I filled out amended 2005 tax returns yesterday, to report income from my wife’s investment club. I’m not terribly impressed with how TaxCut handles amended returns.. For federal, you basically save your existing return under a new filename, then update the return to include the changes, and then tell it you want to fill out form 1040X. But then after you fill out the 1040X, you’re kind of on your own as far as figuring out what you need to print, where to mail it etc. The program’s filing logic isn’t smart enough to know you’re doing an amended return, and it just keeps telling you that the return has already been successfully filed (assuming the return was previously filed electronically). As far as state goes, I couldn’t find anything at all for doing an amended state return. It turns out that for Maryland, it’s all done via the online iFile system (assuming that’s how the original return was filed). Doing it this way was a snap, and I continue to be impressed with the iFile setup. As far as TaxCut goes, I guess you get what you pay for… it was considerably less expensive that Intuit’s TurboTax, and I’m curious if TurboTax has better support for doing amended returns. Hopefully I won’t have to do this terribly often (my wife’s defunct-but-not-disbanded investment club is a topic for another rant)…

Totally different topic — I’m going to try out another blogging engine. I’ve been really happy with Blosxom, but it’s very bare-bones and I’d like to try out something a little more full-featured. My goal was to find something that’ll run on my server which is equipped with php4, mysql and apache. I’d also like something with a relatively small footprint (Movable Type is kinda overkill for my purposes). I found b2evolution which looks promising and is available as a Debian package. Just working on an issue with the database config, and I’ll be able to give it a try.