Credit Card Conundrum

Credit card company sends me offer for new credit card. I can transfer balances from existing high rate cards to the new card and enjoy a low, low rate for the life of the balance. No short-term teaser rates here! I accept this wonderful offer. Hilarity ensues.

So the first card I decide to do a balance transfer is one of my wife's department store charge cards. It has a ridiculously high interest rate so it is a prime candidate. When I apply for this new credit card online, I very carefully enter all the account information and with gleeful anticipation await the reduction in interest that I'm soon to enjoy!

But of course, that's not the end of the story. A few days later I receive my new card upon which they have printed a butchered version of my name. The new card they send me has the name "Seric Asberry" instead of "S. Eric Asberry". Actually, "Seric" is kind of cool because it makes me sound Vulcan. Vulcans rock! Especially that hot Vulcan chick on Star Trek: Enterprise. But, I digress. So, they butcher my name despite the fact that I already have a different type of card with the same company that has my correct name. And I'm wondering, how would they even approve the account for "Seric Asberry" who doesn't exist? Oh, well.

A couple more days pass, and returning home from work, I find a message on my answering machine from the new credit card company. They tell me they need the "correct" payment address in order to process my balance transfer. Hmmm. This doesn't sound good.

So, I call them up, and give them the same address I had given them before (when I filled out the application for the new card). Apparently the address doesn't match what they have on file. The lady then proceeds to tell me that they will have to place a stop payment on the check because they sent it to the wrong address. OK, now, help me out here. These folks called me because they somehow knew they had the wrong payment address. Yet, even though they (somehow) already knew they had the wrong address, they sent a check (to the known wrong address) anyway? Is it just me, or does this make absolutely no sense? They had no answers for me. They reassured me, however, that they would re-issue the balance transfer to the correct payment address. If only I knew how literal they were being.

Today, I received a letter from the credit card company stating that they were pleased to inform me they had processed my balance transfer. I noticed a small problem, however. The letter listed the bank the balance transfer check was issued to, and that bank name was not even remotely similar to the correct bank. The optimist in me chimed in “No worries, mate!” (My inner optimist is Australian). “Probably just crossed in the mail. This is probably the one they issued the stop payment for”. My inner pessimist is a sneakly little guy. He distracted my inner optimist while strategically placing a banana peel on the floor of my brain. Before he knew what was happening, my inner optimist slipped on the peel and fell to the floor, lapsing into unconciousness. The inner pessimist took over and began dialing the phone number of the credit card company.

I’m greeted with the robotic operator who presents me with a dizzying array of menu choices to help appropriately direct my call. I choose the option for “balance transfers and balance transfer inquiries”. I’m connected to a pleasant gentleman who politely asks how he can help. I proceed to explain my concern about getting this notice of a balance transfer sent to the wrong bank. He responds by telling me that he’ll have to transfer me to someone in the “balance transfer department” who can help me with that. OK, silly me, I'm confused again. What exactly is the point of me choosing a menu option to route my call, if the call is going to be routed to someone who cannot help me with that type of problem? You just gotta love big corporations!

“But before I transfer you ...” he begins, as he launches into a sales pitch for YET ANOTHER new credit card that I don’t need, with the annual fee waived for the first year. I start to get impatient, and finally interrupt him, and tell him I’m really not interested in another credit card.

“OK, but let me just tell you about a rental car insurance benefit we offer with no monthly or annual fee ...”. I foolishly listen, thinking he is talking about a benefit I already have. But no, finally he hits the punch-line! They don’t charge a monthly or annual fee for the benefit, but they do charge me a fee for the benefit automatically any time I use my card to rent a car. “No, thank you ... I am not interested. I am only interested in solving the problem that I called about”. Finally, he transfers me.

