Death is Taxes: Well, I'd like to say I just watched the most amazing Super Bowl in recent memory, but I was so sure the Rams would blow them out that I spent the evening getting my taxes filed on turbotax.com.

Actually, I saw the last five minutes so I caught the best part of the game - enough to wish a had laid an extra large bet on the Pats to win. I'd spend some time telling you how lucky we are to have just experienced an exciting Super Bowl, something that happens only once or twice a generation, but I'm too furious with turbotax.com not to vent a little bit.

First, it asks you if you filed with them last year, which I did, so I said Yes, thinking they might actually default some information from my return last year. Nope. As far as I can tell, it does you no good to answer that question one way or another. That's shame because the only reason I used turbotax.com was because I thought I wouldn't have to re-enter a lot of stuff (Intuit happens to be a major competitor to the company I work for).

The entire process is structured as a series of question and data fields you walk through. There is a index where you can quickly jump around to the differnt sections, but no way to go directly to a form and line where you know a number is missing. Still the federal return was not too bad to enter.

The state return processing is abysmal. There is no index to speak of. If you are ninety-percent of the way done with your state return and you realize something is missing you have to click back through all the questions until you find the one you missed then click back forward to where you left off. What's worse, in the case of my return, there was a piece of data that was impossible to enter, because of a rather obvious bug. I could answer Yes to the question as to whether I had anything to enter on a certain line, but it never offered a data field to enter it. Luckily for me, it was a trivial amount and only cost me a few dollars of my refund, but man-oh-man did Intuit tech support get a savage message from me.

Bottom line, I won't be using turbotax.com again next year. And you should probably shop around if you are looking for a web filing service. And if you do select turbo tax, think seriously about doing fed only.

So I'm out an evenings worth of productive work and a Super Bowl memory, you're out tonight's post so your visit here will be less satisfying, and Intuit is out a customer. What a splendid evening all around. Luckily, Diana Krall lives in my computer (just behind the video card) and has been singing to me all night to keep me calm. She's smaller than she looks.