Brandon Live!

I meant to post something here before I left… oops!  Anyway, we all made it here safe and sound and so far things are going great.  Uganda is beautiful, the people are amazing, and the team I’m with is just great.  I was a little nervous about being the only non-religious team member, but it hasn’t been a problem at all and I don’t think it will be.  Anyway, that’s a topic for another time… I just wanted to post something here to refer you over to the team blog:

http://trip.WeHaveHope.org

We’re trying to have someone update it every day (we were thwarted last night by a database problem, but BlueHost took care of it quickly).  If you want to track our experiences, or learn more about the trip, go read up there! 

I’ll be home on September 7th.  Until then…

Today comes the first Start++ update since May.  Long overdue, perhaps - but I hope worth the wait :)  As I teased earlier, a major new feature available in 0.7 is the ability to turn many iPhone web apps into Start Gadgets.  There are more examples on the Start++ home page.  But here’s another:

Just like previous Start++ customizations, these can be exported and shared on BrandonTools.com - in fact, I’ve already created a place to share them with others (and you can subscribe via RSS to see when new ones are added!).  Setting one up isn’t too difficult if you’re familiar with how these kinds of web apps work.  Below is what the gadget building UI looks like:

(Click to enlarge)

Note that Start++ is still in beta, and that the capabilities of Start++ Start Gadgets will continue to grow.

So what are you waiting for?  Go grab the download.

I just sent the following message to BoA customer service, since they don’t allow direct e-mail or have a “reply” function on the astoundingly unhelpful messages they send to me. 

This is unacceptable.  To review my experience so far, visit: http://brandonlive.com/2007/08/16/boa-is-pissing-me-off/

I just received a response to my last message stating that:

“Please be advised, Online Banking only allows access to Bank of America
accounts located in the same state as your checking account. As a result, we
are unable to add your account ending in -xxxx to Online Banking.”

My checking account has always been in Washington.  My credit account has always been in Washington.  I live and work in Washington, nowhere else.  It’s been two weeks since this issue arose and it is still not fixed.  Please fix this today, or I will have to find a bank with competent customer service.

Update:  It’s out.

I’ve been mostly happy with Bank of America for the two years or so that I’ve been a customer.  That’s quickly changing. 

I just tried to send the following message using their Online Banking customer service e-mail function:

This is my third message on this subject, and I’m quite disappointed at the customer service I’ve experienced thus far.

My personal credit card through BoA has been set up with my online banking account since I got it.  It expired at the end of this month, and so a new card was automatically issued to me.  However, the account disappeared from my online banking profile when that happened.  At that time, I requested that all available accounts be added to my profile, but that did not happen.  Instead I received an automatic message stating that an account number which was not mine could not be added to the account.  Great.

If I try to enter the new credit card number into the Add/Remove Account box, I am given a message that says the card is an MBNA card and that I must go to an MBNA website to access the account.  Upon going to that website, I am told that it is no longer available and that I should come back to this one.  If this were a temporary situation during a merger/acquisition or if I had ever been an MBNA account holder, this might be an understandable error.  However, that is not the case - and this user experience is alarming (and frankly, unacceptable) coming from a company like BoA.

I sent a second message explaining this situation, to which I have received no response at all.  After about a week, I decided I would call the customer service number given in one of the automated replies I received before.  After waiting on hold a considerable length of time, a helpful customer service rep said she would be able to take care of it, but when she made the change to “combine the accounts into the same profile” it had no effect on my online banking account. 

She then said that I would have to be transferred to the Washington State online banking department and that they would be able to help me.  I asked if I would have to talk to them and explain the situation again, and she said yes.  Personally, this bothers me - as I don’t think customers should have to contact multiple customer service departments and explain both their situation and what a prior rep told them.  The support personnel should be able to handle that work by themselves, and simply call the customer back when the issue has been resolved.

I didn’t bother her with that complaint though, and simply asked to be transferred so that I could get my online banking account fixed and make my payment.  After she transferred me and I had selected the menu option for online banking issues, the call disconnected with an entirely unhelpful error message in the voice-controlled menu system (something like “An error has occurred, please call back and try again”).  Needless to say, this is quite frustrating when you don’t know the number to which you were transferred.

