Caveats:

• Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston and Salt Lake City metro area Redbox locations.
• Limit one (1) free DVD rental per new Redbox customer credit/debit card.
• The promotion runs from 8/21 through 9/17 so get cracking.

See RedBox for a list of locations and DVDs.

I went to the Golden Gopher Fan Fest 2005 today. It was an open practice/scrimage in preparation for the upcoming football season. You can find the rest of the pictures that I took in the Fan Fest 2005 Set on Flickr.

I just want to let you all know about what Wells Fargo does with their customers who have CDs.

Things to know:

• When your CD matures, Wells Fargo automatically renews your CD after a certain period of time for the same length term.
• Rates are for the most part low, with the exception of a few select term lengths that pay significantly more.

Let’s illustrate this with a current example:

Suppose you have $10,000 and are looking for a CD with a term of about 3 years or less.

Standard interest rates are:

• 2.00% for 3-5 months
• 2.50% for 5-11 months
• 2.75% for 12-23 months
• 3.00% for 24-36 months

However, there are their featured rates:

• 3.75% for 7 months
• 4.00% for 13 months
• 4.25% for 26 months

Clearly, it’s in your best interest to take one of the featured rates. But now, when your CD matures, the featured rates will be for different lengths of times. Maybe like 6 months, 14 months and 25 months. So your CD will automatically renew (after some length of time) into a more standard interest rate.

Therefore, you have to go into the bank and specifically choose the new term length to get the featured rate. It’s a hassle for you, the customer. What does the bank get out of it? Well I guess it has to pay you a lower interest rate if you are lazy and don’t come into the bank (because it’s such a hassle to go there anyway).

Update: My supposedly ‘resolved’ problem still isn’t resolved.

Update 2: Resolved!

Friday: my mother and I headed off to Wells Fargo—she needed to renew a CD, I needed to do some account maintenance. Specifically, I had some sort of custodial account that really needed to be put in my name (now that I’m 20). Naively, it seems like it should be pretty easy change, just remove my mom’s name from the account and make sure I have control of the money. Little did I know…

The story begins with a 20 minute wait to see a banker. Seems like nobody cares about customer service—they’ll get your money no matter how long it takes to see a banker. My mom quickly renews her CD, and we begin working on changing over the other account. It turns out that you can’t just change the ownership of the account (I could understand this for tax reasons, but the money was already in my name). So we withdraw all the money from the account and proceed to close it. Well, I guess the banker thought you couldn’t just close it—had to make some call to corporate to remove some PMA linking. Corporate tells him he could have just closed the account. That’s ok, only wasted like 5 minutes.

Then he gets out the paperwork to open a new account. Everything goes smoothly (or so I think). I sign a couple times on this machine that imports my signature into some PDF file. That’s pretty neat. He deposits the money from the previous account into the new account, hands me the receipt, shakes my hand and says goodbye. Everything went great, or so I thought.

Monday: Since I had been to the bank pretty late on Friday (5:40pm or so), I didn’t expect a lot to happen in terms of processing until maybe Monday or Tuesday. But, feeling lucky, I log onto Wells Fargo Online, just to see if the new account had shown up. It hadn’t. I called the 1-800 number, talked to another banker, who kindly told me that since it had been so late on Friday, it’s really like it was processed on Monday, so check back tomorrow.

Tuesday: Check online, the account still not there. Call the 1-800 number, I’m given the same racket and told to check back tomorrow. Oh, and they ask if I want a loan. No thanks, I’d rather just have the $5000 that has gone missing.

Wednesday: Check online, account still missing in action. Call the 1-800 number, this time I talk to a genuinely helpful banker. Instead of giving me some ‘it’ll show up eventually crap’, he plainly states that he only sees my old checking account, no new savings account. I ask if it should be processed by now, and he tells me that it should have happened essentially instantaneously. So it should have shown up on Friday of last week. So you can make the inference that those bankers I spoke with over the phone on Monday and Tuesday were just too lazy to deal with my problem. He asks for the account number of the new account I’ve opened and says he can’t find that account anywhere. He puts me on hold and checks into it further. Wow! What a helpful guy! He tells me I’ll have to head back to the branch office, to see if they can figure it out.

