Penalties for Responsible Use of Credit

Published
by
mr.flarp
on October 27, 2009
in finance
. 0 Comments

Traditional wisdom when using credit cards was to keep spending under control as to not rack up debt you couldn’t pay off and to make sure to pay off your entire balance each month. New policies by Bank of America and Citigroup may changing that.

According to this USA Today article, Bank of America is going to start charging an annual fee ranging from $30 to $100 that could affect people with accounts carrying no outstanding balances. Other banks may start charging inactivity fees for their cards as well.

In this article by The Raw Story, it suggests Citigroup is going to charge a penalty of up to $90 per year for cardholders who don’t charge more than $2400 annually on their account. They also write of banks jacking up interest rates on cards before next February in anticipation of new federal legislation that would prevent them from being able to do so afterwards.

I use credit cards a lot… pretty much for everything I buy. I also pay off my balances in full every month, as I manage my spending such that I never charge more than I can afford. I suppose this is the worst case for credit card companies, as they aren’t able to collect exorbitant interest payments from me, having to settle with mere transaction charges. The are, however, still making money on every purchase I make. These changes could potentially penalize me and those like me for doing nothing more than using credit responsibly, all because the credit card companies want to make more.

I’ll be watching closely on my Citi and other cards to see what changes, if any, they apply to my accounts. It appears not all banks are pulling these scams, so it may be time to look into other cards.

Phone Transfer Fiasco

Published
by
mr.flarp
on October 7, 2009
in general
. 1 Comment

Earlier this evening, I called T-Mobile customer service to consolidate all the phones for my family into one family plan. We had five phones split across two family plans. The goal was to get all five phones on one family plan. Seeing as how we are already all T-Mobile customers, just on separate plans, I figured this would be pretty easy. 1 hour 20 minutes, five customer service representatives, and one customer care supervisor later, my original thought regarding the ease of the process was proven completely wrong.

The first CSR I spoke with was in account activation and said I needed to speak to someone in account verification to “release” the numbers for the other lines I was trying to add to the family plan. So, he transferred me to account verification. The next CSR then proceeded to call the other members of my family to verify the numbers for release and then said I would need to speak to customer service to move the accounts under the same family plan. So far things were going reasonably smoothly. That would soon change…

The next CSR in customer service brought up my account info along with the accounts for the other lines to do the transfer. Evidently, releasing the lines only flags them as available for transfer, but in order to change the owner of the lines, I needed to talk to a different customer service group to obtain authorization for “change of responsibility” for the numbers.

So now I’m on my 4th CSR to obtain the change of responsibility authorization. She said she needed to talk to the other account holders to verify this, because apparently the first round of authorization to release the numbers was something completely different. So I thought this would just be another round of calls to the other account holders. I thought wrong. She claimed she couldn’t just call the other account holders to verify the transfer, but rather we had to be physically be in the same location, as in passing the phone from person to person. Seeing as how there is a 200 mile gap between my family and I, this wasn’t really possible. I suggested again that she could conference call them, as the previous CSR had done only minutes earlier, but she was insistent on us all needing to be in the same location.

After a frustrating exchange with her, I asked to be transferred to a supervisor. He was almost as useless, simply stating that I needed to talk to customer care to do a change of responsibility for the accounts. I explained what the previous CSR claimed about us needing to be in the same location, and he went off to talk about how it was a security matter where T-Mobile couldn’t transfer someone’s account without their authorization. He obviously missed the point entirely. After some more pointless ramblings from him about needing to verify the identity of the account holders, he transferred me back to customer care.

Now, I’m about an hour into the call and onto my 5th CSR. Finally, I got someone competent in the customer care group. This new guy did what the 4th CSR and supervisor refused to do, which was call the other account holders to obtain the change of responsibility authorization. After about 20 minutes, he finished the calls to the other account holders and got the new account set up.

To top off this whole ridiculous experience, backtrack to three days to when I was visiting my family for the weekend. The five of us went to an actual T-Mobile store to do this transfer, figuring the in-person interaction would be easiest. The store manager told us he couldn’t do the account verification in the store, despite us all being there in-person, and that we’d have to go through customer care.

I don’t know how a company can be that disorganized and dysfunctional and still be in business.