Indulge me for a moment as I digress into a side rant. What is the deal with credit card companies who, when you call to inquire about some concern, instead of immediately addressing that concern try to sell you something? This is not the first time (or only credit card company) that has annoyed me with some sales pitch when I call to speak to customer no-service. Usually, they at least wait until after the problem is resolved, but either way, it is annoying! What are these companies thinking? Does anyone ever say “heck yeah! Forget about that silly old problem I was calling about. Sign me up! Oh, but wait. Let me grab some vaseline and bend over first”. I guarantee I will never sign up for some benefit or service that is pitched to me this way.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled rant. I’m finally transferred to another polite gentleman in the correct department. He confirms my optimistic surmise that in fact, this problem has already been dealt with, they did send the payment to the wrong address but they have already issued a stop payment, and re-issued the transfer to the correct address. Great! They did exactly what they promised. “Sir, can I just get you to verify that mailing address again?”. I did, and they had it right. Whew. I was a bit worried for a moment. “And sir, can you verify the account number?”. “blah blah blah”. “Umm, sir, could you repeat that one more time?” “blah blah blah”. “Oh boy ...”, he begins. As it turns out, while they did re-issue the balance transfer to the correct address, this time they issued it for the wrong account number. Which is really funny (ha ha ho ho hee hee) since the first payment that they sent to the wrong address had the correct account number.

He is very apologetic, and tells me they will issue another stop payment on the check, and will issue yet another balance transfer for the correct account. (Presumably, for the correct account and the correct address).

Third time’s a charm, right? RIGHT? FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS SACRED AND HOLY, PLEASE SAY “RIGHT!”

Ding! There goes the pill timer. Time to take my medication again.

DOT NOT

Previously on this blog I ranted and raved about my painful experience with the last round of Windows updates. Well, that time has come 'round once again, and this time it's been no less painful.

Everything went fine, until it got to the .NET update.


Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (update 1 of 1) ...

SL9.tmp - Common Language Runtime Debugging Services
Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.
Process id=0x50c (1292), Thread id=0x1b8 (440)

Click OK to terminate the application
Click CANCEL to debug the application


Obviously I was simply not meant to use .NET. I rebooted, stood on one leg, did a special dance that a witch doctor once taught me, but all to no avail. It simply won't install the update. The truth of the matter is that the machine is long overdue to have a complete re-install done. But it's my work machine, and of course they (yes, the mysterious, anonymous evildoers known as "they") make it a pain in the ass when you rebuild your machine, because you have to have the machine added to the SEED OF THE ANTICHRIST -- errr, I mean Windows -- domain, and only one of the sup41337 admins can do that, blah blah blah. I hate Windows. I truly loathe and despise it. Windows makes me want to gain posession of inumerable EMP weapons and use them for the greater good of mankind. (Not that I'm overly dramatic about these things). So, my final solution for this problem? Tell Windows update to quit displaying that particular update. Enough with the taunting already!

Oh, that reminds me, I just bought a new computer that runs Windows! (I will never learn). I just upgraded my laptop to a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a 17" display. I'm very pleased with it! It's my primary machine, for both work and play. It has a 256MB graphics card which blows away anything on my desktop. It also has lots of memory and a beautiful hi-res display which makes it equally nice for doing software development. And, with appropriate tweaking, I can even forget that I'm running Windows for the most part.

One more thing I wanted to mention. I have added a new search feature to my site. You may notice that the "blogger toolbar" is no longer displayed at the top of the page. What that was supposed to do was allow you to search the blog via google. But for whatever reason it never actually worked. When it created the search it munged it up. So I pilfered some Javascript code and added my own little search function (look on the right side about halfway down the page).

Also, don't forget, (OK, I guess there were actually two more things I wanted to mention) there is a link there which allow you to syndicate the site via RSS. The preceding link is for use with Bloglines but you can also point just about any RSS client to this link.

There's also (OK, technically I guess we're up to three now) a link for subscribing to a mailing list so you can be notified whenever I post a new entry or add a new picture to the moblog section. Note that the RSS feed doesn't include the moblog stuff. The moblog is seperate from the "blogger" stuff so I'll need to figure out some way to generate an RSS feed myself during some of my nearly limitless free time.

So ... happy weekend... and don't forget to send your savings account to the IRS by midnight!

Tweaking Windows for Fun and Profit

Actually, there is not a lot of profit involved here, but I've been having fun tweaking Windows to make its appearance suit me better. Part of it has been making Windows look and feel a little more like OSX, and part of it has just been some other tweaks that have nothing to do with OSX.

