So. I signed up for a CapitalOne card before traveling to Europe. The main reason being that CapitalOne does not charge a 3% foreign transaction fee like most other credit card companies (like my Citi card). A second bonus was that the CapitalOne card would be interest free until my October statement. That was the wording as I remember it (for some reason I didn't save the terms and conditions on the original offer). In August I called CapitalOne to reverify that the interest rate was 0.0% until my October statement. I was told this was the case. So, planning to make sure there was no chance of accruing interest on any amount I made sure to pay off the entire balance after receiving my September statement.

Well, wasn't I surprised to find that I had an interest charge of $7.49 on my October statement. I was a bit confused by this since I had paid the entire balance of the September statement by the September due date. Apparently with the magical way that CapitalOne runs their numbers my 0.0% interest rate stopped applying at some point while my account still carried a balance. Of course, they don't give you the specific numbers about where the magical Finance Charge comes from. There's a randomly selected number labeled "Balance Rate Applied To:" which despite my best efforts, I couldn't get that number by using the formula described in my fine print (and which the CSR related to me several times). The fact that I could do math was apparently the tipping point in making the charge go away.

After spending about 35 minutes (of which 28 were probably spent on hold for various reasons) on the phone with the first CSR my call was picked up by the supervisor. Before even beginning she tries to make me feel better about being a CapitalOne customer apparently by thanking me for having my account and congratulating me for having a "Platinum" card status (oooOOOooo, I'm all better now, thanks).

I again explained that my 0.0% interest rate was supposed to go up to my October statement. And again she tried to tell me that the Finance Charge I was being assessed somehow came from the day that my full payment went through until the billing cycle ended on October 6. My argument was that if Interest was being charged for those days, then on those days the balance was 0, so..... where does the magical $7.49 come from and why was the interest rate being applied to those days anyways??

Now, having been on the phone for 48 minutes they probably were afraid that I didn't have anything better to be doing with my time (not true, but it was the principle of the matter!) and that I would continue to press the issue until I was given a satisfactory answer about why I was being charged, she gave in. Without further explanation she agreed to reverse the Finance Charge, and then said, "I also notice that we can reduce your Interest Rate from 11.90% APR to 8.90% APR, would you like to do that?" Gee... let me think, I never pay interest, but on the other hand... How many people do they get that refuse the lower interest rate? So I asked to make sure that there were no catches or other changes to my account. She then read the official legal disclosure about what changes would be made, which only amounted to the APR changing, so I agreed.

All said and done, if you were to consider the problem as I having made $7.49 for my time on the phone then I worked for an incredible wage of $9.36 / hr. Good thing I didn't take time off of work to have this argument and that I didn't use my cell phone. I realize it really wasn't worth it monetarily; but, as I said before, it's the principle of the thing.

Not that I would have been terribly annoyed if they had managed to give me a valid reason as to why I was being charged. I did use their card for all of my transactions in Europe, paid no foreign transaction fee, and then paid no interest on the entire amount charged. But, hey, just because I can successfully work their system doesn't mean they get to screw me for no reason.

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Hasn't been much of interest happening, so I haven't written anything. Yesterday I had an Ultimate game with Orem Ultimate. We only had 7 team member show up so we played savage (no subs). The other team had 2 subs. We won, 15-10, but it was very tiring. The weather was nice though, so that was a bonus. All except for the little gnats or whatever they were they would start buzzing around your head every time you stood still for 10 seconds. Better than the week before though, when it was ~39 degrees and snowed for the first half of the game. That game started out rather sad, we started 0-9. Not a single point the entire first half. But then we got our act together and came back with 8 unanswered points and made it 8-9. At one point I think it was tied 10-10. Then we ended up losing 10-15 or 11-15 I don't remember which. But it was COLD.

Other than that, I spent the 7th completely ill. And the rest of that week catching up. Then the 252 students took a test that we need to get graded. As part of that I decided I didn't really want to spend a bunch of time analyzing the Push Down Automata (PDA) that they were required to write out for one of the answers. So I took 6 hours and wrote a Non-Deterministic Finite Automata Simulator and a Push Down Automata Simulator. It was kind of fun to do actually. It was fun to write in Python again after having to deal with Java for my Natural Language Processing class.

So I wrote up and tested the two simulators. Then I wrote a quick piece that would test all pertinent strings up to length 11 and determine whether the machine the students needed to write should accept or reject the strings. Now, all I have to do is transcribe their machines into my simple notation and run the 4096 strings on it. If they pass all 4096 correctly then there is a very high likelihood that their machine is correct. And the more strings they fail the more wrong their machine is. So, while programming the simulator and then transcribing each machine may not end up saving me any time the work will be much less frustrating and tiresome. And I can pass on the simulators to future TAs for them to use in teaching or grading.

So those are the exciting highlights of my last two weeks.

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I needed to read some cd-text from an audio cd today. I was saddened to find that the default audio ripper in Ubuntu does not do this for me automatically (it could be done easily enough though). If you just _want_ the information and don't mind so much that it's not being extracted automatically for you with the fields filled out in the ripper then you can find it by doing a simple "cdda2wav -Q". If you have more than one cd-rom drive, then you'll want "cdda2wav -Q -D /dev/cdrom2" where "/dev/cdrom2" is the cd-rom device you want to access. Unfortunately cdda2wav will not be installed by default, but you can get it with a quick "sudo apt-get install icedax".

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