This Nerd Heard…

So the RIAA has gone after Yuri Shutovsky for copyright infringement.  Our good friend Yuri (no, I don’t really know him) has an alibi during the time that this alledged copyright violation occured.  It seems that he was on an extended trip to Russia.   He even offered up his passport showing that he has entry and exit stamps proving that he was in Russia during this time.

Not to be deterred by such trivial details, the RIAA has asked a judge that Yuri turn over all hard drives in his possession as well as the names and addresses of everyone who has ever used his computer.  Unsuprisingly, the judge has sided with the RIAA and has required that he turn over all of this information.  They even asked (very politely, I’m sure) that his work place be required to turn over all information about any computer that he has ever used while in their employ.

Even though Mr. Shutovsky was in Russia during the time of the alledged violation the RIAA believes that  “regardless of who was using the PC at the time, Yuri Shutovsky is responsible for whatever copyright infringement may have occurred by virtue of his paying for broadband from Verizon” (Arstechnica).  By that very argument, Verizon is also responsible for whatever copyright infringement occured because they allowed someone to commit copyright infringement through their network.

But, we all know that RIAA would never go after Verizon.  Why? Because Verizon has enough money that they can afford to hire attorneys competent enough to defend themselves against such a baseless lawsuit.

Here’s a tip to all you record labels out there.  Quit trying to scare your customers into you buying your product.  I know that downloading pirated music is illegal and I honestly don’t understand why people choose to do so.  I can’t understand it because I can’t understand why most people would want to listen to the crap that you sell.  Instead, focus your time, energy, and money on finding and promoting music that is worth buying.  Once you do that, learn to charge a reasonable fee and guess what? People WILL pay for your music.

Scaring your “customers” into paying for your service reminds me an awful lot of the racketeering performed by the Mafia.  In fact, maybe Mr. Shutovsky should sue the RIAA for racketeering?  I’d love to see that civil suit.

That’s right, someone stole my work email address. The culprit was no hacker though, it was the CEO of my company who took it from me. Why would he want my email address? Well his administrative assistant has a name that is almost identical to my own. In fact, the only difference between our first and last names is one letter.

His assistant and I have peacefully coexisted ever since she started working at our company about 6 months ago. Occassionally, someone inside the company would incorrectly send emails to her instead of me. The reason they do this is because they use auto complete to type in the address for them automagically and my name comes before hers alphabetically.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, he decided this morning that I needed a new email address. His office didn’t contact me, ask me how I felt, anything like that. I got an email from our IT department asking me what my middle initial was so that they could adjust my address. Of course, several months ago his assistant asked me if it was okay for us to switch addresses. I objected then since I had been using that email address for about 3 years and felt that it was too inconvenient since the problem only seems to be an internal one. Changing email addresses wouldn’t fix an internal problem because they are using their address book auto complete, and not just typing in the wrong address. So, his office already knew that I was oppossed to the idea.

Anyway, so I responded to our IT departments email and made sure that the President’s assistant got my response. I told them that I believed strongly that the problem was caused by people being careless, and not because of my address. I also told them that the change would be rather inconvenient because I couldn’t remember all of the mailing lists I was subscribed to, that it might inconvenience customers, vendors, and other people, but the IT department said their hands were tied.

That wasn’t at all surprising. I just think that it is absurd that my email address of many years hsould have to change because of a perceived problem by the CEO. I have several friends who have had to deal with this problem for over 4 years. I’m willing to bet $1000 that it doesn’t even fix the problem. I’m going to laugh if I get some super confidential email after all this fuss was made over my email address.

The best part of all was that the IT department didn’t even tell me before they made the change. They just did it and it caused my email to go down. I was without email for hours because of this.

Some of you may remember how at the same time I started this site, I also installed the Whisper Aire 2000 whole house fan. In that post I complained about how it was a bit nosier than I expected it to be. Well I’m able to tell you now that the fan is so quiet you wouldn’t even know that it was on.

Well, that could be that it’s just not working. I used it about a month ago without any problem and now it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. I’ve contacted the company but their website doesn’t even list the product anymore. That’s not a good sign. It makes it seem like they’ve had so many problems with this product that they just want to pretend that it never even existed. Or, at the very least, that they had nothing to do with it.

In any event, I am currently cranky about the whole thing. I went up into the attic and made sure there were no visible problems with the wiring and what not. It’s on the same circuit as my internet so it must have power. I even flipped the thing off, waited and flipped it back on to see if maybe some breaker needed to be reset. The thing is still dead.

I had quite the experience with this customer service oriented bank.  I imagine there have been people who have had worse problems with other banks, but this is the worst that has ever happened to me.

Last Wednesday, I deposited a check in the ATM at my local WaMu during business hours.  The check was written out by me, to me, on a different bank account.  I deposited the check into my savings account. As usual, I did not endorse the back of the check (they never have pens at the ATM).

