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I've had all my money with HSBC for more than 10 years now. So I was very surprised when I heard that they were selling all their upstate NY branches to First Niagara. This ended up being a good opportunity to move to a local bank with more personal service. We picked Canandaigua National Bank because they're one of the few locals and Rachelle worked for them as a floating teller during a few summers in college.
Once the decision was made it took a little thought to actually move over to it. We had a lot of accounts with direct deposits, auto-debits and even a few outstanding checks. We also had to open the new accounts with an initial deposit, so we had to time this very carefully.
So once we wrapped our heads around what we had to do we opened some new accounts (consolidating some), updated our direct deposits, moved some money and then went to close our old accounts. I was surprised how simple it was to close all of our HSBC accounts. They basically moved all our remaining money into one account, cut us a bank check and closed them all; it took about 25 minutes. It was kind of scary walking around with that bank check on the way to deposit it at CNB because it was basically all our money. If something had happened to that check we'd have be screwed.
Fast forward a few weeks and we are still getting mail from First Niagara. Just today actually they sent us new check books. Rachelle called them and asked why we continue to get things from them when they don't have any of our accounts. They told her that they don't have any information on us and that this is all automated. They said not to worry because they won't have any of our money so it won't really matter. I'm just curious if they're going to open up credit cards in our names for over-draft protection since we had that at HSBC. We'll have to pay attention to that and check back every few weeks.
On St. Patrick's Day, instead of making corned beef and cabbage ourselves we went to Buffalo to hang out with Rachelle's family. During this trip we hit a few milestones with our Honda Accord.
First, on the trip there we hit 100,000 miles! Sadly I didn't even notice. Rachelle mentioned it on the way home when we were about 100+ past the big number.
While we were there Rachelle somehow conned her brother into washing her car. Her mom helped out and discovered the first significant rust spot on the car. I hadn't noticed it because it was on the top of the car just above the windshield of all places and it hadn't broken through the paint yet, it was just in the "iron worms" phase.
The next day I took out my Dremel and even though it killed me to do so ground off all the paint and rust I could find in this spot. I had to act fast because the rust was creeping toward the rubber around the windshield and if it got under there I would never be able to stop it without taking out the windshield. I painted the spot with XO Rust and once that dries I can paint over it with touch up paint.
Living in Rochester for six years and driving 100,000 miles without growing any rust is a major accomplishment for this car. Obviously it wouldn't last forever, but I'm sad because now that this process has started, it'll never stop. I'll just have to keep up with it.
On a weekend (of course) a while ago there was a tiny issue with my email server at work. I got a call from someone saying they hadn't gotten any email for a while on their smartphone and they couldn't login using webmail. When I got a second to check it, sure enough it wasn't working. Over the years I've learned that one of the first things to check when a server goes crazy is how much available disk space there is. In this case the operating system disk was 100% utilized. I log everything on that server and those logs add up, especially with a few iPhones and iPads connected to it, so I deleted about 7GB of log files. Everything seemed to be back to normal, email started flowing again and I could get into webmail without issue. I should have known that was too easy, but I went back to my weekend.
Sunday night I received a text message from someone else saying email isn't working. I didn't notice the message until I was going to bed so I decided to wait until the morning to look at it again. On Monday morning when I checked it out, another set of disks was full in the same server, this one for the transaction logs. These logs are supposed to be purged every day when an online backup is performed, so these disks should never fill up. Since transaction logs hold data that hasn't yet been committed to the database, you can't just delete them to free up space, if you do you'll lose data. The only safe way to remove the logs is to perform an online backup. The problem is when there is no more room for transaction logs the information store dismounts, going offline and making an online backup impossible. Luckily, I actually planned for just such an eventuality and have a multi-gigabyte dummy file sitting on every disk on this server. I just deleted the dummy file which left enough space to mount the information store and perform the backup to purge the logs. After an hour or so email was flowing again.
Then I noticed the disk space on the OS drive was getting low again! I cleared 7GB of logs two days before and it only had 1GB free. I continued looking around and found all sorts of spam in my queues waiting to be sent, all 'from' the same teacher's account. This teacher's password had obviously been compromised and someone was using his credentials to send out spam from my server. The nerve. I changed his password, cleared out the queues and everything returned to normal.
It didn't make sense at the time, but this spammer was trying to send so much mail that the connection logs filled up the OS disk. Then the volume of messages caused so many transactions that the transaction log disk filled up before the nightly backup could purge the logs.
This was super annoying because it didn't matter that my system was up to date and correctly configured to prevent relaying spam. The bad guy had a valid username and password which gave him access. Originally, allowing relaying based on authentication was enabled for because people had smartphones that required IMAP/SMTP access. Now almost all smartphones (Android, iPhone, Blackberry) can talk directly to Exchange server using ActiveSync, so I might be able to disable it. It was a great way to start the week.
Claire just turned two and I must say the "terrible twos" are not that bad. Sure she can be stubborn and want to do things her way, but as long as she knows you're the boss we can usually work out a compromise.
There is one recent change in her behavior that is really driving me nuts: she won't eat anymore. When she was really young it was problems with different textures in baby food, then she wasn't really all that adventurous in trying new things and now she just doesn't seem to eat anything at all. We had a very short list of food she was guaranteed to eat. We would always try to get her to taste new things but in case that didn't go well could always give her something she liked. Over the past month she has slowly started crossing things off that list.
