Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2011-11-04

First off: happy birthday, Dad! *throws confetti*

Second: happy birthday, Kinect! (Incidentally, it was released one year ago, today.)

Today was a somewhat busy day. I moved the contents of my savings account from BoA to a credit union (because Bank of America steals houses). This caused trouble on both ends.

At BoA there were some complexities:

• I told the teller how much I wanted to withdraw. She replied: "Uh, we don't have that much in cash." A cashier's check will suffice, thanks.
• I opened the account in Texas, but was drawing funds from California. Since there are different regulations in each state, they don't have as much access to the account information in CA as they do in TX.
• In the 5 years I'd owned the account, I'd never once written a check, so the teller couldn't find my signature on file online to compare against the one I was providing to authorize the withdrawl. Eventually she wrote something on the withdrawl form, and proceeded with the transaction.

Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't have to provide any form of ID (although I suppose debit card swipe + PIN counts).

Making the deposit at CUBS was comparatively simpler, but took just as long - the teller had to get an override from her manager or another branch to be able to deposit a check that size. None of the other branches were answering the telephone, but after about 20 minutes her manager came in and took care of the deal.

I'm doing the mandatory IRB training. It's long.

I met with Dave Wagner today, and over the course of two hours, we planned out a research project, came up with some interesting questions, talked to several other students, realized that the questions were not actually interesting, and came up with some other questions. The preliminary results from one of the other students' studies make me disappointed in cell phone users at large, but even more so, at Google for failing to let Android users make more granular security decisions. Permissions should be something you can dynamically grant or revoke at runtime, and app developers shouldn't be taught that they can write code that assumes it can get whatever privileged data it wants at runtime. Blargh.

After that meeting, I met with Ankur, Annelise, and Josiah to plan puzzle hunts. We'll be rerunning the 2011 Berkeley Mystery Hunt this winter for the general public, so there was some discussion of logistics and review of the puzzles to make them more suitable for the anticipated audience. We're also laying the groundwork for what will hopefully become the 2012 Berkeley Mystery Hunt, which is super exciting because one of my life goals is to write and run a puzzle hunt. We have some great ideas, and it's really fun to brainstorm with people who are just as excited about puzzles and twice as skilled. We had three solid hours of creative discourse, and my mind is still brimming with other crazy ideas to try. I love this feeling.

Comments: