Linkstew

My weekend project as long as I'm stuck at home being on-call is to finally write some scripts to parse the five years of checking and credit transactions I've saved so I can figure out how much I've spent on what. While I'm at it I'm taking this opportunity to learn ruby and subversion.

I've found a few mystery meat transactions while doing this that have had me on the phone to BofA asking "wtf, mate?"

My first call, however, was a little annoying. I listened to the top level menu choices, and when none of them were what I wanted, I hit 0:

0 is an invalid option. To access your account for balances, account activity, transfers, or other services, press 1...

So I listened again, and spellunked through more of their menus than I really wanted to (No, I'm not ordering new checks, but ... maybe?), before I finally hit 0 again:

0 is an invalid option. To access your account for balances, account activity, transfers, or other services, press 1...

So I hung up, and went and looked online to see if I had dialed the automated customer service number or something, but everything I could find listed the number on my card as the number for customer service for California residents. So I called back:

Welcome to Bank of America. Para español... To access your account for balances, account activity, transfers, or other services, press 1...

0

0 is an invalid option. To access your account for balances, account activity, transfers, or other services, press 1...

0

0 is an invalid option. To access your account for balances, account activity, transfers, or other services, press 1...

0! 0! 0!

Please hold for the next avaialble representative; For quality purposes, your call may be recorded.

Oh, right, of course.

Fundrace.org: Find out who donated to whom.

That Money Map is almost depressing. No good at all.

One night last week, I came home to find I had what was clearly an envelope containing a check from the State of California waiting for me in the mail. For a minute I was really confused, wondering if it was a really late tax refund or something. But upon opening the envelope, I found it to be a $271 refund check for my car registration, at the governator's executive order.

Y'know... I would have been perfectly happy to let California keep that money. I'm sure they could have done plenty with it... They could have put it towards education, just to pick an example. But now that they've already bothered to give it back, I'll take it. It's not going to do anything to make me like Ahnold any, though. At this rate, it'll probably end up paying for my gas.

I really need a job where I don't have to drive to work.

The Mathematics of . . . Pocket Change. Brother, can you spare 18 cents?

This article is pretty cool, but it only reinforces my belief that the penny just needs to go. Even with an 18 cent coin, 24 cents would still an unpleasant amount of change to recieve.

Damn, BofA approved my credit card application. Those punks. Not having a credit card was something I was kind of proud of, but now I'm going to end up in debt just like everyone else. Man, the real world sucks.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the fact that having a credit card is damn near required in this day and age? Because I do. And I mean required in the "the only way to do this transaction is with a credit card" sense, not in the "I can't afford stuff" sense. Case in point: The reason I applied for this credit card in the first place was just so that I can get a new cell phone plan, in my name (rather than my dad's).

So a totally random question just occurred to me, and I don't know the answer:

What keeps a college student from collecting unemployment?

I suppose, if I had to guess right now, I'd guess that it's that a college student isn't actively seeking employment, but it seems like that'd be simple enough for a clever college student to work around... But I know nothing about unemployment laws, so that was just a totally random guess.

Does anyone have the real answer?

My bank account is so manic depressive. And I think it suffers from seasonal affective disorder, too.

This isn't helped by the fact that my roommate lost his checkbook and so paid rent last month in fifties... Which just means I haven't deposited it yet, because I don't want to use the ATM to deposit that much cash.

And worse, he paid this month's rent in twenties, and of course, Berkeley rent being what it is... Damn my wallet is fat now.

Um... Forget I said that. Please don't mug me.

School starts tomorrow, which is moderately confusing because for the last three years classes have started on a Tuesday. But then I'm confused back in the other direction when I remember that I don't have any classes on Monday, and I don't start on Tuesday until 2 pm.

I just did my time sheet today, and I worked more than 60 hours a week for three weeks in a row. Somehow I've managed to delude myself into believing that I'll be less busy once classes start. But considering that 60 hours is three quarters of what I'm supposed to work in an entire month during the school year, it might just be true.

