Just a quick note: today is Bike to Work Day! Officially so in the Bay Area, but you can observe it wherever you are. If you're within pedaling distance of your office, give it a spin!
I was impressed by how many people I saw out riding today. It's really fun, and today is a great day to get started. With more cyclists around you're more visible, and there are refreshment stations set up all over where you can grab snacks, drinks, and more information about cycling opportunities.
Fate has struck again, and the weather didn't exactly cooperate this year. It will be the hottest day of the year to date, with San Jose expected to reach a whopping 99 degrees. That said, as long as you ride in the morning and evening, you should be fine, and with a brisk wind and the Bay Area's patented lack of humidity, it ought to be pleasant as well. Just be sure to bring water with you when you ride, and ride safe!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Running on low battery
I rarely use this blog to rant. Generally because there isn't much to rant about. So consider this more of a quiet diatribe.
I've been really disappointed by the way the Android Developer Challenge has unfolded. I don't blame anyone in particular for this... Google is free to run it however they want, and I'm sure all the judges they've tapped have very busy lives without this being added to the list. Still, it's a shame to see what could have been such a great kick-start to the developer community generate so much ill-will.
This whole post is VERY inside-baseball, so if the preceding paragraph doesn't make sense, save yourself and skip the rest.
Any developer will tell you that they've gained something from the challenge, regardless of whether they've won or not. Speaking personally, it has focused and incented me to spend a lot of time learning the APIs, grokking its quirks, and getting valuable experience writing apps that behave well. All of this has made me a better programmer, and possibly helped build a stronger resume. So, in a very grade-school sense, I have "won". (In every other sense, not so much.)
That said, the motivation at the front of people's minds has been to, y'know, really win the contest, meaning a selection as one of the 50 finalists. While I would have downloaded the SDK and played around with it, I probably would not have invested as many hours as I did without the added motivation of the contest.
While the details of the contest have always been a bit hazy, Google clearly established four criteria by which applications would be judged: originality, polish, indispensability, and demonstration of Android features. These were announced early enough that developers wrote their apps with those criteria in mind, focusing on them when making design and implementation decisions.
When the deadline grew closer (after being extended), Google announced more details about how judging would work. There would be about 100 judges, drawn from OHA companies and "industry experts". Each application would be evaluated by four randomly chosen judges. Each judge would give the apps a score of 1-10 on each of the four criteria. The 100 submissions with the highest scores would then go on to a second round of judging, and the 50 of those 100 with the highest scores would be declared the winners.
On its face, this is an excellent system.
The problem is that there seems to have been a great deal of confusion over the meaning of "evaluate." Specifically, developers had assumed that the judges would follow instructions in their documentation, use the app and examine its features. Judges assumed that they needed to launch the app. As the May 5th "deadline" grew closer, more and more developers began to gripe on the official Android Challenge group. Among those who have networked applications and tracked usage, a disturbing number reported seeing judges who did little or no evaluation at all.
At first, a Google team member explained that some of these abortive accesses were probably just "spot checks," designed to see if an application was functional but not an actual evaluation per se. That quieted people for a little while, but as the deadline grew closer and rumors swirled that the 100 semifinalists had been selected, it grew into an outcry.
Speaking personally, this exact thing happened to me. Two judges logged into the application and did nothing. Another two used the app for about two minutes each, never accessing any of the significant features of the app.
It's hard to convey how dispiriting this is. After spending months of work and making sacrifices to pull a product together, learning that people aren't even really looking at it feels profoundly deflating. I think back over all the time I spent fixing bugs, polishing the user interface, thinking carefully through workflows, doing every little thing I could think of to make the app shine just a little bit more. Having all of that go to waste is a pretty awful feeling.
Again, I don't really blame anyone for this. It's Google's contest and Google's money, and they're free to do whatever they want with it.
It's a little hard for me to blame the judges, too. Let's do some math. 1,788 entries were submitted. With each needing four evaluations, that's 7,152 test runs required. Assuming about 100 judges, each one would need to run about 72 applications.
