Valuing my business

I've been a Bank of America customer for many years (I actually started with Security Pacific in 1991 which Bank of America bought). I'm in the process of moving my home loan to another bank because BofA's rates are pretty awful. As such, I lose my free "Prima Checking" account. So, I'm closing all my BofA accounts and moving them elsewhere where I don't have to worry about fees. Well, the problem with that is I also have a safe deposit box at BofA and in order to have a box, I need a BofA account.

OK, fine I'll drop my account down to the basic account (MyAccess checking) which if I don't maintain the minimum balance, it will cost me $8.95 a month. When looking online, I see that if I open a MyAccess checking account online, there is no minimum balance and no monthly fee. So, I asked BofA about it and they said I'd have to close my account and open a new one despite them being the same type of account. How is that for loyalty? This just reaffirms my decision to move all my accounts away from them. Hey, Brian Moynihan, work on customer service and stop trying to nickel and dime your loyal customers.

Time or money (or quality just isn't there)

Several months ago, my wife and I bought our son a Tonka Mighty Motorized Garbage Truck from Costco to give him for Hanukkah as he's a bit scared of the garbage truck coming down the street and we thought that this could help him. We gave him the truck last night and within 5 minutes, the lifting mechanism stopped working. My wife got new batteries as it shouldn't like the motor was dying, but that didn't help. After a few online searches, my wife saw many horrible reviews of this product with the same problem.

I told our son that I'd try to fix it after he went to sleep. Well, it has triangular shaped screws which made it a bit hard to take apart. However, a small flat head screwdriver seemed to fit and turned the screws. I disassembled the entire truck and found the problem. One of the gears wasn't firmly attached to the metal shaft. I used some super glue to glue it onto the shaft and presto, it started working again. Yeah! However, this little repair job took over 2 hours! Tonka doesn't make toys like they used to, so the $20 we spent on the toy was topped off with 2 hours of repair work making the toy a lot more expensive than $20.

Our son was delighted that his garbage truck was working again. He probably has one of the only Tonka garbage trucks that is still working. While it is still early, I'm crossing my fingers that my repair job worked.

We, as a society, keep demanding lower prices on products, but in a lot of cases are willing to accept poor quality.

Note, it appears that Tonka has licensed its name to a company called Funrise Toys. That's too bad because I always thought that Tonka trucks were well built.

Imprinting a signature in a PDF

The other day I needed to put my signature on a PDF, so I used PDFPen to do so, but noticed that I could still move the signature even after saving it and tried to use the "Merge Imprint into Page" option, but found that it didn't work either (their support confirmed that due to changes in PDFs, this feature was kind of useless and should be removed). My solution was to print out the PDF and scan it back in; my signature was definitely imprinted on the PDF as the entire PDF was a bitmap image. I kind of forgot about this until today.

I heard about the TSA document leak on the news and searched for it. Wired had a lot of information including a link to a document that explains how to properly redact information. The basic idea is to save the PDF as a multi-page TIFF, then convert the TIFF to a PDF. While PDFPen, this is easy:

• Open PDF in PDFPen.
• Add signature and other information that you don't want editable.
• Save PDF as TIFF.
• Open TIFF in PDFPen (or Preview).
• Save file as PDF.

Presto! Now the PDFPen folks just need to adds this as an option to eliminate the steps. I realize that this significantly increases the file size, but it does accomplish my goal.

Unhelpful error of the day

I was working in Quicken today and decided to online enable some of my accounts as I've never done that before. I am using Quicken 2007 for the Mac and have applied the latest "update" (update is in quotes for reasons that will become clear soon.

I checked my bank for the FAQ on what to use as the username and finally found a reference on the web (the bank was no help) and knew I had that correct, but Quicken kept giving me a OL-249 error. I searched and searched and finally found a "Quicken Certificate Updater" to update the SSL certificates. After applying the "update", I was able to connect to my bank. I then found an article on Quicken's Web site referencing this error.

So why didn't the error say "unable to establish SSL connection which would have been a lot more helpful? Why didn't Intuit make the Certificate Updater a version update to the application; the updater patches something in the app, so it had to go through some QA. If they had done this, a check for updates or the automatic updates would have alerted me to this and I would have applied the patch 2 months ago. Instead, I wasted 20 minutes looking for the answer.

Now that I have this working, will I use it? I'm not sure. I manually enter all my transactions so that I can independently verify that no extra charges are posted to my account. Then I go through the statement and reconcile each transaction. In theory, reconciling the statement by hand is the same as reconciling it using the downloaded transactions as they should be generated off the same data. I'm sure it will save me a bunch of time if I do it this way and I still have my manual check of entering all the transactions.

On a side note, it appears that more and more banks are charging customers to use this feature in Quicken. I realize that banks have to pay Intuit for the feature, but passing on the fee to the customer is just nickel and diming us. Luckily one of the banks I use doesn't charge for this privilege AND supports the Mac (many banks don't support the Mac.)