And I'm only taking 13 units, which will be the lightest class schedule I've had since my first semester at Berkeley. I'm taking CS 188 and CS 170 for my major, Anthropology 160 (Folklore) because it sounds interesting, and CS 9E because I needed a one unit class for my scholarship. CS 9E is "Productive use of a unix environment," and considering that I'm only productive with unix at my fingertips, it ought to be an easy unit, at that.

Why do I need that magical 13th unit? For my scholarship. And considering that this is the first semester I'm getting anything more than a measly $500 stipend, I'm not about to risk it by trying to petition to take only 12 units. Speaking of my scholarship, the check came in the mail on Wednesday, and so I actually bought a few books yesterday.

I'm kind of looking forward to 170 and 188, to get new ideas about things I can do with all the information in the stew, and new ways to do it more efficiently. And I'm kind of looking forward to Anthro 160, because I've heard good things about it, and folklore interests me.

And yes, I'm very, very bitter that I can't into CS 160.

Awhile back, I mentioned that my parent's ISP, which had been bought, had been bought by Earthlink. When Onemain bought Lightspeed, the transition was nice and smooth, without so much as a change of settings required.

But then Earthlink came along, and I am so less than impressed with the way this second transition is being handled. First of all, they emailed instructions about what the new PPP login would be. Um, it's a good thing my family checks their email often, I think.

But that's barely the ridiculous part that angers me: Under Lightspeed, and subsequently Onemain, my parents paid $24.95 a month, got unlimited dial up access, and got five email addresses (all five of which, I should note, are used regularly (me, mom, dad, brother, family)). Okay, fair enough.

So then onemain/earthlink/whoever sent out a transition email to their customers, informing us that the plan that best fit our needs was the "Earthlink Light" plan. Quick summary of the earthlink light plan: $6.95 a month for six hours of online time, plus $1 for every additional hour, and 1 email address.

Um.

A quick check reveals the "Earthlink Unlimited" plan, which clocks in at $21.95 a month for unlimited access and 8 email addresses. Lightspeed only ever offered that one plan, and hence, anyone who was ever a Lightspeed customer going through this transition should have been given the Unlimited plan by default, with an option to downgrade if so desired, instead of being autofuckingmatically downgraded. Heck, the Earthlink unlimited plan actually features more email addresses for $3 less a month.

Besides the fact that we clearly have five email addresses that the Light plan doesn't support, my brother is online more than I am. My parents probably would have paid more for online access for a month than they pay for rent.

I can't fathom what kind of moron planned this transition, unless it was some guy who was trying to figure out how to make the Onemain purchase pay for itself in a single month. And then when everyone bitched, they could just say "Oh, we emailed you what we were doing. But we'll fix it now. But you still have to pay, because you didn't get your account changed at the time."

I'm only tangentially involved in this, and it just makes me whistling mad. I can only imagine how all the old school Lightspeed customers feel. So much for support and service. Apparently it's all about "How can we fuck over our customers?"

And the worst worst part is that of the national ISP's (including AOL, MSN, Earthlink, et cetera), I by far like Earthlink the best.

I fear.

My roommate works at one of the local theaters, which means he's got the hook up. So today we took advantage of that hook up and saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and AI. The strange thing about seeing a movie in the theater for free is that it makes it much easier to enjoy. I don't have to sit there feeling bitter that I blew $9 on a movie that I'm only marginally enjoying, and instead I can just marginally enjoy the movie. Which isn't to say that I only marginally enjoyed AI, but that it might explain why I seemed to enjoy it so much more than everyone else in the audience. But I'm planning on writing up a whole separate entry on AI, so for now I'll talk about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is back in theaters for some reason.

I like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I like it so much that I've probably seen it 30 times. I like it so much that I've seen it so much that I would have never seen it in the theater if it hadn't been free. The first thing I noticed was how crisp the picture on the big screen was compared to the VHS copy I've seen so often. And other than that, it was the same movie I knew inside and out, which meant I spent a lot of time feeling bored. You see, when we used to watch the movie, we would actively do other things, and only pay attention to the movie at certain favorite scenes -- Why watch captivated when you know the punchlines, and some scenes just seem to go on longer than they should? I hadn't seen it for about three years, so I enjoyed seeing it again, but it was still something I would have rather flipped through on DVD.