Now: The deadline was April 14th. Google spent some time making sure that they identified all the working submissions, packaged them up, identified the judges, and shipped laptops with the proper software installed. From what people online were seeing, apps didn't start being evaluated until about the 21st. If you believe the rumors, the final 100 were chosen around the 30th. That gives a grand total of 10 calendar days for testing; more realistically, 8 workdays.
Doing more math... each judge would need to test 9 applications every single day. That sounds pretty painful to begin with. Keeping in mind who these people are, though, it's different from having a dedicated QA team testing. These are all people with regular full-time jobs, taking on a volunteer effort that will not bring them any more revenue. All their work will be anonymous, and any glory will attach to Google.
So, while I remain extremely disappointed, I at least understand why, say, someone would blow through 5 submissions over their lunch break, doing a quick Blink-style gut check of how good it is.
And yet, and yet... there's an undeniable wail out there. "But I worked for MONTHS on my application! And you can only spare two minutes?"
Who knows how widespread this is, but between my experiences and those being recounted online, it seems broad.
I doubt we'll ever learn more, but the more the situation deteriorated, the more curious I became about how it actually worked. I would have loved to have seen Google's instructions to the judges; did they say, "If you read the documentation and think it's a bad app, don't bother judging it"? Was there some judges out there who did spend a long amount of time with each app? And, if so, were their marks higher or lower than those who spent very little time? Did people just run out of time and rush their final evalutions? Did Google have any second thoughts about how the contest was being run?
I'm sure I'll never know, but at least it keeps my mind busy.
Wrapping back around to the beginning... it is disappointing that it ended like this. The Challenge was and remains a great idea - it got people excited about Android, established several thousand nascent experts prior to launch, brought in content to help move handsets, and helped keep Android in the public eye after Apple announced their SDK. While the full fallout of this may not be known for a while, I'm guessing some bitter individuals will turn against Android or Google as a whole, will discourage others against competing in the second Challenge, and remove themselves from the gene pool of Android early adopters. Again, it's a shame, because the Challenge was such a great idea, and I can imagine that in the future the powers that be will point to the ADC as a reason not to hold another one.
Oh, and by the way: congratulations to all the winners! I really do look forward to seeing the applications.
UPDATE 5/13/08: Dan Morrill explained the ADC judging process in a blog post today. I think this is a great step towards addressing some of the concerns expressed by members of the Android community. It casts a bit more light on some of the more mysterious aspects of the process, and should reassure contestants that they were not unfairly penalized by the actions of individual judges.
Unfortunately, Google's process can only deal with the data it receives, and without having spied on every judge, the most burning questions will never be answered. The post does a great job of explaining why you shouldn't panic if only three judges reviewed your application; it doesn't give much solace if zero judges did.
Again, this is a learning process for everyone. I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is... as long as judging continues on a volunteer basis, we will need to prepare for rushed or incomplete evaluations.
I've been really disappointed by the way the Android Developer Challenge has unfolded. I don't blame anyone in particular for this... Google is free to run it however they want, and I'm sure all the judges they've tapped have very busy lives without this being added to the list. Still, it's a shame to see what could have been such a great kick-start to the developer community generate so much ill-will.
This whole post is VERY inside-baseball, so if the preceding paragraph doesn't make sense, save yourself and skip the rest.
Any developer will tell you that they've gained something from the challenge, regardless of whether they've won or not. Speaking personally, it has focused and incented me to spend a lot of time learning the APIs, grokking its quirks, and getting valuable experience writing apps that behave well. All of this has made me a better programmer, and possibly helped build a stronger resume. So, in a very grade-school sense, I have "won". (In every other sense, not so much.)
That said, the motivation at the front of people's minds has been to, y'know, really win the contest, meaning a selection as one of the 50 finalists. While I would have downloaded the SDK and played around with it, I probably would not have invested as many hours as I did without the added motivation of the contest.
While the details of the contest have always been a bit hazy, Google clearly established four criteria by which applications would be judged: originality, polish, indispensability, and demonstration of Android features. These were announced early enough that developers wrote their apps with those criteria in mind, focusing on them when making design and implementation decisions.
