erudity.net » nerd

USAA makes a saving throw

vic — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:52:24 +0000

On Friday I got in touch with my real estate agent to ensure that everything was as smooth as it could be. He let me know that Ekta, the awesome loan officer, had told him that it was going to be two to three weeks. I was puzzled at this, as Ekta had told both me and Rachel, the title officer, the night before - about 14 hours before, actually - that closing would happen no later than November 30. I asked Bob, the agent, what this meant for the sale - he didn't know, as he had just found out about this himself, but would get in touch with the seller and see what he wanted to do. (More on this later.) I got off the phone with Bob and contacted USAA so that I could let them know about Ekta's extreme unreliability and poor performance. I left a message with her supervisor and drove home after my last class for the day was cancelled.

When I got home Ekta's supervisor Leelee called me back. Having had some time to think over exactly what I was going to say, I remained calm and went over the litany of errors and oversights that had occurred in the handling of my loan - pretty much what was in my last post plus the added stuff from the top of this one. I also added that I had never experienced dissatisfaction like this with USAA before, including my first home loan that I had processed through them. This was really the heart of the matter, as USAA portrays themselves as being there for their members in the armed forces, but here I was, in a very stressful and demanding time, and they had been no better than Bank of America or any other large firm. To her credit, Leelee also stayed calm, and informed me that she had reviewed my file and that I was right - there were several issues in the way that my stuff had been handled; as a result, she was transferring my loan over to her most experienced officer, giving Ekta some remedial training, and would be contacting the VA daily in an effort to expedite the processing of the loan. She also apologized for my experience and hoped that the solutions she'd put forth would help. I agreed that they would, thanked her for her attention and time, and got off the phone with her.

About this time Bob called me back to let me know that the seller had agreed to let me move in before closing, so long as I would pay pro-rated rent in the amount of his mortgage, which seemed reasonable and far easier than rescheduling all the utility hookups, movers, and appliance deliveries I had scheduled, plus it cuts my commute in half.

So all told, USAA came through and the seller was awesome enough to let me move in on my original date. HUZZAH.

03-03-09 Setlist (square root day, woo!)

vic — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:36:05 +0000

Teardrop - Massive Attack
Busted - The Black Keys
Heavy Metal Drummer - Wilco
A Go Go - John Scofield
Metaphor - In Flames
Intoxica - Man or Astro-Man?
King of The Monsters - Man or Astro-Man?
Loud Neighbors - 2 Skinnee J's

Holy crap, "A Go Go" was popular as hell.

An army of NERRRRDS

vic — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:00 +0000

from my buddy via AIM:

hey vic, did you ever do the Duke TIP program?
where you take the SAT in 7th grade
they want to take a sample of my DNA now
i think they want to build a clone army of people who were good at analogies at age 14

New theme

vic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:36:12 +0000

Old theme was getting to be meh. Trying out this one for a while.

CMSs and Usability

vic — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:29:10 +0000

My first blogging experience was on blogger.com in 2000, where I recounted the experiences of that summer. It was pretty easy to use and wrote to a remote site on a server that I had. After that blog fell into disuse, I wrote on a collaborative blog that used WordPress 1.3 and the b2 theme, hosted on a different server, but still one that I owned. We settled on it because it was pretty easy to install and we could see what was going on under the hood, making it easy to muck about with the layout. After a year or so, we upgraded to WP 2.0 in order to use newer and shinier layouts. This proved to be a disaster, with the end result being an 8 hour session to manually move the content from the old database structure to the new one. When that blog went by the wayside, I focused more on my community of friends that use LiveJournal and moved away from blogs that I had to host myself. After an unfortunate blogging incident, I set all of my entries to friends-only. This is all well and good, but part of the genius of the web is the ease with which ideas are shared amongst people - to include total strangers. So when I saw that "erudity.net" was available, I snatched it up with the intent of getting back to my roots, blogging-wise.

I started by installing Textpattern onto a TextDrive account. You'd think that this would be easy, right? Dean Allen explicitly made the service so that people could use TextPattern as their CMS. Of course, in their transition from self-financed to being owned (pwnd?) by Joyent, a good many things seem to have gone awry. After a bit of wrangling, I got TextPattern up and running with the default template - hooray! Now let's get it looking pretty. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really pretty TextPattern templates out there. Which all take a BS in Comp Sci to install. In this day and age there is no reason to have to manually add, edit and delete pages in a CMS setup in order to get a template to work - that's not a template, that's a set of directions for customizing your website. If I wanted to do that, I would have just started from scratch. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what my friend who runs TextPattern recommended.)

So POOF to TextPattern. Call me when you get a usable system for managing design and layout, to say nothing of plugins. I'm now running WordPress again, which is VASTLY improved since I last used it. Now all I have to do is get the dumb "powered by black minimalism" watermark off the top of the layout and I'm set.