Category Archives: Ramblings

Ramblings& musings, related and relevant… or not.

Simple personalization would save bank cash

February 21, 2006 pmh

ThePortableConsultant’s bank has just altered his service plan to get rid of returned paper cheques. Such progress!

For a $2 fee, however, they will send the cheque images, unless you have premium service in which case there is no fee.

This is clearly spelled out on the statement. You can phone their call centre to ask for this service or select the cheque image service in your online profile.

However, if you go to set the online profile you’re told there is a $2 fee. The page where you select the option is not personalized and there is no mention that with the premium plan there would be no charge.

Although any consultant would know that the bank would eventually straighten out any billing errors, this Portable Consultant chose to use the call centre instead. This is a cost that the bank could have avoided if they had simply personalized the option selection page OR if they had reiterated on the page that premium plans would not be charged the fee.

Thousands of other customers must have seen that charge and phoned the call centre for an explanation. Since this consultant was told the call was being recorded it’s possible, though not probable I suppose, that the issue will be noted.

This is particularly ironic because the Portable Consultant in question had once applied for a position managing this particular bank’s online services’ CMS team. 🙂

-pmh at ThePortableConsultant.com

Emerging, Ramblings

Seagate’s Upstanding Momentus Gets Perpendicular

January 18, 2006 pmh

Now that we have your attention… 😉

Todd Cochrane’s Jan 17th Geek News Central Podcast pointed me to Gizmondo which pointed me to Seagate’s application of perpendicular recording technology that yields 10x the recording capacity of those lazy horizontal bits.

Now, I was recently reading up on direct to edit systems used for recording DV to hard disk rather than tape (to shorten post-production times). As it turns out these systems are expensive as well as conveniently small.

Anyway, I followed these pointers to see what the future has in store for my future video and audio recording devices expecting the usual grey engineering specs… but instead found a very fun “explanation” of the underlying technology (thanks to a comment from ‘Rick’).

The point of this post is not to point you to the engineering, but to show you that even magnetic bits can have talent! Turn up your speakers to this little dance number from Hitachi and “Inspire the Next“!.

–pmh

Ramblings