Bryce Yehl

24″ LCD follow-up

Bryce — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:28:28 +0000

I ended up returning the pair of Westinghouse 24″ L2410NM LCDs after about 3 weeks. The displays were stunningly gorgeous, and 24 inches would seem to be the sweet spot for using large non-overlapping windows, but this particular model of LCD had one terrible flaw — no sleep mode on the HDMI input. At least not when used with a DVI to HDMI cable.

Instead of turning off the screen would go bright blue.

I tried to deal with it by turning the screens off when I wasn’t using them but I’d often forget. At home this would be especially annoying — having to get out of bed to shut it off so that I could sleep, or coming home to find that it had been on all day.

At home I don’t really miss it, most of my computing is surfing the web on one 20″ LCD while watching TV on the other so the extra pixels weren’t of much benefit. At the office, on the other hand, I’m still using a MacBook and every each pixel on an external display makes a dramatic difference.

It’s budget time at work so I’m hoping to get a bigger screen without having it come out of my pocket, but if I come across another good deal on a 24″ LCD I may just buy one anyways…

Usorious

Bryce — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:39:39 +0000

Got an e-mail this morning from Progressive that my renewal documents are available online. Like many insurance companies, they give two prices — one for making six monthly payments and another that is discounted for paying in full. For giggles I punched the numbers into a loan calculator and arrived at an interest rate of over 40%.

Fourty. Fucking. Percent!

Suddenly that WaMu card that I cancelled the other day ain’t looking so bad…

B*

Bryce — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:38:31 +0000

Bumpage has finally kicked in, nine hard inquiries have prematurely fallen off of my credit report this week. TransUnion has been dropping one every few days while Equifax has suddenly started dropping one with every soft inquiry. At this rate they should both be free of hard inquiries in another week or two. Sadly this trick does not work against Experian, but I have a plan for the next phase of my credit repair strategy…

The upshot is that I just got an instant approval for a Citibank card with a limit at the higher end of my current cards. This shows that what I’ve been doing has been working — I’ve applied for and been denied a Citi card every couple of months — and will allow me to cancel a stack of lower-limit cards without increasing my overall utilization.

Jacked

Bryce — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:34:06 +0000

AmEx isn’t the only credit card company suddenly showing me less love. I’ve got a WaMu card that just had its first anniversary, and to celebrate they announced on my last statement that the interest rate would be jacked up by a whopping ten percentage points.

Closed.

Twilight Zone

Bryce — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:56:06 +0000

Last week American Express whacked me with a financial review, which is where they suspend your account and demand financial records, in my case an IRS form 4506T to authorize the release prior tax returns. It is a decidedly unpleasant process and while I don’t think it’s likely that they will close my account, they are my largest credit grantor and I wouldn’t be surprised if they reduced my limits.

But the kicker is that they called last night to ask how I felt about my last contact, how I’d rate the company, would I recommend them to someone else, etc. To one of the questions my response was You’re fucking joking, right? Truthfully, all of my interactions with AmEx customer service have been friendly and even the FR agents have been nice, but with my FR still pending it’s hard to have any positive feelings towards the company…

PIN Pain

Bryce — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:05:40 +0000

Note to future self: When you get a new debit card, use it right away. Better to discover that your PIN doesn’t work when the bank is open and you aren’t in need of some immediate cash…

Opening a second bank account may be one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

31

Bryce — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:42:09 +0000

Another birthday goes by this week. I still haven’t come to terms being 30. A friend from my teenage years pointed out that we’re still young but she still has another year to be twenty-something.

Is my name fucking Bill Murray?

Bryce — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:33:51 +0000

What about X?

It doesn’t matter because Y doesn’t Z.

But what about X?

It doesn’t matter because Y doesn’t Z.

But what about X?

Hey, look, your shadow!

The story of my life

Bryce — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:21:37 +0000

Your rules do not apply to Us

Bryce — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:01:15 +0000

A TSA screener gets caught sneaking a gun to work. You might expect that a TSA screener would be arrested and charged just like anyone else, perhaps even fired, but you would be wrong. Suspended for 30 days, no criminal charges, and back on the job.