She used to eat a bowl of cereal with me every morning. We'd mix it up with some mini pancakes or scrambled eggs but now she won't eat any of it. Even if she doesn't say "NO" to it when I ask if she wants it, she'll take one bite and say "done." Same goes for lunch and same for dinner. She used to love pasta with sauce, grilled cheese, yogurt, apple sauce, corn, chicken nuggets and a few other things. It seems like she doesn't like anything anymore. I was praying this was just a phase, but it's now been a month of this and still going. Dinner used to be very enjoyable but has become a nightly torture trying to get her to eat anything.
She does seem to eat better at daycare, but I have a feeling that's peer-pressure or the caregivers being optimistic with their descriptions. Does one bite qualify as "some" or "none"?
The only things she does actually request to eat are craisins. Obviously those things have like no nutritional value at all since they exit looking the same as when they entered and while they are fat-free they're loaded with sugar which she can't survive on.
We recently went to her 2 year wellness appointment and they said she's doing fine, so the small amount of food she is actually swallowing is keeping her alive. I guess that's good to know, but I really hope she snaps out of this soon.
I've owned an MP3 player for many years. My first one was a Dell Digital Jukebox back around 2002. I had a few of those because they kept breaking and Dell kept replacing them. Then Dell got out of the portable music player business and stopped making them. When I finally wore out my last Dell DJ, Rachelle got me a Creative Zen Vision:M. I loved this player and used it for many years. Sadly, it started acting stupid recently so I figured it was time for a new one. I did some research and found that an Apple iPod was probably my best option. I was conflicted about this; I am the opposite of an Apple fanboy and I really don't like iTunes, but I figured I could give it a try. Rachelle got me a 7th generation 160GB iPod Classic for Christmas and so far I've been very happy with it.
I spend a lot of my time listening to audiobooks. IPods have special functionality for audiobooks so I was rather excited when I found this out. Audiobooks can be separated from the music library and not included in randomized music play. They also have a resume feature where you can come back to the exact point you were at if you go listen to something else. They also support chapters so you can easily skip around. This is the best considering how much it sucks to fast forward though a book that can be 30+ hours long.
These features are perfect for me, except I'm having a big problem getting my current audiobooks into the format required to take advantage of these features. All my audiobooks are in multiple .mp3 files. I can put these on the iPod as-is, but it'll treat each part as it's own book. What I really need is to convert all the .mp3 files into one big chaptered .m4b file. There are tons of tools to join mp3s into an m4b out there, but inserting chapter breaks is the tough part. There doesn't seem to be any free windows software out there that actually works to do it. I'd even be willing to pay (a little) for software that works, but all the ones I found seem to be Apple software and won't run on Windows.
I found a free Java-based tool called ID3v2ChapterTool that supposedly can add ID3 chapters to media files but the resulting files were never recognized or imported by iTunes. Maybe I wasn't using it correctly, who knows. I was assuming Apple used chapter support in ID3 tags embedded in the media files for chapters...but maybe they use some other proprietary means of doing it. My next try is going to be installing Mac OSX in a virtual machine on my Windows desktop to try running one of the Mac tools for creating chapters.
I'm the king of keeping things low-key. Yesterday was New Year's Eve, and I wanted nothing more than sitting at home with Rachelle and Claire. We did end up going to a friend's house for about two hours before Claire's bedtime. It was a good time and I am glad we got out for a bit to see friends, but I was happy after putting Claire to bed to sit on the couch and watch a movie.
We're a bit lame and went to bed around 11. I don't really have a problem missing out on things like midnight on New Year's Eve because in fact I didn't miss it. At midnight I was rudely woken up by my neighbors shouting, playing music and setting off fireworks. I wasn't aware that NYE is a big fireworks holiday, but I guess it is according to my neighbors. I don't know who it actually was, but they most have been very close since I found a couple spent fireworks in my flower bed the next morning.
I was amazed it didn't wake up Claire. Maybe it did, but she didn't make any noise. If she had started crying I would've gone over there in just my boxer-briefs with a baseball bat and made all of them cry.
Banks can't really afford to screw around with their website security. With viruses and spyware recording keystrokes on users' computers, money can disappear from accounts in the blink of an eye. So banks need to go a few steps further than just requiring a username and password on their websites to protect accounts.
One of the banks I'm currently with used to require a username and basically two different passwords. The second one, called a security key, having to be "typed" on a virtual keyboard using the mouse. I think this was a very good technique to combat things like key-loggers and spyware.
So in an effort to keep things fresh, in November they changed how the security key works. Now instead of requiring you to click in the whole key, they ask for the characters at 3 seemingly random places in the key:
Sure this mixes it up and I'm sure their intent was to have you type different characters each time, but I'm not sure this is an upgrade. First, instead of requiring a really long string of characters now they're down to 3. Second, my security key is rather long and intricate and trying to figure out what the 6th or 18th or 19th character is in my head is practically impossible. This forces me to write it down, which breaks the first rule of passwords: you don't write them down!
The last problem I have with this setup has to do with the data the bank stores. In order to authenticate people the bank needs to have your password stored in their system. More accurately, they should have a one-way hash of your password. So when you login they hash the password you supply and see if the resulting string matches what they have in their database. This way they don't know your password and more importantly if they were to be compromised, your password is still safe. With this new security key mechanism they either need to have your password stored in plain-text or have a hash of every possible 3 digit combination of the key. Either way it seems your password could be easily figured out if you had access to the data on their end.