When the deadline grew closer (after being extended), Google announced more details about how judging would work. There would be about 100 judges, drawn from OHA companies and "industry experts". Each application would be evaluated by four randomly chosen judges. Each judge would give the apps a score of 1-10 on each of the four criteria. The 100 submissions with the highest scores would then go on to a second round of judging, and the 50 of those 100 with the highest scores would be declared the winners.
On its face, this is an excellent system.
The problem is that there seems to have been a great deal of confusion over the meaning of "evaluate." Specifically, developers had assumed that the judges would follow instructions in their documentation, use the app and examine its features. Judges assumed that they needed to launch the app. As the May 5th "deadline" grew closer, more and more developers began to gripe on the official Android Challenge group. Among those who have networked applications and tracked usage, a disturbing number reported seeing judges who did little or no evaluation at all.
At first, a Google team member explained that some of these abortive accesses were probably just "spot checks," designed to see if an application was functional but not an actual evaluation per se. That quieted people for a little while, but as the deadline grew closer and rumors swirled that the 100 semifinalists had been selected, it grew into an outcry.
Speaking personally, this exact thing happened to me. Two judges logged into the application and did nothing. Another two used the app for about two minutes each, never accessing any of the significant features of the app.
It's hard to convey how dispiriting this is. After spending months of work and making sacrifices to pull a product together, learning that people aren't even really looking at it feels profoundly deflating. I think back over all the time I spent fixing bugs, polishing the user interface, thinking carefully through workflows, doing every little thing I could think of to make the app shine just a little bit more. Having all of that go to waste is a pretty awful feeling.
Again, I don't really blame anyone for this. It's Google's contest and Google's money, and they're free to do whatever they want with it.
It's a little hard for me to blame the judges, too. Let's do some math. 1,788 entries were submitted. With each needing four evaluations, that's 7,152 test runs required. Assuming about 100 judges, each one would need to run about 72 applications.
Now: The deadline was April 14th. Google spent some time making sure that they identified all the working submissions, packaged them up, identified the judges, and shipped laptops with the proper software installed. From what people online were seeing, apps didn't start being evaluated until about the 21st. If you believe the rumors, the final 100 were chosen around the 30th. That gives a grand total of 10 calendar days for testing; more realistically, 8 workdays.
Doing more math... each judge would need to test 9 applications every single day. That sounds pretty painful to begin with. Keeping in mind who these people are, though, it's different from having a dedicated QA team testing. These are all people with regular full-time jobs, taking on a volunteer effort that will not bring them any more revenue. All their work will be anonymous, and any glory will attach to Google.
So, while I remain extremely disappointed, I at least understand why, say, someone would blow through 5 submissions over their lunch break, doing a quick Blink-style gut check of how good it is.
And yet, and yet... there's an undeniable wail out there. "But I worked for MONTHS on my application! And you can only spare two minutes?"
Who knows how widespread this is, but between my experiences and those being recounted online, it seems broad.
I doubt we'll ever learn more, but the more the situation deteriorated, the more curious I became about how it actually worked. I would have loved to have seen Google's instructions to the judges; did they say, "If you read the documentation and think it's a bad app, don't bother judging it"? Was there some judges out there who did spend a long amount of time with each app? And, if so, were their marks higher or lower than those who spent very little time? Did people just run out of time and rush their final evalutions? Did Google have any second thoughts about how the contest was being run?
I'm sure I'll never know, but at least it keeps my mind busy.
Wrapping back around to the beginning... it is disappointing that it ended like this. The Challenge was and remains a great idea - it got people excited about Android, established several thousand nascent experts prior to launch, brought in content to help move handsets, and helped keep Android in the public eye after Apple announced their SDK. While the full fallout of this may not be known for a while, I'm guessing some bitter individuals will turn against Android or Google as a whole, will discourage others against competing in the second Challenge, and remove themselves from the gene pool of Android early adopters. Again, it's a shame, because the Challenge was such a great idea, and I can imagine that in the future the powers that be will point to the ADC as a reason not to hold another one.
Oh, and by the way: congratulations to all the winners! I really do look forward to seeing the applications.
UPDATE 5/13/08: Dan Morrill explained the ADC judging process in a blog post today. I think this is a great step towards addressing some of the concerns expressed by members of the Android community. It casts a bit more light on some of the more mysterious aspects of the process, and should reassure contestants that they were not unfairly penalized by the actions of individual judges.
