oct17.com Blog

CBS MoneyWatch.com is launched!

You all heard enough about it from me — our new personal finance site is live. And boy! Am I tired.

Things not to do: Accidentally wire $3,000 to AT&T

I love electronic bill-pay, but I recommend that you periodically clean out your old, unused accounts. Otherwise, your mouse might slip and you could select the wrong recipient when paying your holiday credit card bill. And if you do somehow accidentally wire thousands of dollars to the wrong company, make sure it isn’t AT&T.

So far it’s been two months with no offical acknowledgement from the company that they have my money or that I’ve filed any claim to get it back. The tally so far:

• 9 different customer service reps, incl supervisors
• 1 copy of a bank-routing info
• 3 hours on the phone
• 2 faxes
• 1 postal letter (not registered! that was mistake)
• 1 unrelated refund of $121 that was found in an old account

Latest sally was today, so everyone cross their fingers and wish me luck.

UPDATE: All’s well that ends well. After talking to a dozen different customer service representatives, I was given a magic phone number. This number was answered on the 1st or 2nd ring by a human, who could look up my claim and give me a status! It was unreal. I checked back a few times, while “the check was in the mail,” and then the check actually arrived.

I’d post the Magic AT&T Phone Number, but that would probably ruin it.

Hey, Yahoo: I *pay* you for this service!

I am experiencing some sort of technical curse. My troubles with the home network are well-documented at this point, and tonight at dinner Gopal informs me that his e-mail is no longer working properly. It won’t send.

I fiddle with the settings. For some reason, the Comcast SMTP mail server is not responding. “That’s OK,” I figure, “Oct17.com and the associated e-mail accounts (including Gopal’s) are part of a paid Web Hosting Service from Yahoo.” They have a dedicated SMTP server that I can use, because I pay for it. (Routing outgoing mail through Comcast’s servers seems a bit like cheating, anyway.) So I switch the settings to use Yahoo’s servers and authentication, and everything’s dandy.

Until I decide to check and see if Sudha’s e-mail is working, too.

I should have left well enough alone! Instead, I decide to update her SMTP settings as well. But then the Yahoo SMTP server wants a password. Uh-oh: what’s Sudha’s e-mail password? She’s on the phone, but after trying all the ones I know without luck, I interrupt and ask her. She tells me. It doesn’t work.

“That’s OK,” I figure. “I control the Oct17.com mail accounts. I’ll just reset it in my Yahoo Web Hosting control panel.”

Except you can’t. The e-mail control panel will permit me to delete Sudha’s Oct17.com e-mail account, but I can’t change the password. That’s really annoying. I pay for the service, which includes the e-mail accounts; I am the administrator, and I don’t have permission to administer.

There’s no process for me to automatically reset her password online, and after spending 20 minutes on the phone with Yahoo tech support (also something I pay for), it turns out they can’t reset a password either!

New passport: $75. New citizenship: $675

The nuclear family got new passports this week — a remarkably quick two weeks after we applied at the local library. (Extremely cool that they have a passport office in there after hours. Love this library.) The new passports are cyborgs; they are stiff with embedded electronics, colorful with holographic etchings, and full of … no stamps. Luckily they return the pages of your old passport so you can reminisce about your globetrotting. Brij’s passport is good for 5 years. Saloni’s and mine are good for the usual 10. Each one costs about $75 to process.

Also this week, the Sarins are filling out their applications for U.S. citizenship. (We spend enough dinner-table time arguing about politics that it’s really overdue, I think.) Lots of information to supply, and most shocking was that the fee to move from Green Card holder to Citizen costs you $675 per person. And I seriously doubt these will get processed in two weeks.

• Saloni says: We’re sending out economic-stimulus package right back to the government.

Vivu and CBS

Time to update the Ole Blog here with two major pieces of employment news.

• Saloni works at Vivu. It happened by slow degrees; first a get-to-know-you meeting with the CEO, then some follow-up discussions on the direction of the startup, and before you know it she’s printing business cards for the whole company including one for herself that says, “Director of Marketing.” Vivu is definitely in startup mode: barely a dozen people, still fervently pitching investors for capital, staff meetings on Sunday mornings. She’s thrilled, I’m thrilled, and a video-streaming startup makes a nice complement to my new employer…
• CNET’s being acquired by CBS. Starting in (roughly) July, I’ll work for the giant media company that’s the home of “Wheel of Fortune” and “CSI” (and CBS Sports, too, David). This is a huge relief and a presumed release from the sneaky barbarians at the gate of JANA. For CNET, I think this opens up huge advertiser opportunities in categories where CBS is a major player and CNET is not. For me personally, this means some fantastic opportunities to expand BNET onto radio and possibly TV, while learning something about those media. Hey, I made the jump from print to online more than 10 years ago; time to learn some new tricks.

