Lately I’ve been pretty busy. For example, tonight I’ve been working on Financial Accounting homework – each problem takes about 1-2 hours.

But when it rains, it pours.

Last Monday I made a deposit at a Major Bank that I had just switched to, after 13 years with Citibank. Generally when I make deposits, I go to a teller. Call me old fashioned. I deposited a money order and I noticed that today, it still hadn’t been credited to my account.

So I called and they said they had no record of my deposit. Now at home, I found the receipt and it turned out that the amount had been credited to account ending 1141. Uh. My account is 1191.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that my handwriting isn’t great, so 9->4 is quite possible. But the fact is that before the teller accepted my money order, I had to swipe my ATM card and enter a PIN.

Shouldn’t some sort of alarm been raised at the fact that I was trying to deposit a money order to an account that was not mine? What was the point of swiping my ATM card and entering my PIN?

This raises all sorts of troubling questions. Hopefully I’ll uncover what happened tomorrow. Oye vei!

As an aside, I now understand why it is called crediting my account at the bank!

UPDATE: A few calls later, the money magically appeared in my account. Lesson learned – always check your receipt.

This particular comic caught my attention:

PHD Comics: Deadline

I remember that happening a lot in college in computer science – especially in my junior year when at the height of the Dot Com boom, all these people (including some wearing scrubs) decided they wanted to become database experts. As a result, the servers kept falling over, and in two separate classes that I took in Fall that semester, people could not submit their final projects until early in the Spring semester.

Extensions are not always a good thing.

Lehman Bros. bust hit San Mateo County hard
San Mateo County has been stung by the recent Wall Street investment crisis, absorbing about $150 million in potential losses that could result in public school budget cuts, delays on road and Caltrain improvements, and scaled-down city services.

…

Funds from these cities, school districts and special districts were pooled together in San Mateo County’s $2.6 billion investment portfolio. Critics have said the county needs to hire an outside expert for this portfolio.

Jean Holbrook, the county’s superintendent of schools, pegged countywide losses at $37.4 million for kindergarten through grade 12. The San Mateo County Community College District, whose three colleges serve 40,000 students, lost $25.2 million. The countywide school insurance fund lost more than $550,000.

“It’s hitting at the same time that we had a late and inadequate state budget,” Holbrook said. “Those losses are impossible for a school district to absorb. This is not money just sitting around in reserves. It’s used for our ongoing operating expenses – paying salaries, and making the payments on buildings and facilities.”

The Sequoia Union High School District, which includes schools in Belmont, Woodside, Atherton, San Carlos, Redwood City and Menlo Park, was hit especially hard by the bankruptcy, losing $6.6 million – more than any other district in the county, said spokeswoman Bettylu Smith.

…

Church and other supervisors are considering whether to limit the amounts invested from each issuer of commercial paper and corporate bonds, from 10 percent to just 2 percent of the county pool. The Lehman Bros. portfolio accounted for 5.9 percent of the county’s investment fund.

This is rather unfortunate. Given the precarious position that most schools are in already, this is just more bad news.

Today I received an e-mail from HSBC stating that the interest rate on my account was dropping to 3.0%. While that’s not news I wanted to hear, I applaud them for being upfront about it. Some of my other accounts have dropped the interest rate in half without any notice.

On Friday, at around 1030am, the security lines at Terminal A in SJC were so bad that they backed up into the ramps descending from the parking garages.

Did you know that there’s a secret security line that’s only open between 5am-11am and has no one in line (because it’s secret)?

Just walked a little further outside to the International Arrivals building. If you have a boarding pass already, and have only carry on luggage, apparently they will allow you to enter and be screened there.

I walked by Friday and then doubled back to re-read the sign stating the rules. A TSA agent noticed and actually tried to flag me down to enter because I guess there was no one there (I was trying to leave the airport though… not enter).

Pretty neat. But only between 5am-11am according to the sign.

Bill Would Limit Customs’s Laptop Seizures – Yahoo! News
Democrats in Congress are proposing legislation to limit the authority of customs agents to search and duplicate Americans’ laptops, PDAs, and other electronic devices at border crossings.
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The move follows the release of documents showing that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency broadly expanded the authority of agents to search and duplicate materials from travelers entering the country without the requirement of reasonable suspicion.

Two Democratic senators, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Maria Cantwell of Washington, have cosponsored a bill that would require customs agents to establish a “reasonable suspicion of illegal activity” before searching the contents of laptops or other devices carried by U.S. citizens entering the country. The measure would also limit the amount of time that officials can detain laptops and other devices without a court order and forbids the use of race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin in search selection. A similar bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives.

Now this is a bill I can support!