The first little annoyance that I wanted to address was the Windows command line window. Sure, it gets the job done, but it's kind of ugly. For example, you can't do critically important things like make the background transparent. So after a little digging, I found a nice little open source program called Console. It sports features like making the console background transparent, using an image for the background, and a myriad of other little doo-dads. Lovely.

Next, the minimalist in me wondered if there was some way to get rid of the icons on the Windows desktop that I never use. I don't just mean some of them I mean all of them! I want a pristine desktop with no clutter to obscure my calming, serene natural desktop. Once again, Google proves me to be my one, true friend as it leads me to a simple registry hack. Note, however, that I found this page led me to the appropriate registry key, but unless I'm reading it wrong, they say to set the value to zero to disable the icons. I found that it was already set to 0 and I had to set it to 1.

Speaking of Google, this is a little off-topic, but if you are a Firefox user I highly recommend the Google Preview plugin. Basically it adds a thumbnail picture of the web page for each search result. Nice.

OK, let's go for a little bit more Mac look and feel. How about ditching the task bar and replacing it with something like the dock on OSX? No problem. Note that there is a free version as well as a "plus" version that gives you a few extra features.

Well, it's looking better, but it's still not quite right. Still has that ugly Windows look and feel even though the taskbar is gone. I remember a utility I used in the past, called Windowblinds. I hadn't used it recently, and had stopped using it in the past because it seemed to really degrade my system performance. But I decide to give it another whirl, and wouldn't you know it, it comes pre-packaged with a theme called "iSkin". Wow ... my windows look just like they are running under OSX now! It also doesn't seem to have any notable impact on the responsiveness of Windows, so either I have better hardware than I used to or they have really made improvements to its efficiency. Also, I no longer need to run WinRoll, because most of its functionality is already supported by Windowblinds.

We're almost there, but Trillian just doesn't look right. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue again and I'm able to unearth an iChat skin. Now Trillian looks a lot more like iChat under OSX. Not completely though. It doesn't really support the cutesy little "speech bubbles" that show up under iChat. It tries to imitate them kinda-sorta-but-not-really. (Sorry-- I try to avoid throwing around technical jargon like "kinda-sort-but-not-really" but sometimes you have to use such terms in order to communicate your points more clearly).

I'm pretty happy with the look and feel now. The only thing kind of missing is the "Finder bar" but that doesn't bother me in the least. In fact that's probably the one thing about OSX I don't really care for. The only other thing I'm not sure about is the system tray. ObjectDock supports it but the icons show up just as big as all the other icons and it loses a lot of elegance. I also found a docklet which solves that problem by displaying all the system tray icons within the space of a normal dock icon. Unfortunately, it seems to be causing system instability for some reason.

Overall I think my desktop looks much better. The only problem is, I was up late last night doing all this. I really needed one of these to help me get up this morning.

The Mac is Back!

You may have read my earlier posting regarding my woes with my Mac Mini. I'm happy to report that those problems, for now at least, appear to have been eliminated.



One of my Mac-head friends from work came up with the winning suggestion: disable the power-saving option that turns off the hard disk. I don't really understand why, but for some reason that fixed the problem. The only thing I can surmise is that somehow the disk was getting caught in some kind of cycle on/cycle off loop or something, because the problem only manifested after I had been away from the computer for an extended period of time. It's hard for me to believe that there aren't a lot more people yelling about this problem if it's just a bug, though. Maybe it's because while I left the option to power down the disk enabled, I disabled the "sleep" option so the Mac would never go to sleep. Perhaps the two settings in combination cause the Mac to lose its marbles.

I'm just glad the problem seems to be fixed. Now I look forward to actually using the silly little thing again. :)

Movin' Out

Yesterday we went to see Movin' Out at the Fox Theatre. (Which reminds me ... my second grade teacher didn't give me credit for spelling theatre with an "re" instead of an "er" at the end on that spelling test. Well, I think I am vindicated now, yes? Not that I'm bitter and hold on to things from my past. But, I digress).


I'm not generally a big fan of musicals. Well, OK, actually I pretty much hate them. Or so I've always maintained. But then, I really liked the movie Chicago, and that was basically a musical. I've been a big fan of Billy Joel for a long time. So naturally, when I heard about this musical based on Billy Joel's music I had to go see it.

