Never trust a bank

On Friday I went to the bank to deposit a check for my business; I made a mistake and put in my personal ATM card and deposited the business check into my personal account. I noticed my mistake almost immediately and went right into the bank to straighten it out. They couldn't get my check out of the ATM and give it back to me, so they transferred money from my personal account to my business account for the amount of the check. I thought that was the end of my mistake. I happened to check my statement online today and found out that the bank (properly) rejected my deposit as the check was made out to my business and debited my account for the deposit. So I called the bank and they said within 7-10 days the check should be mailed back to me so I can try the deposit again. This is fine, but I wish I was told this before I made the transfer as I got real close to overdrawing my account. Now I have to write a check from my business account to my personal account to reverse the "fix" I made on Friday. It's unfortunate that my little mistake has caused me such a major headache.

A little UI tweaking can go a long way

The other day, I sent my latest program to a friend of mine to test and he asked if I wouldn't mind some constructive feedback. I'm always hesitant to get user interface feedback as last time I did (from an Apple UI guru), I was in the host seat for well over an hour getting what I thought was a good user interface ripped apart. Anyway, I told my friend that as long as it didn't involve brushed metal (the look that Apple is using everywhere in excess), I'd listen. Over the course of a day or so, we exchanged instant messages and email and I was amazed to see the transformation. While I thought my program was technically solid, I wasn't all that pleased with the user interface before; it was very utilitarian. My friend's ideas along with some of my own sparked by his comments turned my program into something that I'm extremely pleased to show off (when the time comes).

User interfaces will never be perfect or to everyone's liking, but a little effort and a little different perspective can go a long way.

Another reason to hate time change

I've never been a big fan of switching back to standard time from daylight savings time as it gets dark sooner and the long days of winter are ahead (OK, I live in San Diego and winters aren't all that bad, but I'm more of a late spring/summer kind of person). On the news last night, they reminded us that this will be the last time change in October as next year daylight savings time ends one week later. What problems will this cause? Well, for every device that has time zone information built into it, for example Palm handhelds, they'll either have to issue a software update or everyone (in the US) will have to create new time zones with the correct start and end dates for daylight savings time. Furthermore, all the synchronization software will have to be updated to handle this. Talk about another headache for me. Time zones are enough of a problem in software without them changing.

Poor emergency response times

San Diego has consistently been ranked as have poor emergency (fire/medical) response times with average response times being somewhere around 10 minutes or so. For a major city, this is pretty awful. We saw this first hand today. We took our dog to Dusty Rhodes park in Ocean Beach (there isn't a dog park near us) and as we were sitting there, I heard a crash, looked up and saw the tail end of a multi car accident on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Lots of people went over to see if they could help and several dialed 911. The first fire truck didn't arrive on scene for somewhere around 15 minutes after the accident, then an ambulance arrived more than 5 minutes after that (we saw the ambulance come around the park and it took about 3-4 minutes for it to drive around the park with the traffic). Next, the police arrived maybe 5-10 minutes later. It's really a good thing that no one had injuries and there wasn't a fire, because the delayed response could have been disastrous.

Our city (which has no money) is in dire need of more emergency resources. It is a real shame that our politicians create the pension crisis and has put our great city is such a financial mess that we can't even afford to put more emergency personnel on the street.

On a side note, the accident was a Cadillac Escalade that rear ended a Subaru Forester. The front end damage that the Escalade sustained was severe while there didn't appear to be much rear end damage on the Subaru; it had its windows shattered and it looked like a non-functioning wheel, but no apparent collapse. I'm not sure how a speeding Escalade that significantly outweighs the Subaru had so much damage.