Back at the Branch Office, I sign in at the desk and proceed to wait my 20 minutes to speak with a banker. During that time, several other people came, signed in, and then left without seeing a banker because the wait was taking too long. Great job at customer service! (Sarcasm). Eventually, I get to see another banker. I like meeting with people in person—then they can’t give you the run around or just lie to you to get you to go away. This guy was very helpful as well. He pulls my information up, shows me the lists of accounts he sees for me. It’s clear that this new account disappeared some how. Armed with the receipts and new account number, he proceeds to try to track down the problem. I get myself a water and read most of a Sports Illustrated. He comes back and says, good news, we’ll get that account created for you. Just sign this form (again, since I had already signed it on Friday). Ok, your account has been made. Now we just need to find the money that’ll go into it. Hmm. Well, I’ll try calling this place that keeps track of mis-posted transactions. He waits on the phone some more. They start looking for my lost transaction. Success! They find it! It’ll get credited at midnight tonight (I hope).

Thursday (Update): Checked my account online, the balance was not posted at midnight last night like I had been told. I called the banker (no more waiting in line!) about an hour before the bank opened and left him a message saying that the balance had not been posted yet. He finally got back to me a little bit before noon, saying that because of some miscommunication, the $5000 will show up in my account tonight at midnight. Let’s see if he’s right this time. Please note that Wells Fargo has had my $5000 held hostage for nearly a week now. I should complain about all of the interest I’m losing (probably a few cents), but rates are too low for it to really mean anything.

Maybe I’ll just put my money where my mouth is and move this part of my savings over to ING Direct. Their savings accounts are getting a 3.30% APY—way better than the rate at Wells Fargo.

Friday: And my money is back, only one week later.

Postscript:

• So why did this whole problem come about? The only explanation I got was that it was a ‘strange computer glitch’.
• What if I didn’t notice this for a few months? Well, the banker told me I was lucky that I caught this so quickly—it would have been much harder to track down later.

But the real question is this: Why is it my responsibility to make sure that the voodoo magic that the bank performs goes correctly. Can’t the banker tell me the truth when he says that my account was created successfully and my money deposited?

There are 8 students participating in the ND Math REU this year. Together, we are working on 4 separate math problems—2 students per problem. My partner and I are investigating Totally Positive (resp. Totally Nonnegative) Matrices, namely matrices whose minors are all positive (resp. nonnegative). (Note here that by minor, I really mean the determinant of any square submatrix). (See MathWorld for a description of a Totally Positive Matrix).

At the moment, we are looking at what inequalities between minors hold true for every totally positive matrix. This theory has been worked out for principle minors for up to 5×5 matrices, and generalized to some extent over non-principle minors. While there is a lot of work in this field, at present we are examining if there is a sort of ‘extremal’ or primitive set of inequalities that generate every other valid inequality.

Hopefully I’ll be able to write a more concrete description of what we are trying to accomplish at a later date.

Also, I must mention that the campus is beautiful in the summer (well, they are doing some construction, including regilding the golden dome). I’ll try to take some action shots of the REU students and the pretty campus tomorrow.

Update: Photos

To begin, we flew from Minneapolis to Detroit to Rome, and then spent 3 days in Rome sightseeing. After Rome, we stopped off in nearby Tivoli to tour Villa d’Este and Villa Adriana.

The next stop was the remote Assergi (l’Aquila) near Gran Sasso. Here we had some lectures given by researchers working in the nearby Gran Sasso Laboratory. Due to some political reasons and safety concerns, we were not allowed to tour the Gran Sasso Laboratory (which is located deep within the heart of the mountain, connected to one of the tunnels thru the mountain).

Leaving Gran Sasso, we took a bus to Florence for some more sightseeing. There was a little bit of class work when we toured the European Gravitational Observatory about an hour outside of town. The EGO is looking for gravity waves using a very large interferometer. Neat stuff, really.

After spending a few nights in Florence, we stopped for the afternoon in Pisa before continuing on to Torino. Torino was just a quick layover until we left promptly the next morning for the Laboratory in the Frejus Tunnel (you know, the one that’s closed now because of the fire that killed 2 people).

Next stop was the beautiful Geneva, Switzerland, where we stayed 4 nights to tour the nearby CERN research facilities. After the 4th night in Geneva, we drove to Montreaux located on the other side of Lake Geneva to tour an old castle, Chateau de Chillon.

We then took the TGV from Geneva to Paris, a trip which lasted about 3.5 hours. After spending 3 nights in Paris (so 2 full days of sightseeing), the trip ended and we flew home.

I’ll try to write more about my experiences when I get the chance.

No data has been received for the last 10 seconds.

I have no idea what this means. This problem only arose after I switched to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I get this in situations where I never had a problem before. I don’t think it is a firewall issue because I can connect okay; it only seems to trigger after being connected for a little while (anywhere between a few seconds and a few minutes).

Ideas?