Unfortunately, Google's process can only deal with the data it receives, and without having spied on every judge, the most burning questions will never be answered. The post does a great job of explaining why you shouldn't panic if only three judges reviewed your application; it doesn't give much solace if zero judges did.
Again, this is a learning process for everyone. I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is... as long as judging continues on a volunteer basis, we will need to prepare for rushed or incomplete evaluations.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Oblivious
Ahhh, working on Saturday. Yes, I remember what this feels like...
Coming up for air - I wanted to share a few thoughts on Oblivion. Expect a more comprehensive review when I beat the game... possibly sometime in 2009.
Wow, this game is gorgeous. I don't have an amazing graphics card - just an nvidia 8600 GT - but it still looks lovely. Not just lovely in the terms of well-done graphics; lovely in that it's something I want to look at. This is in stark contrast to Morrowind, which also ran great on my computer at the time, but where much of the world looked ugly.
There are exceptions to the visual appeal, though. The biggest that I can think of is faces... virtually everyone you meet in Tamriel is somewhere between plain and hideous. I suppose it's nice to not have everyone in a game look beautiful, but it does feel particularly ugly.
My character in this game is similar to the one I played in Morrowind: primarily a thief character with some magic skills (in this case Illusion and Mysticism) and Speechcraft. It's a fun character, but the game's leveling system is kicking my rear. I spent the first part of the game sneaking around, breaking into houses, stealing stuff, running errands, and generally having fun. It's a strategy I enjoy - I generally don't like combat, so I like focusing on more stealth-oriented activities. However, Oblivion is an interesting game in that the enemies you meet are "leveled". When entering a ruined temple at level 1, you might meet a skeleton. Entering that same temple at level 5 may present a zombie. Go back at level 10 and you'll face a powerful ghost; I assume that at even higher levels you would be staring down a lich or something similar.
I get what Bethesda is doing here. They want to keep the game challenging, making sure that wherever you are and how powerful your character is, the fighting is still interesting but winnable. The problem is that for a lot of players like myself, one's level does not reflect their combat abilities. I may be a master thief, but I am a novice at using most weapons, and so I can't face some of these creatures. Often times you need to defeat monsters to complete a quest, as opposed to being able to sneak around them or find other solutions. Needless to say this can be very frustrating.
The situation is better now, but only because I've purposely stopped leveling. In Oblivion as with Morrowind, you need to sleep in a bed to gain a level; my character has now gone for over a month without any sleep. Because of this I've been able to gradually build up his Marskman, Light Armor and Blade skills, while at the same time keeping my level at 11 and so not facing harder opponents. As a result I now can finally, generally, hold my own in a one-on-one fight. Still, I'd rather just be able to play the game and level normally, without worrying about it becoming unplayable.
On the bright side, there is a mod to fix this situation. Actually, there are several mods. Actually, there is a huge modding community that has offerings that tweak any aspect of the game you can imagine. This is a big part of why I deliberately waited for over two years before starting the game: I knew that the Elder Scrolls had a great community, and their offerings would only get better with time. I've installed a few small mods that help with specific annoyances, and have been pleased at the results. Changes to the leveling system are far more sweeping, so I'm holding off on that for now. Ideally I would have installed one before starting the game; now that I'm dozens of hours into it, I'm being careful not to mess anything up or upset the balance.
Speaking of messing things up: I started playing the game in Vista, and now am actually running it in Ubuntu. I have to say, I'm very impressed with how the Wine project has come along. The last time I seriously tried to use it a few years ago, it would work with specific titles, but even then you would need to jump through hoops and be left with a game missing some features. It's still more complicated than installing in Windows, but an order of magnitude less complicated than it was before, thanks in large part to some very well-written wikis out there. It took less than an hour for me to get everything installed and running.
