Big props to East Side Scooters
They got my scooter working again. I'm strongly suspicious of how it failed, but at the moment I'm going with "tickled by lightning" because nothing else explains it unless one of the oldsters in this condoplex decided it was a "noisy motorcycle" and tased it or something. Yes, East Side Scooters.
Oh, and *fuck* H&R Block. If you thought they put a lot of effort into trying to convince you to pay them money to free-file your taxes last year, you haven't seen anything yet. For example:
I will say that I'm pretty impressed with one thing. H&R Block actually managed to be more disingenuous than "free" porn sites. About the only thing they left out was an attempt at exploiting the browser through some PDF-centric vulnerability (then again, I haven't looked that closely at the PDF version of my tax return).
Oh, and *fuck* H&R Block. If you thought they put a lot of effort into trying to convince you to pay them money to free-file your taxes last year, you haven't seen anything yet. For example:
- In a framed window with a pile of whitespace filling the middle (so there's no excuse about the browser being "too short" the first time they try to get you to "upgrade" to Basic (for $29.95) you have to actually scroll down to see something more than the "Yes, I'd like to pay you money to file for free" link. What you see at the bottom of the window without scrolling is just the text and link for "upgrading". There's a good two inches of empty whitespace on the screen, and if you scroll down a half inch you then see the "Next" button.
- Towards the end of things, three times in a row they ask you again, if you'd like to pay them money. One of these times they ask you if you'd like to pay them money to file your state return. For people who are claiming to know what they're doing, I find this highly questionable since Tennessee has no state taxes to file.
- When it comes time to pay, if you owe, they don't even do it through the main site. They show you a link to another site called "payUSAtax.com" (guess who runs it... That's right... H&R Block!) which when you click on it spawns another window that says it's directing you to there so you can pay your taxes. ...except it doesn't actually do this. With Chrome and Firefox the new window spawns and just sits there doing nothing in particular (checking the network traffic, the webserver doesn't even bother to respond!). In Internet Explorer (yes, I actually ran that one, too) with all of it's default settings glory the window spawns, waits a moment, and then closes like nothing ever happened.
I will say that I'm pretty impressed with one thing. H&R Block actually managed to be more disingenuous than "free" porn sites. About the only thing they left out was an attempt at exploiting the browser through some PDF-centric vulnerability (then again, I haven't looked that closely at the PDF version of my tax return).