing company. Does the severance benefits that we will receive from January to June qualify as earned income even though we are not actively going to work? My personal feeling is that it does because the income will be reported in box 2 of the W-2, it's not a pension or annuity, and it is not deferred income. (While I say the benefits continue, the actual reality is that some are not due to reasons out of the company's control, so that should answer anyones questions regarding my comments from prior posts not matching the details listed above. I do give the company credit though, they worked hard to find replacement 'benefits' that were comperable in value to what we had before and have compensated us for lost benefits.)

I remember a bunch of those guys, but some of the ones that I recognise must have started working there AFTER I left. I saw the picture and immediately remembered the laugh of one of the ladies as vividly as if she was standing here beside me.

Actually I think it's a pretty HORRIBLE change of venue... Let's just say that I WAS married when I left Maine. The story reads like a soap opera so I won't go into that here, but the kids and I are doing ok although I would rather be living in Maine. 27 days to go and then maybe I can do something about that.