So after moving to CA we clearly don't need our Sovereign Bank accounts anymore. I set out the other day on a mission to clear all auto payments from them, and also close the account.

The first people I talked to said I need to get the account down to a $0 balance. Simple. I cleared out auto payments, made sure everything was in order. Did a $1.18 transfer to my new ING (awesome by the way) account and thought I was good.

At that point a couple of things happened. First I missed an auto payment. My amazon web services (s3) account wasn't moved to the new credit card so they chared me $.73. This came out before my transfer so it suceeded. The next step unfortunately sucks. My gas company has a horrible website and I while I thought I removed the auto payment, I did not. Even though the auto payment was set for "what was due" and even though my balance was technically $0.0 cause I had paid their $16 dollar charge manually they billed me for the $16 again. So now my balance with them is $16 over and sovereign got a $16 charge that the account couldn't afford.

They charged me $35 for this $16 overcharge. Then my $1.18 charge came in and I get hit with $35 again. This is ridiculous. I call with the goal of 1) closing the account, 2) paying the balance, 3) trying to get one (at least) of the charges removed.

The first lady I spoke to was a complete bitch and told me they couldn't do anything for the charges and the ONLY way for me to pay is to mail a check. The caveat is that I'm already 3 days overdrawn (of course I only found out today...) and if I get to 6 days overdrawn they charge me AGAIN. So mailing in a check is a huge gamble. Honestly at this point I bet if I mail a check, they won't "process" it till after the fee date so I would get charged. She told me mailing the check is the only option since I can't make it to a branch.

After this I ask to speak to a supervisor. This supervisor sounded good at first. She is reversing one of the charges and she also told me I can pay over the phone "for a fee". I assume by fee she meant $1-2, like the fee to pay your gas bill over the phone or something like that. I was happy with one $35 dollar fee reversal at least. So now I need to wait until Monday, check that the $35 fee is removed and then call to close the account.

Here's the kicker: She then informs me to double check all of my payment accounts (like that amazon one) cause for THIRTY days after the "request" to close my account, sovereign will PAY CHARGES that come into the account and charge me $35 for each one? WHAT THE FUCK. There is no logical reason that they can't just start denying charges to my account. I want to close the account and have sovereign do NOTHING else but this aparently isn't an option. They basically force me to be open to charges for another 30 days. And why not? If they can force this on me they can get $35 bucks everytime I forget about another auto payment going into my account.

The other kicker: The "fee" is $15 for paying over the phone... cause that's what Western Union charges they tell me. Give me a fucking break. They have online banking and billpay technology, but they can't take a payment from my other bank without a $15 dollar fee? This is bullshit. Complete bullshit. Fuck sovereign.

So now my plan is to get rid of sovereign in my life as fast as possible. I'm going to make sure the $35 dollar reversal is on my account on Monday. I'm going to make sure Amazon S3 is set to bill my other credit card. Then on Monday I will call collections and have them bill me $15 bucks in order to make a instant payment to be able to close the account. Then I will pray that I don't get another payment to the sovereign account for $30 days.

I will be calling customer service on Monday as well to find out if there is ANY way to actually close the account. There has to be, policy or not that is ridiculous.

Update: Amazon S3 payment moved. Now just waiting for Monday to call sovereign's collections department and then customer service after.

Quick Comment: I just wanted to quickly make another point. I'm glad I'm in a situation that I can pay these ridiculous fees without missing rent and other things like that. What if I were much worse off? I can't imagine people living paycheck to paycheck being able to deal with this. Something has got to change.

Great Idea from Coworker: On Monday I will also report my cards as stolen so that sovereign WON'T TAKE CHARGES FROM THEM!

Uggg: Wanted to overnight a check from ING for $20 bucks since I'd rather pay ING+Courier $20 than Sovereign+Western Union $15, but since their collection address is a PO Box you can't overnight courier deliver to them... of course.

Update: It's Monday morning past 8 and unfortunately the payment I transfered from ING and the $35 reversal don't show up on my account. Going to wait until tomorrow I guess to see if those things post. It's amazing how some banks do things immediately while others take days to get the simplest things done. I did call in order to report our cards lost (without replacement since that's another fee of course...) so now hopefully no payments can go through. It's amazing how rude the lady can be on the phone. She asks me for recent transactions to veryify me. I give her one and she goes "Can you give me another?"... so I give her another. After that she asks again so I read off about 4-5 from the account and she gets annoyed at me "Just give me one sir!"...