Some Records Shouldn’t Be Broken

Published
by
mr.flarp
on June 25, 2009
in general
. 0 Comments

In India, ”cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. - Mark Twain

Austin isn’t India, but today is proving to be quite hot as well. Coincidentally, the doorknob to the front door to our offices actually broke this morning. It didn’t melt (or did it?), but it did get jammed open…

The record high for Austin for a June 25 was 102°F set in 1984. I’d be more than content to let that record stand…

I’d Be Fired If That Were My Job

Published
by
mr.flarp
on June 23, 2009
in general
. 0 Comments

There’s a picture opposite me
Of my primitive ancestry
Which stood on rocky shores and
Kept the beaches shipwreck free

Though I respect that a lot
I’d be fired if that were my job
After killing Jason off and
Countless screaming Argonauts
- They Might Be Giants

Not sure why, but my traffic experiences today made me think of this song. It started with my morning commute… But to be more accurate, it actually started about five hours before. There was an accident on I-35N at about 2:30am. A driver lost control of his vehicle and crashed into the dividing wall injuring himself and a passenger. An unfortunate incident, but not the point. Fast forward five hours to rush hour Monday morning. The city workers still hadn’t cleaned up the one-car wreck. Not only that, but they closed off all lanes of traffic on the highway. Northbound traffic was at a halt. Southbound didn’t fare much better due to the mental deficients rubber-necking. It wasn’t until 1pm that they re-opened the highway. That’s over 10 hours that they left part of a major highway closed!

But it doesn’t end there. The city has been doing road maintenance on highway 183N, which is a good thing. As typical of this work, they have to close down sections of road. They even start their work at the tail end of evening rush-hour traffic to reduce impact. So far, so good. Where it all falls apart, however, is informing commuters of if and when they’re going to be working. The city Roadworks web site, as of this writing, is still claiming “No Scheduled Closures At This Time”. Street signs well enough in advance of the construction, especially when closing exits and on-ramps, should also be done, so drivers can re-route. The first indication of the closure of the ramp from I-35N to 183N was a line of cones blocking off the lane that started in the exit lane itself. Very unhelpfully, there was a sign about 5 feet before the first cone saying “Right Lane Closed Ahead”. It just so happened that the next exit and U-turn location wasn’t for another 4-5 miles. The city has nice programmable signs to warn us of zombie infestations, but it evidently didn’t occur to them to put such signs on the highway to serve up some more practical information.

If I was at the watch during an incident that disrupted a major portion our campus network and elected to leave things down for over 10 hours during business and peak usage hours, I’d be fired for negligence of duties and incompetence. Similarly, if I had scheduled some major service-disrupting maintenance and didn’t announce or give notice until 5 minutes beforehand, the next communication I’d get with would be from my management informing me of my termination. And I’m only responsible for a campus network, not transit for an entire city.

Miserable Month of May

Published
by
mr.flarp
on June 16, 2009
in general and work
. 2 Comments

This May was a particularly unpleasant month.

It all started out with car troubles, which would rear its head multiple times before the month’s end. On the evening of May 3, I ran over a screw, which led to a flat. I got that fixed the following morning for $10 and figured my mishap for the month was out of the way. No such luck. On my way home from work May 5, I had a minor blowout (different tire) on the flyover connecting the two major highways on my commute. I ended up replacing all four tires (they had about 30k miles on them already), which upped my vehicle expenses by another $750. But it wasn’t over yet. I hit 30k miles mid month, so I had the scheduled service for that, which ran about $250 all said and done. A week later, the “check engine” light came on in my car. I brought it into the dealership, and they said that the purge valve was clogged. Fortunately, it was covered under warranty, so I didn’t have to pay for its replacement. They did also notice the cabin air filter needed replacement, which ran another $40. So in all, I had four different visits to auto shops month at a cost of just over $1000.

But that wasn’t the biggest expense… I’m finished up the dealings between my insurance company and roofing contractor to take care of hail damage that happened at the end of March. That was another $2800 out of pocket ($1400 deductible plus depreciation on the current roof, which was about 3.5 years old).

Adding the roof to the vehicle expenses brought my total unplanned expenses to $3800 for the month of May. Adding the $2200 spent at the end of April replacing the AC compressor and evaporator coil at my rental property, that sums up to $6000 in unplanned expenses in about a 5 week period.