The one interesting thing about seeing it in the theater was the ending. As Pratchett pointed out, the Python's don't know how to write an ending, and the Holy Grail is the prime example of that. And once Arthur had been driven off in chains and the black screen with the silly music came on, no one laughed. Well, a few people, myself included, laughed, but I was laughing at all the people who weren't laughing. At all the people who apparently hadn't seen the movie before, and were waiting for.. something else. And so I laughed at their nervous shuffling, and their questioning murmuring, and I sat waiting and laughing to see how long they were going to wait and not laugh -- but I eventually got hungry and left.

I think the ending is a great joke in it's own right, but you can't get it the first time you see it.

Yesterday, I got a letter from some California income tax person. "That's funny," I mumbled. "I thought I wanted my $80 refund to be direct-deposited?" So I ripped open the envelope, and inside I found what seemed to be a check, but I wasn't sure, because it included lines named "balance" and "total payments". After staring at it for awhile, and listening to the phone message explaining what they'd done, and thinking about how taxes worked, in the hopes of figuring out whether it was a bill or a check, I finally determined that it was a check. The letter claimed that they didn't direct deposit my refund because they'd made an adjustment to my refund, because I'd mis-added something.

They claimed that my total tax liability for the year was $161, and that I'd paid $2646.02, so they gave me a refund of $2485.02 instead of the $80 I was expecting.

My total income last year was only $14,000. There's no way I paid $2646.02 to the state. I'm pretty sure I didn't even pay that much in federal taxes. I just don't believe it. But since I can't find my W-2 form to verify how much I actually paid the state, I guess I'll just drop the money into my savings account until they notice. It could take them years, but in the mean time I might make up to $12 in interest! Wow, that'd be swell!

I finished another semester -- my sixth at UC Berkeley. Now I've got another intermission before the final stretch of my undergraduate career. This summer, Here's what I want to get done:

• For the love of god, Finish Employees (Work).
• Migrate everything to our new primary web server (Work).
• Clean up LinkStew's code.
• Add features to that other site I work on. Notably, work on my user account scripts and incorporate them.
• Finish Zelda 64, Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, Zelda: Oracle of Ages, and Metal Gear Solid (1).
• Read Science of Discworld.
• Reduce my two Desktop PC's into one, with best parts from each machine. Unfortunately, the remaining pieces aren't going to be usable because there won't be a working motherboard.
• Organize all of my stuff in my apartment. Haha yeah right, like that'll ever happen... If I organize some subset of it, like all of my books, or my kitchen, I'll be happy.

Unfortunatley, I won't be able to go to Anime Expo this summer, for the first time in four years. I have other obligations with work... Hey, it'll save me a load of money, so it'll be worth it. Now I just need to convince my co-workers that I don't want to go to USENIX. I mean, I'd like to go, but I think my time could be better spent visiting Bakersfield and my money could be better spent allocated to paying rent.

I'll be working full time this summer, but I'll also hopefully make it down to Bakersfield a couple of times to spend some time with my friends. It seems like an eternity since I've seen them. Of course, a lot's happened since then... Deaths and midterms and finals and all that.

And in mid-July, I'll have to finally figure out what classes I'll be taking this fall. There are three classes I need to graduate, and two of them are only offered in the spring, leaving me three empty slots to fill for the fall. Unfortunately, if I wanted to take a reduced courseload, then I wouldn't get to keep my scholarship, and since I'm getting actual money from my scholarship for the first time next fall, I'm not about to forfeit my scholarship. So I need 13 units... Well, I guess I could take Japanese 1b... it's 5 units, and then I'd only need one other class. Too bad I forgot a lot of my Japanese. Ah, but this discussion is for later...

I've got two months before the excrement of August hit's the air conditioning, and in those two months, I have only one commitment. Just work. No school, no second job, just work. This should be relaxing.