Amazing.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

http://www.nazeeabbassi.com/blog/2011/04/self-study/

This was linked on facebook for me from a friend. I really love these photos, wanted to post about them here as well as in facebook.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So we're in Anaheim now, ready to begin the 2nd part of our trip. We landed in CA on Saturday and immediately went out to the Los Angelos County Museum of Art. The idea was to see the Burton exhibit which was pretty cool. I had no idea that he did his own art (which is just being naive) but they had a LOT of it. I had to admit that my favorite part was the room that had the catwomen suit, the edward scissorhands suit, the batman hats and the penguin baby carriage but that's because it was a room that was all about the movies I loved.

The best part of this art musuem however was definitely "Five Car Stud". If you are in CA please go see this before it leaves in January. Absolutely amazing piece that blew me away. I was not prepared for something so amazing on Saturday. Please go see it.

After this we drove down to San Diego. On Sunday we checked out San Diego (the Gaslamp district and the seaport village). On Monday we hit the zoo. Today we checked out San Clemente on the way back to Anaheim. San Diego is amazing in that there is NO TRAFFIC it would seem. LA has plenty (as we found on Saturday night going to San Diego) but we found none since getting to San Diego. It was a great couple of days. That zoo is too big for one day, so we saw what we could before getting too tired. We also saw Horrible Bosses on Sunday while wandering around. I enjoyed it (as I knew I would).

Everywhere that we ate was pretty good. I'll be making another blog post later detailing all of the places we ate while here :) We are mainly using Yelp to find places and so far it's been great. We also used Priceline to find a hotel in San Diego and it worked out great!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So I ended up buying a new iPhone 4s on the apple website.

I couldn't see myself paying upwards of $300-$450 for an iphone 4 (buying one completely new out of contract on ebay or through AT&T etc). That just didn't make sense.

What I would LOVE to do is buy a new phone completely out of contract so I wouldn't have to renew but then the cost becomes $500-600 for any new phone (iPhone or not). This is just ridiculous. I feel like I'm avoiding contract troubles by paying more money to the people I want to be avoiding anyway.

So in the end, I do the only logical thing... which is exactly what all of these contracts and pricing structures are setup to do. I buy the newest phone, out of contract which also RENEWS my contract screwing me for when the iPhone 5 comes out.

So it seems like until our government wakes up and starts instating laws that actually help people (not likely) AT&T will keep winning while providing shitty service.

Edit: I also looked into canceling AT&T and switching to another carrier but with my wife and I on a family plan that involves paying TWO canceling fees and stuff like that. It doesn't work out financially.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Just had my phone stolen out of my car while traveling in Ithaca. Accidentally left the car unlocked (didn't think I did) and accidentally left the phone in the car.

The worst part about this? Due to normal cell phone contract bullshit, to get the SAME PHONE I HAD I now have to pay 399.99... I paid $200.00 for the phone new of course. Complete bullshit.

Notes for others: always have a passcode on your phone. That way the people who steal it can't wipe it before you are able to use the location features to find the phone :-(

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I would gladly throw my $199 for a new iPhone 4S but according to the apple store website it would cost me $450 currently due to my contract... I hate cell phone contracts. So I guess most current iPhone 4 users won't be able to upgrade at a reasonable price.

EDIT: Some other iPhone 4 users have responded via twitter with the same message. We all have to wait until Feburary if we want to upgrade :-(

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So today in preperation for the hurricane I wanted to buy a new flashlight. When I went to Lowes the salesguy laughed at me and said "A bit late buddy huh?"...

Is that how customer service works now? On the way out of the store (I immediately just walked away from the dude) I hear 5 other people asking other workers the same question and none of them laughed at the customer.

I think from now on I'm going to Home Depot. No one at Lowes acts the way they do in the commercials. I want to be helped. I want to take your advice and I want to be treated like I'm not an idiot. Let's hope Home Depot delivers.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I think Serendipity Recording Studios is finally ready for action! For those that never saw it, here are a couple of photos of the room prior to any work.

See the full gallery on Posterous

I hired http://www.edenhomeimprovement.com/ to do the work and here are some photos after the first day.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Some photos of the room during work and after they were done preparing it for painting.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Now our work began! Caitlin helped me a ton on this project since I'm not good at painting trim at all! First was priming all of the walls and painting the ceiling.