On Friday, I checked my statement online and was able to determine that the check had posted and that my available and ledger balances were as I would have expected.  I then transferred a large sum from savings to my checking account and setup bill payments to be completed that night.  The last time I checked my statement was at 4pm, when I remembered that the address for my mortgage servicer had changed.  Everything looked normal.

On Saturday, I checked my statement to make sure that all my payments went out.  At that point in time, I had a large negative balance in my savings account (and I had no idea why).  This wasn’t cool because I needed to give someone a check on Sunday and I was woried about my account being screwed up.

On Sunday, I went to write my check and looked online and saw that both of my accounts now had a positive balance.  The savings account had a larger balance than I expected, but I didn’t worry about that.  I figured they must have messed up when fixing my account and that I’d just have to deal with it on Tuesday when I had a spare moment.

On Monday, at 4:20pm I discovered that my checking account now had a large negative balance ($1000 more than the negative balance my savings account had on Saturday).  As you can guess, I was absolutely furious.  I talked to my brother, who works at WaMu, and he told me that they have been unusually anal about people not signing the back of a check.

So, even though I had dinner plans and was very short on time, I knew that I had at least one check that would bounce if I didn’t resolve the issue.  I also knew that my insurance company would be debiting the funds for my auto and life insurance this week.

I talked to the teller and told her about the whole situation and she was the most unhelpful person I have ever encountered.  First of all, she said it was my own fault for not signing the back of the check.  I told her that it could not possibly be my fault because as a WaMu customer for 4 years, I have never EVER signed the back of a check, even when I went inside and deposited it with a teller.

That argument got nowhere fast.  She still insisted it was my fault and that the bank couldn’t do anything about that because the branch did not notice that it wasnt endorsed before they sent it off to the clearing house.  So, I changed tact and ask why the bank could not notify me via automated phone call or automated email.  Her response was “We’re just too busy to notify the customer of something like that.”

Now, I’m sure that is not WaMu’s official policy.  But who tells a loyal customer (who has an employee account mind you) that they are just too busy for them?  I could probably write a plugin for their software that provided automatic email notification of a bank issued debit (bounced check, service fees, whatever) in two or three hours. 

But don’t worry, the teller happily informed me that I likely would have gotten something in the mail from them on Wednesday (tomorrow).  Of course, my mail person almost always delivers the mail after 7pm.  That means that, since I am traveling on Friday, I would have had one business day to resolve all of my bank issues.  But, what if I had been on vacation all week? I would have been left without any money, without access to an ATM, or to use my debit card for payment.

Why? Because WaMu wouldn’t cash a check that I wrote to myself and didn’t sign the back of.  I can concede to the fact that they can refuse to honor the check.  However, A) the money should have never been posted to my account, B) the bank should have notified me immediately C) I have had an employee account for 4 years and have direct deposit, the bank could have easily given me the money and then asked me to fix the issue as soon as possible.

I believe that what they did is illegal also.  Not that they debited my savings acount for the amount of the check. But, they also reversed an unrelated transaction (the transfer) in order to make my savings account positive again.  This then caused my checking account to go negative. I believe they could have cleaned out my checking account to try and balance the savings account but reversing a transfer seems to be a bit much to me. 

In either event, they would have saved themselves a loyal and content customer had they handled this in a more reasonable manner.  I have referred many of my friends to Wamu over the years. I’m afraid I can no longer offer that referal.  If I have referred you, I suggest you consider careful whether WaMu is really as grand as they say they are.

My brother still works there, so I have a hard time speaking negatively of the employer that puts food on his table.  But, if they don’t change their behavior with loyal customers, they won’t be able to afford to pay him anyway.

Well, I found out that today Barry Bonds has passed Hank Aaron’s NL home run hitting record.  This isn’t his career record, Bonds hasn’t passed that yet.  He’s still 31 homeruns behind.  But, this has reminded me of the whole Balco scandal, and the fact that Barry Bonds definitely used illegal performance enhancing substances.

It really irritates me that Major League Baseball (MLB) has not stepped up and announced that Barry Bond’s will be ineligible for the record.  It is impossible to know how many seasons, and homeruns, that Barry Bonds used while on performance enhancing drugs.  In fact, I would be surprised if Barry Bonds is not taking performance enhancing drugs now.

So why is baseball allowing him to continue his home run hitting trek?  Are they really going to replace Hank Aaron in the record books with a known cheater?  How is his drug use any better than Pete Rose’s gambling scandal?  It is worse, if you ask me.  Worse because thousands of atheletes throughout the world now feel that they have to use drugs in order to compete with people like Barry.

I intend to write the baseball commissioner and tell him how I feel.  It would be nice if others, who feel the same way, did likewise.  We cannot allow professional sports to ignore the issue.  All sports should behave in the same manner as International Cycling.  I believe that writing your local Congressional representative and letting them know how you feel would be useful also.

Here is the contact information for baseball’s commissioner:

Allan H. (Bud) Selig, Commissioner
245 Park Avenue, 31st Floor
New York, NY 10167
Phone: (212) 931-7800