And what did I find? Not only does Linux rule: Vista really does suck! The game actually runs BETTER in Ubuntu than Vista, which startled me. For example: I did not realize until playing in Linux that there was speech in the game. In Windows, I heard sound effects, and could read what characters said, but for some reason, the actual speech never ever played. (This actually ticks me off, since it means that I missed 90% of the Patrick Stewart voice-overs.) There are other individual sounds that didn't play for me: doors opening and lockpicking are two I can think of. Anyways, that was a really pleasant surprise. The one thing I had to give up was water animations, which is a shame - the water in Vista looked wonderful - but it's a small price to pay for better performance.
I haven't picked up Knights of the Nine or Shivering Isles yet. Not sure yet whether or not to install them before beating the main quest... you can tackle them in either order.
There seem to be fewer factions this time around than in the prequel... either that or I just haven't found them all. In Morrowind, I think I belonged to around 10 factions by the end of the game, including religious orders and the Imperial army. Right now I'm just in four: the standard three guilds (Fighters, Mages, and Thieves) plus the Blades. Ah well... even if there aren't many factions in the game, I'm confident there are mods out there to add more.
Oh, the best thing about the game so far? Fast travel. This was by far my biggest annoyance in Morrowind: it took FOREVER to get most places, since you had this enormous map and only a finite number of places to which you could travel. Oblivion has an entirely rational system in place: after you visit an interesting location, it appears on your map, and after it is on your map, you can just click on it to travel there. Poof! It isn't magic... if the location is on the other side of the country, it will take you days to appear there, but that's fine. The game simulates you walking (or riding) that whole distance so you don't need to do it yourself. So I really like this new system... it keeps things balanced and challenging, since you need to travel to a place first before you can fast-travel, but it cuts the repetitiveness way down.
One minor related annoyance: there is no equivalent of Recall, Almislvi (sp?) Intervention, or Divine Intervention. These were incredibly useful spells in Morrowind that let you warp instantly out of any place. It saved my skin in some situations when I was deep in a lair and couldn't face a powerful opponent. Fast travel in Oblivion is much more flexible (and cheaper) than these spells, but it is also very limited: you can't use it inside caves, castles, when underwater, when enemies are around, when trespassing, etc. Again, it does sort of make sense - being able to escape anytime is arguably quite unbalanced, especially if you can heal/repair/upgrade and then fast travel right back to where you were - but I still miss it. A nice compromise would be the ability to, say, immediately leave a dungeon after you've fought your way down five levels, killed every monster in there and taken all the treasure. Spending five minutes running back to the entrance is not my idea of a fun game.
Oh, there's plenty more that I could write, but that would cut into valuable time that I could be spending playing this game. Expect plenty more in a future post!
Coming up for air - I wanted to share a few thoughts on Oblivion. Expect a more comprehensive review when I beat the game... possibly sometime in 2009.
Wow, this game is gorgeous. I don't have an amazing graphics card - just an nvidia 8600 GT - but it still looks lovely. Not just lovely in the terms of well-done graphics; lovely in that it's something I want to look at. This is in stark contrast to Morrowind, which also ran great on my computer at the time, but where much of the world looked ugly.
There are exceptions to the visual appeal, though. The biggest that I can think of is faces... virtually everyone you meet in Tamriel is somewhere between plain and hideous. I suppose it's nice to not have everyone in a game look beautiful, but it does feel particularly ugly.
My character in this game is similar to the one I played in Morrowind: primarily a thief character with some magic skills (in this case Illusion and Mysticism) and Speechcraft. It's a fun character, but the game's leveling system is kicking my rear. I spent the first part of the game sneaking around, breaking into houses, stealing stuff, running errands, and generally having fun. It's a strategy I enjoy - I generally don't like combat, so I like focusing on more stealth-oriented activities. However, Oblivion is an interesting game in that the enemies you meet are "leveled". When entering a ruined temple at level 1, you might meet a skeleton. Entering that same temple at level 5 may present a zombie. Go back at level 10 and you'll face a powerful ghost; I assume that at even higher levels you would be staring down a lich or something similar.
I get what Bethesda is doing here. They want to keep the game challenging, making sure that wherever you are and how powerful your character is, the fighting is still interesting but winnable. The problem is that for a lot of players like myself, one's level does not reflect their combat abilities. I may be a master thief, but I am a novice at using most weapons, and so I can't face some of these creatures. Often times you need to defeat monsters to complete a quest, as opposed to being able to sneak around them or find other solutions. Needless to say this can be very frustrating.
