I have been using TaxAct for years to calculate and file my taxes. At first I would pay to download the software and run that, but as prices went up for the download I would use the online software. TaxAct was always cheaper than TurboTax and others and you could import the previous year’s information which helped speed things up. It was usually extra to get the state version, so I would fill in my own state forms and mail them in, which was so easy it wasn’t worth $10 extra. Then they started having the deluxe version for maybe $5 more which included state as well as state electronic filing, so I was getting that for around $12-15 total. They would run specials in November or December offering the best prices for next year’s taxes. This year the price structure changed and it was now $14.99 for federal and $14.99 for state (and the sale was only 25% off, maybe just the federal version). I felt like that was too much and I needed to check out other options.
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Old Hard Drive
Eric was moving all of his stuff out last weekend. I don’t think he realized how much stuff he had never taken back to his apartment, but he threw away or took almost all of it. He found his old laptop and a 2.5 inch hard drive that I said I could recycle next time I go to an electronics recycling day. After he left I opened up the laptop and there was a 120 GB solid state drive in there. So the 320 GB hard drive had probably been the laptop’s original hard drive and he had put the solid state drive in there to increase performance. I could sell the solid state drive. They seem to fetch $30-$40 on eBay, or I wondered if I could do the same with my old laptop that I am using as a desktop now. I had swapped in a 500 GB hard drive to get a couple of more years of life out of it, but after my desktop computer failed, I bought an external hard drive attached to my network, and the idea is that all computers will store their files in one place, on the external drive, so a large hard drive isn’t necessary in the laptop. I’m still working on a good way to back up that drive in case it fails, but I have quite a collection of portable drives that I could use. I recently got a 1 TB drive to use as the main backup. When I upgraded the old laptop I had bought a 500 GB portable drive and then took that drive out and put it in my laptop. So that enclosure had the old notebook drive in it for 250 GB of storage. It is pretty easy to take the drive out of the enclosure, so I tested Eric’s 320GB and 120GB drives in the enclosure and they both seemed to work fine. Because the laptop doesn’t work, I went ahead and formatted them both. All it seemed like I needed to was copy the 500 GB drive contents over to the SSD.
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Fake Coin
Yesterday Eric sent me a picture and said “What is this gigantic coin?” I saw the date of 1871 on it and looked up 1871 coins. I soon found a similar looking coin: the seated liberty dollar coin. In excellent condition it can be worth thousands of dollars, but even in average condition it can still be worth $200. Today he gave me the coin to look at and I quickly found out it was fake. The real coin should weigh 26.7 grams. I have a small digital scale and it said the coin only weighed 17.7 grams. I also measured the diameter, which seemed to be correct. As another test, I held a magnet up to it and it stuck. Silver dollars were made from 90% silver and 10% copper, neither of which will stick to a magnet. So it is definitely fake. I looked up fake seated liberty dollars on the internet and found a post by a guy who got one and he noticed that if you look at the coin and flip it vertically, the other side should also be right side up, but his fake was upside down. He said he called the mint and they said the reverse of all US coins should flip right side up. Eric’s coin was made the wrong way too. So it was pretty easy to figure out a fake. Really all it took was a magnet.
Comcast
In October I was nearing the end of my AT&T U-verse contract. I had upgraded my internet from DSL with them, getting bundling discounts by combining a horrible TV package that they basically paid me $5 per month to accept (non HD, not much more than local channels), but the deal also included HBO (including HBO Go online) and a year of Amazon Prime, which Eric has made good use of. The total cost was about $50 per month for 18 Mbps internet service (that was really in the low 20’s, so better than expected). When it came time to renew, I hoped to get internet only and hopefully get the price down a little, maybe to $40. But when I called them, they had no interest in giving me any kind of reasonable deal, and said internet only at that speed would be $60 per month. I told them to let my service stop at the end of the term. And they were fine with that.
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William J. Blythe, III
One of the neat things about FamilySearch.org, where I work on the family tree and look up records, is that it is collaborative, like Wikipedia, so people can work on their family trees and eventually maybe everyone will hook up into one giant tree. 
If I follow my maternal line back I run into my great, great grandmother, who was born Emma Ann Farr and who married Rufus Chapman McCord (I’ve written about the McCords before). Rufus McCord died pretty young, but had a lot of kids for Emma to raise. There is a great picture of Emma and her children and grandchildren, taken in Birmingham on Easter 1922 (shown below, she is in the middle with the lace collar). The picture includes a big chunk of that part of the family, including 3 generations of my ancestors, down to my grandmother, Helen Brunson, who was just 15, born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1907 (second from the right on the back row). She got married the year after this picture was taken, at age 16, but her marriage license said she was 18. Helen’s mother is Velma McCord Brunson, on the left side of the picture in the white blouse and directly above Velma is her husband, Roy Brunson.
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