Hopefully no more job updates for a while. It’s been a busy month!

Hilton Head Island discoveries

Brij, Saloni and I spent the week on Hilton Head Island with Mom (and Jackie, and regular visits from Aunt Betsy and Uncle Ken). It was a great time-off week with a whole lot of nothing going on. Plus Dolphin sitings.

In going over family stories I was struck by one comparison that hadn’t come up before. Many years ago, in preparation for my father’s 40th birthday my family had a savings drive. We squirreled away spare dollars in a coffee can for months, saving up to surprise my father with something he’d never dreamed he would own: the complete, multi-volume set of the OED — the mythical, impressive Oxford English Dictionary.

This is a pricey gift today and was even moreso back in the 1970’s. He was surprised (or at least fooled his adolescent son) and we displayed that shelf-busting set of dictionaries in the living room for years and years.

For my 40th birthday present, I asked my family for… an XBOX 360. It’s also in our living room.

Vista is so bad, my teeth hurt

We’ve bought two new computers recently, one is a photo workstation for Nine Rubies and one is a home PC for me. (Aside: I needed a new PC because my hand-built Shuttle SB61G2, which I love, got very flaky after an upgrade to 2GB of RAM. The details would bore everyone, but my attempts to fix got nowhere and I think something’s wonky on the motherboard.)

I bought both PCs from the local Best Buy, which was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve had in a while. Best Buy is a big advertiser at work, and I loved the San Francisco store, so I wanted to give them my business. My machine ended up an HP Pavilion a6030n, a quite decent home PC with Vista pre-installed.

Vista is the dullest new OS I’ve ever seen. I like new computer stuff.; I’ve excitedly upgraded to every Windows operating system since Windows 3.1 (including Windows ME — I’m not picky). Vista is the worst. Just a giant snooze interrupted by periods of “why did they change that?!” frustration. I may return with details later, but for family and friends: take my advice and don’t bother.

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Who knew? There’s a www.Oct17.org, which is the home page for an apparently European effort to get a lot of people to sign a “Call to Action” that involves some vague sort of personal commitment to end extreme poverty. They have a podcast, which highlights the plodding difficulty of getting signatures from public officials and private citizens.

Poking around their site — a sort of cousin of this one, I supposed — I discover that Oct 17 became an official sort of day because of a UN resolution.

A gas is a fart

[As a sort of poor-man's scrapbooking, I'm going to start blogging the funny things that Brij says. For posterity.]

A gas is a fart. A fart is a gas.
A poopy is a poopy. A soo-soo is a soo-soo.*
And they’re all stinky!

* “Soo-soo” is the Hindi babytalk for urine. Engl. trans.: pee-pee.

Traffic school for scoundrels

I got a parking ticket back in May for driving 72 mph in a 50 mph zone, on a stretch of Highway 101 called “Hospital Curve”. Nobody slows down for this section, but I got nailed. So I’ve paid my $200 fine this morning, and my $35 fee for traffic school so that my “point” of bad traffic judgment is expunged from my record. Plus a $6 convenience fee for being able to pay in my pajamas on a Saturday morning

Of course I’ve opted for an online traffic school ($20 more). Specifically the Fast Easy Happy Traffic School, which I love because it sounds like a Chinese food take-out place.

So, I’m actually in the middle of the traffic school right now, Saturday morning, while Brij and Saloni are at a playdate. This school is a cheater’s dream, I’ve discovered. After dutifully reading the laborious sections on traffic rules, you click to take the multiple-option quiz. If you get something wrong, Fast Easy Happy repeats the same question, and helpfully inserts onto the page the sections of the text that explain the traffic regulation. Yes, they insert the paragraph containing the answer immediately beneath the question you got wrong.

So I’ve natually accelerated my test-taking by skipping the laborious reading part, taking a shot at the quiz, and then correcting the answers I got wrong. (A fraction of the total, I swear. I was paying attention in High School.) Zoom!

But sometimes you can’t avoid reading the text of the rules and advice, even at Fast Easy Happy traffic school. For instance, I got stopped cold by this not-s0-happy advice:

If your vehicle plunges into deep water, but does not sink immediately, escape through a window. If the vehicle sinks beneath the surface before you can escape, the weight of the engine will force the front end down first. Do not panic, as this usually creates an air pocket in the back of the vehicle. Find this pocket and get into it quickly. Breathe in deeply. When the vehicle has settled, you should be able to escape through a window. If there are young children or anyone else in the vehicle that is unable to release their safety belts, be sure to do so before leaving the vehicle

Jeez! I don’t want to read that on a Saturday morning!