The situation is better now, but only because I've purposely stopped leveling. In Oblivion as with Morrowind, you need to sleep in a bed to gain a level; my character has now gone for over a month without any sleep. Because of this I've been able to gradually build up his Marskman, Light Armor and Blade skills, while at the same time keeping my level at 11 and so not facing harder opponents. As a result I now can finally, generally, hold my own in a one-on-one fight. Still, I'd rather just be able to play the game and level normally, without worrying about it becoming unplayable.
On the bright side, there is a mod to fix this situation. Actually, there are several mods. Actually, there is a huge modding community that has offerings that tweak any aspect of the game you can imagine. This is a big part of why I deliberately waited for over two years before starting the game: I knew that the Elder Scrolls had a great community, and their offerings would only get better with time. I've installed a few small mods that help with specific annoyances, and have been pleased at the results. Changes to the leveling system are far more sweeping, so I'm holding off on that for now. Ideally I would have installed one before starting the game; now that I'm dozens of hours into it, I'm being careful not to mess anything up or upset the balance.
Speaking of messing things up: I started playing the game in Vista, and now am actually running it in Ubuntu. I have to say, I'm very impressed with how the Wine project has come along. The last time I seriously tried to use it a few years ago, it would work with specific titles, but even then you would need to jump through hoops and be left with a game missing some features. It's still more complicated than installing in Windows, but an order of magnitude less complicated than it was before, thanks in large part to some very well-written wikis out there. It took less than an hour for me to get everything installed and running.
And what did I find? Not only does Linux rule: Vista really does suck! The game actually runs BETTER in Ubuntu than Vista, which startled me. For example: I did not realize until playing in Linux that there was speech in the game. In Windows, I heard sound effects, and could read what characters said, but for some reason, the actual speech never ever played. (This actually ticks me off, since it means that I missed 90% of the Patrick Stewart voice-overs.) There are other individual sounds that didn't play for me: doors opening and lockpicking are two I can think of. Anyways, that was a really pleasant surprise. The one thing I had to give up was water animations, which is a shame - the water in Vista looked wonderful - but it's a small price to pay for better performance.
I haven't picked up Knights of the Nine or Shivering Isles yet. Not sure yet whether or not to install them before beating the main quest... you can tackle them in either order.
There seem to be fewer factions this time around than in the prequel... either that or I just haven't found them all. In Morrowind, I think I belonged to around 10 factions by the end of the game, including religious orders and the Imperial army. Right now I'm just in four: the standard three guilds (Fighters, Mages, and Thieves) plus the Blades. Ah well... even if there aren't many factions in the game, I'm confident there are mods out there to add more.
Oh, the best thing about the game so far? Fast travel. This was by far my biggest annoyance in Morrowind: it took FOREVER to get most places, since you had this enormous map and only a finite number of places to which you could travel. Oblivion has an entirely rational system in place: after you visit an interesting location, it appears on your map, and after it is on your map, you can just click on it to travel there. Poof! It isn't magic... if the location is on the other side of the country, it will take you days to appear there, but that's fine. The game simulates you walking (or riding) that whole distance so you don't need to do it yourself. So I really like this new system... it keeps things balanced and challenging, since you need to travel to a place first before you can fast-travel, but it cuts the repetitiveness way down.
One minor related annoyance: there is no equivalent of Recall, Almislvi (sp?) Intervention, or Divine Intervention. These were incredibly useful spells in Morrowind that let you warp instantly out of any place. It saved my skin in some situations when I was deep in a lair and couldn't face a powerful opponent. Fast travel in Oblivion is much more flexible (and cheaper) than these spells, but it is also very limited: you can't use it inside caves, castles, when underwater, when enemies are around, when trespassing, etc. Again, it does sort of make sense - being able to escape anytime is arguably quite unbalanced, especially if you can heal/repair/upgrade and then fast travel right back to where you were - but I still miss it. A nice compromise would be the ability to, say, immediately leave a dungeon after you've fought your way down five levels, killed every monster in there and taken all the treasure. Spending five minutes running back to the entrance is not my idea of a fun game.