See the full gallery on Posterous

After came painting the walls. I chose the blue and orange combination from our wedding combined with my favorite color: purple. Big thanks to Mark for helping put the final coats on!

See the full gallery on Posterous

And finally today I got to put stuff in it!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Hopefully I'll get some time in the next couple of days to hear how it sounds!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So with Sadie's passing me and Caitlin wasted no time getting another dog. We want someone for Grubby to play with, and want two dogs in general so there was no reason to wait

See the full gallery on Posterous

Caitlin did make the fatal mistake of letting me name the dog for the second time. Our first dog is named Grubby after my favorite Warcraft 3 pro player. This dog I decided to name Tcl after the programming language that I've used a lot while programming at Berklee College of Music. Like the wikipedia page says it's pronounced "tickle". It satisfies our requirements of being incredibly geeky, while at the same time being incredibly cute.

So our new dog Tcl will be spending the next few days getting used to Grubby and our 3 cats!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Finally getting around to moving my blog over to posterous. I will be moving some posts over to my coding blog at mx.kelsin.net but unfortunately I will be losing some information and making some long running google links no longer work. I'm generally ok with this since a lot of that data is so old it shouldn't really be relevant anymore anyway.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So after the horrendous delays we experienced on Monday the MBTA passed out these forms apologizing and saying that we can immediately get a refund for both Monday trips by filling out this form. The form stated that every customer can get a max of 2 refunds (inbound and outbound) and had a spot to fill in your monthly pass number, zone and how much you were getting back. We got this form Tuesday evening when coming home. On Wednesday morning another conductor tried to give us these forms and we told him that we got it last night, and he said "Ok" and moved on.

Fast forward to today. My wife and I filled out our forms saying Zone 5 and $12.50 each (each way is $6.25). When we got up to the ticket window the lady rudely asked why we filled out $12.50. We told her that we were delayed on the inbound and outbound and she then told us we needed two forms, not just one and that the conductor should have giving us two. We told her that he didn't and that the forms says we're allowed two and she just says "Not without two forms". Another employee came over to tell us the same thing.

Are you serious? Clearly communication is awful since the conductor didn't know, or didn't tell us this. Now tomorrow morning we need to ask for another form and see if the conductor still has it. This "bonus" is already a bit weird since you can apply for a refund everytime your train is 30 minutes late online. The only difference this time is the immediate money instead of waiting 4-6 weeks to get your spare ticket that you have to then bring to the counter to get a refund for. This is better but it's not like the MBTA is out any more money than they would be anyway without this apology. On top of that they make it very hard to get both refunds by requiring two forms even though the conductor doesn't know that AND the form doesn't say?

I wouldn't mind as much if other cities didn't have awesome transit systems. It's a solved problem guys. Improve service and stop acting like your customers are the enemy and maybe you'll see increased ridership?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We went to the gym again today. For now we really want to try and start a Sat/Sun/Tues/Thurs schedule. The only issues are Tues and Thurs mean really early morning if we want time for cardio and strength training (which I really want to keep doing).

Today was pretty much the same as yesterday but I used 4 upper body machines and did 4 sets of 5 reps instead of just 20 in a row. It's so weird how you can be extremely tired from one machine, but then the next machine you're perfect fine cause it's using different arm muscles.

Anyway, short and simple post but going to try and keep it up.

In other news we bought a electric fondue pot, and chocolate mix and cheeses. So tomorrow is going to be cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue. I know very different strain from the gym, but it's valentines day... not that we wouldn't do that dinner any other day of the year.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Today we went to the gym (on a Saturday!!! WTF???) and had our first "real" workout. The past two times I just used the bikes and that was it. Barely even broke a sweat actually. This time I used the elliptical for 20 minutes which actually had me completely worn out. After that I did 20 reps on one upper body machine, and 20 on another.

The doctor recently told me I should try to strengthen my upper body and shoulders so we'll see how that goes. Also quickly seeing that we really need to come in the morning with like an hour of time, so maybe the weekend + two days a week (for like 45 minutes) is the best route. We'll just have to see.

Either way today felt good and I got some upper body work in. Now time for a shower. Today I'm going to play in the TL Open (with bo1 rounds though it won't take very long) and then we're going to go buy some groceries and a fondue pot.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »