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2007 TurboTax Deluxe free for State Farm Customers

Updated 1/21/09: See my new post for 2008 taxes

I started looking around for TurboTax on the cheap since good old tax time is coming soon. Turns out I’m not going to have to pay for tax software this year at all and neither do you if you have a State Farm policy. Just log into your State Farm account and there will be a fairly innocuous looking “FREE tax filing” link on the left. This sends you to the TurboTax website where you can select TurboTax Deluxe, create an account and fill out your federal and state returns online.

To top things off you get free e-file for both returns which normally costs $15 a pop. Not a bad deal. Just remember to go through State Farm’s website when you go to file and it won’t try to charge you. If you don’t have a very complicated return like me then this could be a good alternative to paying an accountant.

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the lolcat fever. i has it.

The most significant Internet development of 2007 is undoubtedly the explosion of putting humorous captions on pictures of cats which has come to be known as lolcats. If you have no idea what I’m talking about see this post that really kicked off the lolcat phenomenon. xkcd even acknowledged the lolcat phenomenon with this comic. There’s no point trying to make sense of it. Either you think it’s funny or you don’t. It does help to be a geek and have an odd sense of humor. Which category do you put yourself in: show me the kittehs, this is freaking retarded or I don’t get it? Here are some past phenomenons I enjoyed if you happened to miss them:

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Finding Amazon.com products on Amazon.com

The last few times I’ve gone to buy something on Amazon I’ve run into the same problem; it is becoming more and more difficult to actually buy products fulfilled by Amazon and try to meet the $25 required for Super Saver Shipping. There is no straight forward way to tell Amazon’s search to only search products sold by Amazon. Some categories have an option to filter Amazon only products on the left, but that seems pretty hit and miss. Problem for us consumers who don’t like wading through third party products is Amazon is making too much money to care. Anywhere from 30-50% of the units that move through their site are through third parties. The only good solution I’ve found is a site, Amazon Light, that uses Amazon’s web services to search and filter out the third party results, leaving you with search results that are nearly all eligible for free shipping. This will come in handy during the holiday shopping since I despise going to the mall.