Oh, there's plenty more that I could write, but that would cut into valuable time that I could be spending playing this game. Expect plenty more in a future post!
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Cash Money, Yo
When I think of my financial situation, I have a weird picture in my head: that of a six-year-old boy, cheerfully tugging a wagon behind him. More and more stuff gets piled on that wagon the further I go. I tend not to think about it much, but every once in a while I switch to another wagon that looks like it will do a better job at hauling my stuff around.
This past month, I switched to yet another wagon. I am now in the process of taking things off of Grand Yield Direct and loading them onto Capital One Online Savings. Why the switch? As with Grand Yield Direct, it came down to interest rate. Especially with rates so low rate now (thanks a lot, Federal Reserve! Grr...), even one point can mean a big difference in the interest earned.
I tend to hit up bankrate.com every few months to check out their comparison of savings account rates. If my current account is just a bit below the maximum, I'll keep put - these things tend to fluctuate a fair amount anyways, plus I don't want to miss out on getting interest in the days when my money is flowing from one account to another. In this case, though, I could go from 3.0 to 3.75%, which seemed big enough to be meaningful.
How did I select Capital One? There are a few standard things I look at:
Speaking of which, my other hesitation is that this may turn out to be a prolonged teaser rate. Generally speaking, smaller banks offer better rates than larger ones since they don't have the same overhead costs. Because of this, I'll probably be checking rates every month instead of every three months, just to be sure that it still makes sense to keep my money there.
The whole thing is kind of surreal. Browsing the web, clicking on buttons, and somehow trusting that large sums of money are being transferred from one bank to another and that I'll be able to get at it when I need it. It's been working so far; let's hope the trend continues!
This past month, I switched to yet another wagon. I am now in the process of taking things off of Grand Yield Direct and loading them onto Capital One Online Savings. Why the switch? As with Grand Yield Direct, it came down to interest rate. Especially with rates so low rate now (thanks a lot, Federal Reserve! Grr...), even one point can mean a big difference in the interest earned.
I tend to hit up bankrate.com every few months to check out their comparison of savings account rates. If my current account is just a bit below the maximum, I'll keep put - these things tend to fluctuate a fair amount anyways, plus I don't want to miss out on getting interest in the days when my money is flowing from one account to another. In this case, though, I could go from 3.0 to 3.75%, which seemed big enough to be meaningful.
How did I select Capital One? There are a few standard things I look at:
- Fees. Or more precisely, the lack thereof. I will never sign up for any account that charges fees.
- Minimum balances. See above. It's okay if they have a minimum balance to open, but the whole point of a savings account is to have money available, and so I avoid minimum balances like the plague.
- FDIC insurance. This is pretty standard with online accounts, but I still check to make sure they have it.
- Reputation. Bankrate helpfully rates banks on a scale from zero to five stars. I'm generally looking for four stars. As long as it's FDIC insured, this is not critical, but still, I'm looking to avoid a hassle and keep my funds available. Because of this, I did NOT sign up with Countrywide, even though they have the highest rate.
- It has a tiered interest rate structure. To get the top rate I'll need to keep a lot of money in there, and the rate goes down if I withdraw too much. But even the lower rate matches what I currently earn in Grand Yield Direct.
- I have a credit card from Capital One, so I'm already familiar with the institution.
- It's technically a money market and not a savings account. I prefer savings accounts, but the terms of their MMA are pretty good, and again, as long as it's FDIC insured, I don't much care.
- When I tried to sign up online, I got most of the way through the process before hitting an error screen. No changes I made could make it work.
- So I had to call them to finish setting up the account, which defeats a lot of the purpose of online banking. The woman I spoke with was very pleasant and efficient, which is nice. Once again, the financial sector has the best customer service out of anyone.
- Because their servers were having problems, my setup got messed up, so I had to manually copy down and re-enter various numbers to get things working.
- Weirdly, you can't finish signing up for the account online. Unlike ING and Grand Yield Direct, you do 90% of it online, but then they mail you a physical letter which you need to sign and send back to them. This just seems odd, a very 20th-century way of doing business.
