Another semi-useless spot on the web…
I was surfing around and came upon Credit Karma via a link from SlickDeals. While I have no interest in the service, I was reading their FAQ and got a good laugh. In the FAQ titled “Is this safe?”, they have as the last line:
Our office is protected by a 30lb beagle.
Funny. I wonder how many people actually read that.
I received a letter from Sprint the other day saying that they were going to “streamline” their billing format which is an excellent and much needed move, but it goes on to say that I’ll get a new account number, I will have to create a new PIN and security question, and that if you make payments in the stores, you can’t make payments during the 4 days they are transitioning the system. Sounds like great news, but if you have automatic payment (not via a credit card), you have to re-setup your automatic payment with a new account number which is an inconvenience. I pay by credit card, so it doesn’t affect me. Now I’ll have to remember a different account number (instead of my phone number) and will any of this really make life easier?
I applaud Sprint for wanting to simplify billing, but is changing the account number and the account PIN really going to help or make for a large number of headaches at least in the short term. I’m also pleased that the PIN will be used when calling Customer Care instead of the last 4 digits of the account owner’s social security number. After some changes were made to my account that Sprint swore I made, I changed my passphrase and told them not to accept the last 4 digits of my social security number; only about half the reps honored this. With all the identity theft, social security numbers should only be used once for a credit check and then purged. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen.
In any case, I’m curious to see what happens with this new billing system.
My wife and I have now managed to get out of the house to watch a few movies without our son (we left him with a babysitter) and while it is good to get out, it reminds me of how annoyed I get at movies. We pay our money (we’ve gone to matinees so the cost is reasonable) and then have to sit through about 20 minutes of ads. It’s worse if we get there early as they have the “20 before the movie”. My wife calls it, the “20 before the 20 before the movie”. Why should we have to pay money to see all the ads? The cost of movies has gone up so much in the last few years it is unbelievable. So the cost has gone up, the ads have increased, and the industry makes more money. We have to put up with it if we want to goto movies. I guess renting movies on my AppleTV is looking better and better.
Last week before I left for Macworld, the screen on my Parrot CK 3100 car kit went blank. I sent email to Parrot and even though the kit was far out of warranty, they said they’d send me a new screen. They never asked for my serial number and a new screen arrived today. I’ll box up the old one and send it back. This, I must say, is one of the best customer service experiences I’ve had in a long time. Thanks, Parrot!
There have been articles recently saying that fans of the San Diego Chargers would only come out in good weather, but that was proven wrong in a recent game when it was raining. However, this post isn’t about that type of weather. This is about fans that wear the Chargers colors/gear only when they are doing well. In the past week, we’ve seen people wearing Chargers jerseys, have bolts on their cars, fly Chargers flags, etc. This is not normal for San Diego. There are some rabid fans that always have their Chargers stuff around, most fans don’t. It is only when they’re doing well that people come out in full force with their support for the team. Wouldn’t true fans fly the Chargers colors in good times and in bad?
I’ve been to the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco at least twice, but kept forgetting to take a picture of “the stairs to nowhere”. I finally snapped a picture. It always makes me chuckle when I pass by it.
The Expo that is going on at the same time as Macworld is the United Motorcoach Association Expo. I saw the sign in front of Moscone North that detailed their hotel shuttle schedule. It listed the hotels it goes to and one of them was the Marriott. You have to be real lazy to not walk from the Marriott to Moscone. It is a 3 minute walk and just over a block. You’d spend more time getting onto and off the bus than walking.
Today I reviewed my Bank of America mortgage statement to make sure that my payments were being applied correctly; I pay half of my mortgage twice a month on the premise that I’d cut time off my loan. Well, turns out that Bank of America’s automatic payment program deducts the payments twice a month, but only applies them once a month. I found the original documents and found the fine print that this is how it works. Why on earth would anyone agree to this if it didn’t apply the payments twice a month? I feel like such a moron for not catching this earlier. Now I have to go see if I can get it changed so that my payments are applied twice a month or change it back to one payment a month so that bank doesn’t get the float. While this seems quite deceptive to me, I agreed to the terms and that just makes me stupid for doing it.
Uggh. Yesterday I was going to write about the sub prime mortgage market where I think that borrowers should take some of the blame for the problems, but now the tables are turned on me. I’m a well educated consumer and knew about paying twice a month would cut years off my loan and I still got “taken”. All the fine print in mortgages screws over everyone including informed consumers.
If you have mortgage horror stories, please post a comment.
Yesterday as I was attempting to remove a tree that was too close to our house, I managed to puncture a PVC irrigation pipe. Unfortunately, the only way to shutoff the water to the pipe was to turn off the water to the entire house (why anyone would put a shut off to the internal water, but not the external water baffles me). After a trip to Home Depot and a few attempts at repairing it, I finally succeeded. In order to let the PVC cement set, I had to leave the water off in the entire house overnight. We still had some clean water in our reverse osmosis system, but not enough to wash hands and brush teeth. So, I happened to have a few 1 gallon containers of water in my car. As I’m washing my hands with the water from the container, I start thinking of how much water we waste everyday. If I was restricted to using just a few gallons of water a day, I’m not sure what I’d do. Next time water is going down the drain, think about how many gallons of water you just used.
Awhile back I noticed that the amount of spam (basically a dictionary attack) against one of my domains (notifymail.com). It was so bad that the load average on my server kept going up just to reject the mail for addresses that didn’t exist. I went ahead and used the email forwarding of my domain registrar to handle the incoming email. My server load went down and all was fine. Today I turned mail back on for that domain and instantly my server got flooded with email to that domain. So I had to move email back to the domain registrar; I lose some control over my mail, but it is my only choice. Too bad that the domain is basically dead; I’ve had it for years and really liked the domain as it was one of my very successful products.