It was not bad. If I were more sophisticated, I might really have appreciated it even more. But there was no dialogue. There was supposed to be a story here, but I didn't really get much of a story out of it. Until I read the program guide afterwards, that is. Maybe I should have read that first. Anyway, to me, it just seemed more like watching a cover band playing Billy Joel music while watching a bunch of ballet dancers. Sadly, I'm not a fan of ballet. Don't get me wrong -- these people were all obviously very talented. And some of the women were dancing around in their underwear, so that part was good. I guess it just wasn't quite what I was expecting.

It was our first time to the Fox Theater, and that in and of itself was pretty cool. We definitely plan on going back. Overall, we really did enjoy the show. It was neat to do something kind of different, even if I am too much of a backwards country hick to really appreciate it.

Current Music Obsession: Hyperactive by Thomas Dolby (old 80s song)
Current Technological Obsession: Dell Inspiron 9300
Current Videogame Obsession: Still Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, soon to be replaced by Battlefield 2 for the PC when it comes out
Current Animal Kingdom Obsession: Monkeys
Current Mood: Fair to Partly Cloudy

A Couple Nifty Windows Utility programs

From time to time I like to share info about neat little utilities I've found. In this posting I'll briefly discuss SysTrayX and WinRoll.


SysTrayX condenses all those little icons in the system tray down into a single icon. You can then right-click that icon to get a menu consisting of all the icons that used to be in the system tray. See their info page to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. You can also configure SysTrayX to continue showing certain icons on the system tray. For example, maybe you leave Trillian or some other app regularly minimized to the system tray that you still want to have quick access to. Or perhaps some kind of monitoring program whose status icon you want visible at all times. You can set it so that it continues to reside in the system tray, while all the other icons are nestled inside SysTrayX.

It also claims to assist in situations where Windows explorer crashes and the icons in the system tray disappear and don't come back. I haven't really had an opportunity to test that, however. But I've been running it for a few days now and it's been nice to not have so much clutter going on down there in the system tray. I've tried using the "hide inactive icons" feature of the task bar to reduce the clutter before, but that just ends up being more trouble than it's worth. SysTrayX really comes in handy.

That said, registration is $27, which seems a little pricey to me for such a relatively small utility. I haven't decided if I want to register it yet or not. I may see if I can find any free alternatives (yes, I'm cheap). If I find something else that does the same job for free (or even a lot cheaper), I'll let you know. Meanwhile, if something like this would be worth $27 to you, you should check it out. You can download a free demo for their site and use it for a couple of weeks to make sure you like it.

I have previously mentioned another little utility program, called FreeShade. It gives you the option of "rolling up" your windows into just the titlebar, instead of minimizing them to the taskbar. This was something that I originally discovered as a feature in WindowBlinds. I really like this feature, but it's probably not for everyone. Anyway, I recently discovered an alternative to FreeShade called WinRoll.

The first thing I like better about WinRoll is that it does a better job at its basic function. I would have problems with FreeShade where occasionally the window would get screwed up after "rolling it up". I would try to restore it, but the window would not return to full size. Instead, the bottom of the window would extend just below the titlebar, and I'd have to manually resize it. This didn't occur every time, but it was often enough to be annoying. Also, FreeShade didn't handle command prompt windows, and WinRoll does. For some reason though, WinRoll still doesn't roll them up completely -- it still shows one line of text from the window. I can live with that though.

WinRoll also sports a few extra features. If you use the middle button on the titlebar, the Window becomes transparent. Probably more of an "eye candy" feature than something useful, but it's kinda neat. Sadly, this does NOT seem to work on command line windows, which is probably where I'd use it most. If you use the middle button on the minimize button, your window will minimize to the system tray instead of the taskbar. Shift-Left Click the titlebar to send the window behind all the other windows. And finally, if you want a Window to "stay on top", click the middle mouse button on the close button.

One of the best things about WinRoll is that it's free! If the "rollup" feature sounds cool to you, I definitely recommend checking it out. Even if you're just curious, give it a whirl ... you've got nothing to lose because (did I mention?) it's free!