Washington Mutual Bill Pay Unacceptable!

I have a saying that there are no good banks. Washington Mutual (aka WaMu), where I have been a customer for a few years, is an excellent example. Let me make a long story short. It has been more than a week now that I've been struggling to get my bills paid on their website. They are fully aware of the problem, and have been amazingly incompetent in resolving the issues. A summary of their problems are described at ZDNet and at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The Washington Mutual spokesman who said that, "Most of the site is operating just fine," is about as sharp as an automobile mechanic that says "Except for your steering wheel, most of your car is operating just fine." Isn't bill pay a critical component of their website?

As for my own personal experience, I called their customer service department to have a bill paid. When I was finally able to check their work, I found that they mixed up the due date and the start date for the payment, and. It turned out that my bill payment would be 4 days late if I didn't correct the problem myself. I also wrote WaMu a message complaining about their screw up, and I essentially got a form letter that didn't address any of my problems or concerns.

Now, I'm trying to pay my bills as early as possible because I can't trust WaMu to get it right. At the same time, I am looking for a new bank for my bill payments.

My First eBay Experience

Very recently, I opened an eBay account and started bidding on items. Let me take a step backward for those who are not familiar with how eBay works. Before I opened an eBay account, I setup an account on Paypal which is like a bank account that you use to pay for eBay items. While it is not entirely necessary, most sellers on eBay prefer Paypal. One can also pay with a credit card, but Paypal is the entity that handles the transaction. So, I figured that I would have to end up opening a Paypal account anyway.

I was in the market to buy a Hewlett Packard 92274A (74A) toner cartridge for my 12 year old HP LaserJet 4MP printer. For the record, a new one of these replacement cartridges cost about $90 retail. On eBay I saw that they could be had for a lot cheaper, especially those that are designated as remanufactured cartridges. My first 4 or 5 attempts to buy a cartridge didn't meet with much success as I was outbid (sometimes at the very last minute) by somebody else. Up until this point, I had been bidding on cartridges one at a time. Frustrated by my lack of success, I started putting in bids on multiple items at once, hoping that I might be able to get one of them. To make a long story short, my bidding now became too successful, and I ended up winning two toner cartridges from the same seller. This is where the fun began.

I immediately tried to contact the seller to see if he would be willing to combine the shipping charges since most sellers do that when you win multiple auctions. There was no reply to my Emails after a couple of days. I then contacted eBay to see if I could get the seller's phone number. This is when I found out that his telephone was disconnected! Not a great first experience. So, I informed eBay, and they also could not confirm his contact information. For reference, when this happens eBay restricts the member's activities until the outdated contact information is corrected. I eventually got this updated info. So finally after several days, I did make contact with the seller, and he was willing to knock a few dollars off of the shipping. I then made my payment through Paypal.

What happened next was that I think the seller went on vacation or something. Again, there was no response to my Emails. *sigh* After another week or so, I made contact again, and he informed me that my goods had already been shipped. So, then it was up to UPS to deliver the goods. This also seemed to take forever, but in reality it took about 8 days.

In the end, about 3 weeks after the saga began (with setting up a Paypal account), I completed my first eBay purchase. This experience is certainly the opposite of when you just go into a store and walk out with the product you want. I did end up saving quite a bit over the $90+ I would have paid at say Office Depot. But, I wonder if it was worth the hassle. Since I consider this purchase from eBay a learning experience, I would say that it is interesting to learn how the mechanics of the system work. My new toner cartridge is now in my old printer, and I have one more cartridge to spare. These cartridges last me about 2 years each, so I'm set for a while.

I think I'll go looking for something else to buy now.

Confused About Search

This is a dilemma to me. Some of my posts don't show up when I do a search from the Blogger search bar at the top of the screen. For example, if I type "link" in the box above, and press enter it should find the post with my first link. Actually, it will probably find this message now. Anyway, I don't understand how the search works, other than it is not very well.

Yahoo Streaming Quotes

A short while ago, I noticed that Yahoo Finance was offering free streaming quotes for stocks (not to be confused with real-time quotes, which you must pay for). This feature shows 15 minute delayed quotes for NASDAQ stocks, and 20 minute delayed quotes for the other exchanges. The green or red change indicators show a gain or loss for the day, while flashing green or red boxes indicate an uptick or downtick for the symbol. See the screenshot below:


From what I can tell though, whether or not you will see streaming quotes appears (when you access the Yahoo Finance site) to be random. If I don't get streaming quotes at first, I've had some success deleting the cookies in Internet Explorer, and re-accessing Yahoo Finance. Now, my question is does anybody know how to get Yahoo streaming quotes to appear every time you access Yahoo Finance? It does seem that this is a beta test feature of Yahoo Finance, but I'm wondering why it doesn't always seem to work.

Does Adsense Make Cents?

Or Dollars for that matter? Each time that I update my blog settings, it tempts me to sign up for Google Adsense. What type of success have people had running advertisements from their own personal blog? I could see people coming to a blog that is for a dedicated topic. But, I fail to see why or how any significant traffic could be generated for a personal blog, replete with the minute details of one's personal activities. Maybe if your name is Wil Wheaton, or you were otherwise a celebrity, people would be willing to read about your life.

In any case, I may try to experiment with Adsense. We'll see if it makes any sense.

My First Link.

And, here it is, my first link.

Any Comments?

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make any sound? If a blog is posted to the Internet, and nobody reads it, does it make any difference? It seems that somebody may have stumbled upon my blog, but I don't know who. If you happen across my blog, would you kindly leave me a comment to let me know you came by?

Experiment in Blogging

I consider this blog to be an experiment. My intent is to learn about the mechanics of blogging. I started my first web page in 1996, over 10 years ago. I didn't use any webpage creation software for that. Instead, I learned about HTML tags, and edited pages by hand using a UNIX text editor (very painful). However, the web page fell into disuse after 1998, and it has been largely unmodified since that time. So far, from what I can tell about the Blogger interface, it is both easier and harder that I expected. If this makes any sense, some things are easier that I expected. At least for the most basic functions, editing HTML code is not a requirement. On the other hand, I am surprised that the composition window is not as straightforward as say MS Word. What cracks me up (at the moment) is that Blogger's spelling checker doesn't have the words: blog, blogging, and blogger.

My First Post

Here it is. My blog. This is where people from all over can come and read about the minutiae of my life.