Work was also hellish. The summer inter-session (the two-week period between the end of the Spring semester and start of summer terms) brought with it due dates for service impacting projects and our campus maintenance windows. We targeted these for the inter-session because it minimized the impact to the institution (no classes in session and most people were away). This included working two Sundays (the 24th and 31st). The 24th went pretty smoothly, running from about 7:30am-12:30pm. The 31st, however, had fallout that consumed my entire day from about 7:30am-8:30pm.

Staff performance evaluations were also conducted this month. To write the evaluations, I had to review everything that every staff had done over the past year and put them into the contexts of their job expectations. That’s roughly 50 weekly status reports times 7 staff (plus my self evaluation) that required sifting through for specific details within projects that exemplified successes and failures. That process that consumed almost every weekday evening and weekend from about the 4th to the 22nd.

So far, June is turning out to be a little better. I need a break, and July can’t get here soon enough…

Airline Pricing Nonsense

Published
by
mr.flarp
on May 6, 2009
in travel
. 0 Comments

So, I’m to the point of booking our tickets for the upcoming Europe trip with my brothers. After a very frustrating hour talking with AA, United, and Continental customer support reps, it appears the nonsense pricing for plane tickets is consistent with the major airlines.

Let’s consider the following 3 scenarios…

Scenario 1 2 3
Departure
Flight 1 (AUS to DFW) X
Flight 2 (DFW to LHR) X X
Return
Flight 3 (LHR to ORD) X X X
Flight 4 (ORD to AUS) X X X
Total Cost $780 $940 $1140

So, the fewer planes you get on, the more it costs overall. Huh?!

I challenge anyone responsible for this absurd ticket pricing scheme to come up with a rational justification for this. The cost for the airline to operate Flight 2 does not increase from Scenario 1 to 2. In fact, if anything, it decreases, as there is no need to sort out luggage for people making a connecting flight. As for Scenario 3, I can understand somewhat airlines wanting to charge a little bit more for one-way flights, but charging almost 50% more to fly half the distance is just ridiculous. Not to get too deep into conspiracy theories, but it seems there’s some price fixing going on here. The fact that the charges to the consumer are not consistent with the actual services being provided and that at least three major airlines all seem to be in on it seems wrong.

Pay-Per-Gigabyte

Published
by
mr.flarp
on April 3, 2009
in computers
. 4 Comments

Recently, Time Warner Cable stated that they were going to expand their tiered and metered pricing to the RoadRunner broadband residential Internet service. Being a network operator myself and having implemented tiered service offerings, I understand and sympathize with the need to control consumption of a finite resource (in this case, Internet bandwidth) while maintaining a useful service offering for the customers. What TWC is proposing, however, will significantly reduce their target customer base by rendering the service useless to them unless they’re willing to pay a multiple of what they’re paying now.

Currently, the “standard” package for RoadRunner costs $45 per month, and although there are rate limiters on the connection, there is no hard limit on total transfers. TWC proposes services tiers of 5, 10, 20, and 40 gigabytes per month at costs ranging from $30 to $55 for each period. If you exceed the amount in the tier, TWC then charges you $1 per gigabyte transferred.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable - people pay for what they consume. It fits the capitalist model and makes business sense. So what’s the problem? Based on the tiers and prices announced, I would guess the current “standard” price of $45/month will be the price for the 20GB/month tier. That may seem like a lot, but depending on what you do online, 20GB might not go as far as you think.

The TWC executives, when interviewed, cite some enormous numbers in an effort to provide misinformation to the masses. 20GB amounts to millions of E-mail messages, tens of thousands of photos, thousands of songs, and many hundreds of hours of online gaming. While those statements are true, they are also irrelevant. The aforementioned applications are not stressing the network connections.

The problem is video. It’s everywhere now. YouTube, online news sites, and social network sites serve up short segments, while Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and even Xbox Marketplace stream full movies and TV shows. Video is simply part of the online experience now, and its addictive nature means people are spending a lot more time doing it. Some bandwidth samples I took from various video sources:

Source Bandwidth Consumption Rate Usability @ 20GB/mo.
YouTube, SD video clip (Czardas)
 254 Kbps* 0.109 GB/hr 181.8 hours
YouTube, HD video clip (The Black Mages)
 2549 Kbps* 1.094 GB/hr 18.2 hours
Hulu, SD TV episode (Family Guy, 360p) 600 Kbps 0.27 GB/hr 74.1 hours
Hulu, HD TV episode (Family Guy, 480p) 1200 Kbps 0.54 GB/hr 37.0 hours
Xbox Live, SD movie (HHGTTG) 1295 Kbps* 0.571 GB/hr 35.0 hours
Xbox Live, HD movie (HHGTTG) 6473 Kbps* 2.855 GB/hr 7.0 hours
Netflix, SD TV episode (Doctor Who)
 2000 Kbps 0.9 GB/hr 22.2 hours
Netflix, HD movie (Serenity)
 7100 Kbps 3.195 GB/hr 6.26 hours
iTunes, HD movie trailer (Watchmen, 720p) 6100 Kbps* 2.745 GB/hr 7.29 hours
iTunes, HD movie trailer (Watchmen, 1080p) 10400 Kbps* 4.68 GB/hr 4.27 hours
* bandwidth computed as download size divided by video length

All of a sudden, 20GB doesn’t seem like quite so much. Simply watching 3 high-def movies streamed via Netflix or Xbox Live can eat up your entire month’s quota… or watching less than one TV show a day of  in standard definition… The TWC execs would like you to believe a “typical” user would almost never exceed their stated tiers, but that simply is not the case. Technology has made this content readily accessible to everyone, not just the tech savvy (all the above video sources can all be accessed without using a PC).

If 14% of their test population in Beaumont, TX (which really doesn’t have a large technology-rich demographic) exceeded their quotas by an average of 19GB/mo., I can only imagine what will happen in the Austin area, which has over 7 times the population, a substantial tech sector, and is home to one of the largest Universities in the country. If Time Warner Cable wants to remain competitive in the consumer broadband ISP market, they will need to re-evaluate their proposed service offerings in light of what their competition is selling.

Taxes

Published
by
mr.flarp
on March 22, 2009
in general
. 0 Comments

So, I recently finished figuring out my taxes for 2008. This year, I’m actually getting a little bit back ($80… woohoo!). When I got through with it all, it got me thinking, how much of my income gets consumed by taxes? According this table, I am in the 28% tax bracket, and using their calculator, my actual federal taxes should have been just a bit over 21% of my total income.

Federal taxes, however, only account for a portion of all the taxes I pay. There’s also state and local sales tax, property tax, and special taxes/fees tacked onto certain goods and services.  So, I started adding them up, and here’s what I came up with.

Income

  • Salary - pre-tax earnings from primary job (based on W-2)
  • Capital gains & Interest - realized gains from stock and mutual fund sales and interest/dividend payouts (based on 1099 forms)
  • Passive income - net income (revenue minus operating expenses) from rental property (based on 1099-MISC form and expense tracking list)

Taxes

  • Federal income tax
  • Social security tax
  • Medicare tax
  • Property tax
  • State/local sales tax (8.25%) - approximate calculation based on all goods & services made on my credit cards (exclusions: gas, cable/phone bills, online purchases)
  • Gas tax ($0.384/gal - source) - based on my gas consumption records
  • Cable taxes/fees - includes public access fees, FCC regulatory fees, and state/local sales tax
  • Phone taxes/fees - includes FCC regulatory fees, federal & state universal service charge, state infrastructure charge, 911 fees, state/local sales tax, and city/district tax

I’m sure there are other taxes and fees in a number of other categories that I didn’t account for. I excluded all online purchases made because most don’t have applicable sales tax for me anyways. While there probably were taxes on some of those orders, I just excluded them all for simplicity. I also excluded all cash purchases, which were very limited in number and dollars anyways.

So based on the items above, for calendar year 2008, my tax payments amounted to a bit over 33% of my total income. I’m not really sure what to think of that yet. My initial impression is that it seems a bit high. While I’m fortunate to not be hurting for money, it’s still a bit disheartening to know that what I pay in taxes exceeds my personal expenses (housing, food, goods & services, etc.) by a pretty significant amount…

Vehicle Registration Absurdity

Published
by
mr.flarp
on February 18, 2009
in general
. 3 Comments

So, I got my vehicle registration renewal notice from my friendly local department of transportation. After skimming through the form, I reach for my checkbook and get ready to write another check to my local tax assessor-collector… a drill I’ve undertaken many times before. As I start writing, I think to myself, “it’s 2009 now… surely there’s a way to do this online.” I read the forms a little bit closer, and sure enough, there is a URL listed for renewing online.