Essentially, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC had no rights in forcing manufacturers to include copy protection technology (specifically, the “broadcast flag”) that was intended on limiting unauthorized distribution of over-the-air TV on the internet. However, introduction and mandate acceptance of such broadcast flag would have prevented much innovation in the area by essentially blocking out Open Source/Free Software from using digital television by making the drivers difficult or impossible to write for.

Cory Doctorow has a good write up of the subject at Boing Boing: V-TV DAY: WE WON THE BROADCAST FLAG FIGHT! I suggest you take a look, as this ruling is huge in terms of consumer electronics for the next few years.

As it stands now, the FCC can regain this power to institute a broadcast flag only if congress explicitly passes a law granting them that authority. But no politician wants to pass a law breaking the TV’s of their voters. With any luck, it’ll be a dead issue.

Brad on a Donkey, Originally uploaded by Brad Froehle.

You should check out Flickr, as it now has all of my pictures on it. Like this one, of me on a Donkey outside of Old City Hall in Boston, MA. You can also see a set of all the pictures from my trip to Boston.

I’ll try to do a good job posting notes here when I upload cool things to Flickr, you should also subscribe to the RSS feed to get instant updates.

I’ve installed the drivers from Samsung’s website (for Mac OS X 10.3), but they do not seem to show up when I add the printer.

I have all of my homework done for the rest of the semester, save for the Final Report in Methods of Experimental Physics (MXP). That paper is due on Friday, a rapidly approaching deadline!

However, I should be mostly home free after Friday — I only have two finals, one on Thursday and one on Friday.

Tonight wrapped up my Latin Dance class, something that I will definitely miss. Joy (the instructor) and I were talking afterwards — she asked what I was taking next year and then proceeded to suggest Swing Dance. Funny that I already signed up for that one. After class 20 or so of us headed over to Famous Dave’s for Salsa night. We stayed for a little under two hours, leaving pretty early because everybody has stuff to attend to.

So far 4/7 classes have wrapped up completely:

• Latin Dance
• Physics Seminar
• Pepband
• University Bands
• Methods of Experimental Physics: Still have to finish that pesky report.
• Analysis: Just a final exam.
• Electricity and Magnetism: final exam.

If you aren’t a friend or family, some 400 of those won’t be initially visible to you. If you are a Flickr user already, leave a message here and I’ll add you as a friend. If not, either leave your email and I’ll send you a password to get in, or sign up for Flickr and leave your screenname.

I’ve also put together about 30 photo sets that should be interesting to browse.

Snow is for the winter!

Update (May 1, 2005): It briefly snowed again today!

I have updated this plugin to use version 2.0.8 of the TextilePHP class. Thanks to Adam Gessaman for the original plugin.

You can download textile2.0.8-smartypants.zip or textile2.0.8-smartypants.tar.gz.

Note: This was updated from Adam’s 2.0.3 plugin (not the more recent 2.0.5 plugin) by merging the changes in the Textile.php class into the plugin using the GNU utilities diff and patch.

Here’s a list of applications and neat additions:

• iChat
  • Ability to choose between Away and Logging Off when using Fast User Switching… this was a huge annoyance for me in the past.
  • Multiple AIM/Jabber accounts
  • Mobile users show up with the word Mobile next to their name. This means I won’t accidentally IM Gary’s phone anymore.
  • Group support is much better! (It’s actually usable now, because they adopted a method similar to how all the other IM clients do it).

• Safari
  • RSS: I’m not sure I’ll use this here. I’m quite used to NetNewsWire.
  • Undo in forms! (Was this is Safari 1.3?)
  • New page pops up helping you get on the internet if you lack a connection when you try to load a webpage.

• Airport/Wireless
  • The menu bar meter seems to always show more bars… nice psycological effect.

• iCal
  • Calendar Groups (much like Folders in iPhoto, etc). Not sure what use these have.
  • Show birthdays in iCal (no need for extra programs or plugins).

• Mail
  • Smart mailboxes
  • Different interface (unsure about my feelings on this).

• Dictionary
  • Very useful
  • Pretty interface/font selection
  • Looks very professional

• Preview
  • Annotation features
  • New display options (continuous pages, book mode, etc).

• Spotlight
  • AWESOME

• System Preferences
  • I like the ability to search for what I’m looking for. Doesn’t always pop up with what I was thinking (e.g. a search for ‘scroll’ doesn’t highlight the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane).

• Grapher
  • Cool program for plotting 2D and 3D images. It won’t replace gnuplot for making graphs for papers, but it is easier to use than say Mathematica for quickly making and manipulating a 3D graph.

Update: I just remembered I posted my inpressions on the Developer Preview last July. It’s an interesting read to compare my views… some things (like Safari and iChat) were fixed up, but other problems (Dashboard) remain.