- Worst of all, when they sent an email describing how to link to an external account, the instructions were just WRONG. It referred to screens and links that just don't exist. I had to contact their customer service, who, to their credit, did give the right instructions. Still, it seems bizarre that a major national bank like this would get something so wrong, especially since it keeps people from making deposits.
Speaking of which, my other hesitation is that this may turn out to be a prolonged teaser rate. Generally speaking, smaller banks offer better rates than larger ones since they don't have the same overhead costs. Because of this, I'll probably be checking rates every month instead of every three months, just to be sure that it still makes sense to keep my money there.
The whole thing is kind of surreal. Browsing the web, clicking on buttons, and somehow trusting that large sums of money are being transferred from one bank to another and that I'll be able to get at it when I need it. It's been working so far; let's hope the trend continues!
Friday, April 18, 2008
Random bits
I thought this line from a recent New Yorker article was phenomenal:
"[The Founding Fathers] approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it."
Isn't that fantastic? You could teach a seminar on that sentence.
Other news:
After a depressing series of flat tires, I've switched over to a new model called Armadillo. They seem to be working really well so far... it's only been a few days so I can't generalize yet, but I've been pleased with their performance. Impressively, they don't seem to noticeably slow me down either, so it's an improvement all around.
I recently started playing Oblivion. I expect to become even more solitary as I spend the next few months obsessing over the amazing breadth of stuff to do in this game. One bright side: If I'm lucky, this obsession will allow me to resist the siren song of GTA IV, dropping at the end of the month. I want this game very badly. But getting GTA IV means getting a PS3. Getting a PS3 will strongly tempt me to upgrade to HDTV. Maybe it's worth geeking out on an RPG if it means another grand or two staying in my wallet.
Google just announced that they received 1788 submissions to the ADC. Very crudely speaking, if they were to pick the 50 winners at random, each entry would have a 2.8% chance of winning, or about 1 in 36. I'd love to see a graph of the scores they give to the entries. I get the feeling it will be a hard-core bell curve. I know some people entered calculator applications or similar things that are unlikely to make a splash; on the other extreme, you have some companies putting in really original and high-quality apps with man-months of work in them. I suspect that the massive middle will consist of independent developers submitting innovative but unpolished apps.
Man, the weather has been gorgeous out here lately. I know, it's always beautiful in northern California, but spring is a special kind of beautiful. Last weekend I went hiking in Santa Teresa Park and saw more flowers than I have on any previous Bay Area hike.
That's it for now. Peace out!
"[The Founding Fathers] approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it."
Isn't that fantastic? You could teach a seminar on that sentence.
Other news:
After a depressing series of flat tires, I've switched over to a new model called Armadillo. They seem to be working really well so far... it's only been a few days so I can't generalize yet, but I've been pleased with their performance. Impressively, they don't seem to noticeably slow me down either, so it's an improvement all around.
I recently started playing Oblivion. I expect to become even more solitary as I spend the next few months obsessing over the amazing breadth of stuff to do in this game. One bright side: If I'm lucky, this obsession will allow me to resist the siren song of GTA IV, dropping at the end of the month. I want this game very badly. But getting GTA IV means getting a PS3. Getting a PS3 will strongly tempt me to upgrade to HDTV. Maybe it's worth geeking out on an RPG if it means another grand or two staying in my wallet.
Google just announced that they received 1788 submissions to the ADC. Very crudely speaking, if they were to pick the 50 winners at random, each entry would have a 2.8% chance of winning, or about 1 in 36. I'd love to see a graph of the scores they give to the entries. I get the feeling it will be a hard-core bell curve. I know some people entered calculator applications or similar things that are unlikely to make a splash; on the other extreme, you have some companies putting in really original and high-quality apps with man-months of work in them. I suspect that the massive middle will consist of independent developers submitting innovative but unpolished apps.
Man, the weather has been gorgeous out here lately. I know, it's always beautiful in northern California, but spring is a special kind of beautiful. Last weekend I went hiking in Santa Teresa Park and saw more flowers than I have on any previous Bay Area hike.
That's it for now. Peace out!
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