A brief sidebar… Somewhere behind the scenes of all this, there are some computers and databases that are storing all this vehicle registration information. To populate this database for a typical case (vehicle owner mails in their renewal form), the state has to pay people to courier the envelope, sort and transcribe the information from the paper forms into the computer, manually process the check for payment, and then securely dispose of all the paper waste.

So back to my point… I start going through the online process. A couple of pages in, it describes the eligibility requirements and payment methods. At the end of the payment options, they say they’ll tack on an additional $2 “online service fee.”

Now, I’m thinking to myself “what the hell?!” Am I to believe that it somehow costs more to process an online form (for which I’m doing the data input, and I’m pretty sure is 100% automated) versus paying a person to input the exact same data manually? On top of that, they still charge the $1 mail processing fee, even though it’s being submitted electronically. Even the credit card processing fee is nowhere near that amount. (Being a state employee myself and having worked with credit card processing systems in that capacity, I know the actual processing fee, even the more costly ones that do the security verifications, is less than 40 cents a transaction.)

So I guess it’ll be another check this year… Sure, $2 isn’t going put me in the red, but on principle alone, I can’t bring myself to participate in that ridiculousness.

Bulk Update 2

Published
by
mr.flarp
on February 1, 2009
in computers, games, school and work
. 1 Comment

Well… It’s been a bit over a month without a regular update, so here’s bulk update installment #2…

Over the winter holidays, I went home to visit my family. As with any trip home, I invariably got pulled into doing computer support for my parents and relatives. This year, the malware had hit especially hard, severely crippling two different computers. While going through the tedious process of manual clean-up (without re-formatting and re-installing), I got to thinking again about how exposed these systems are and what could be done to reduce malware infection The solution? Don’t use Windows. Sure, it’s what everyone uses and is what everyone is used to (even I have a computer at home running it). The downside is that the malware authors, in order to maximize their target audience, focus their efforts on it. I’m sure Macs, Linux, and any other complex operating system suffers from any number of exploitable bugs, but as long as malware programmers are targeting Windows, that is where users will be most exposed. Sure, antivirus, anti-spyware, and personal firewalls have the potential to help, but the understanding to use them effectively eludes most non-technical users.

Holidays also mean plenty of time to catch up on some video games. Over the course of about seven weeks spanning November through early January, I finished Lost Odyssey, a game developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the mastermind behind the Final Fantasy series. The gameplay almost exactly follows that of the first ten installments of its sibling series. Familiar character personalities… Random encounters… Turn-based, menu-driven battles… Although it sticks with the traditional RPG formula, Lost Odyssey is a very solid and enjoyable game. More recently, I’ve started playing Eternal Sonata, a different RPG that roughly follows the life and times of composer Frederic Chopin. The game itself is fantasy/fiction, but it draws sequences paralleling events of Chopin’s life. The authors of the game designed it such that it requires a second playthrough to access all parts of the game and unlock all achievements, so I’ve got some work ahead of me if I hope to finish before the fourth title in the Star Ocean series is released (in late February).

I also finally received the netbook I won at the company Christmas party. It’s definitely not a desktop or laptop replacement, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its uses. Its size and extraordinary battery life (5+ hours when used periodically for occasionally looking things up or checking mail) makes it a great companion when settling in for extended gaming sessions. The only real gripes I have about the netbook have to to do with the keyboard. The small key size and non-standard layout makes it a pain to type on. I think my typing speed on it is down around 2.5 WPM…

Back on campus, the spring semester has started up as well, and we’re now wrapping up the second week of classes. As with the past eight semesters, I am once again enrolled in the conditioning swimming class. Based on the description of the workouts the instructor gave during the first class day (which scared off almost half the class!), this could prove to be the most challenging. Last semester, we completed just shy of 30 miles in class. If we stick to the workout plans he described at the start of this semester, we should easily surpass that.

Of course, there was also the recent passing of the torch as the nation swore in a new president. At the office, we had discussed preparations for what we might do to accommodate the anticipated load on the network if potentially tens of thousands decided to tune-in to watch the inauguration online. Ultimately, it was decided we would just ride things out, hoping our existing capacity would hold out. Fortunately, it did, although our inbound bandwidth levels did briefly exceed what we were paying for. It was easily the highest network load (of legitimate traffic, not DDoS or other attacks) I’ve seen since I started working there.

Anyways, that wraps up bulk update #2. And now back to my gaming…