Instead of trying to find it and navigate more customer service menus and departments, and waste another hour explaining my situation so far… I am sending this e-mail. 

If I don’t receive a productive response by tomorrow, I’m going to start looking for a new bank.

Thank you,
Brandon

After submitting it, I was told that it is too long and messages must be 3510 characters or fewer.  I pasted the message into Word, and it says the message is 3,052 characters with spaces.

WTF BoA

Less than three weeks remain until I depart for Uganda!  I finally got our team’s official blog set up a couple nights ago, and you should see posts from the whole team popping up very soon.  I’ll be making more posts there (and here) about the trip as it gets closer, and while we’re there you’ll be able to track our progress and experiences via the official blog (hopefully I’ll make it into the town with internet access every few days). 

Where I’ll be:  Our team will be based in the village of Mafubira, a few miles from the town of Jinja, in Southeastern Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria and the Nile River.

What I’ll be doing:  Of the three teams we’re splitting into, mine will be focused on researching sustainable income projects for STAO and the village.  I will also be undertaking an effort to provide technology assistance for STAO and the school (which will be especially interesting since my understanding is that there isn’t yet a real “school” in the traditional sense, ie. with a building or even a classroom to speak of).

How can you help?  

1. Donate money.  Donating to our project budget will greatly help most all of our efforts, including HIV testing for the kids, immunizations, construction of additional orphanage housing, school supplies, and more.  Please donate through this link so that your contribution is allocated appropriately to the trip budget.  All donations go to Tusubira (a registered 501(c)3) and are tax deductible.  Some employers, like Microsoft, will even match your donation!
2. Donate supplies.  We are limited by the airline in what we can carry with us, but believe me that we are going to squeeze as much into our bags/boxes as we can!  Specifically, my efforts could really make use of any working laptop computers (they don’t have to be particularly modern to be useful) that we can use for the lab I’m going to set up.  I also will need some local networking equipment (switches, cabling, etc), USB flash memory devices, and laptop locks for securing them to tables/desks/etc.
3. Subscribe to our blog
4. Tell others about our cause.
5. Keep our team in your thoughts and prayers during our journey.

It might not contain new “features” per se, and Apple certainly didn’t make much hoopla about the release (as far as I know, there’s still no official changelist apart from the security fixes).  But I’m incredibly happy with it.

What’s great about this update is that it fixes every issue that I wanted them to fix (in terms of bugs, not features like EAS support which it still needs).  Here are the major ones for me:

1. Bluetooth to my car no longer drops out if it’s not plugged into power.  From what I read on forums this seemed like a specific interaction between the iPhone and Audi’s handsfree system.  Because of that I was afraid it wouldn’t get fixed.  But it was!
2. IMAP folder support works now.  Previously I could only sync my “inbox” folder.  At one point I managed to get the IMAP Path Prefix thing to work and could see my folders for about a day, but then the mail app started crashing whenever I tried to run it, and I had to reset the account.  Now it just works - no fancy configuration steps needed, the other folders just magically started showing up after the update.
3. Album view UI bugs are gone.  It used to be that if you went into Album view, selected a specific album, and then hit the “home” button, when you went back to the iPod app you would still be in Album view inside the album you’d selected, but without a “back” button to get back to the main Album list.  Also, hitting “Album” again at the bottom had no effect at all.  So you had to switch to another mode like Artist and then back, if you wanted to change albums.  Now it’s doubly fixed - because not only does the “back” button show up as it should - but tapping “Album” at the bottom also takes you back to the top level view.  Sweet.

 I’m really glad they were able to fix these things so quickly, as well as the security vulnerabilities reported.  When the patch was first announced, it sounded like that was all they’d addresses.  I was extremely happy, then, to find these other issues fixed - and fixed well.

My previous phones (BlackJack, PPC-6700, PPC-6600, Treo 600) all had issues and quirks that were never fixed.  Thus, I was actually prepared to live with the above annoyances because that’s what I was used to doing.

To the iPhone developers / PMs / QA people - thank you for working so quickly to address these real customer issues and not putting them off because individually they only affected a small subset of users.  My impression of Apple (a company I quite honestly disliked a great deal until a year or two ago) just keeps getting better.  I can only hope that competitors (in the form of Microsoft, Samsung, HTC / UTStarcom, Palm, Motorola, etc) take note.