Citibank putting ads in my recent transaction list

Look at this lame move by Citibank:

Is nothing sacred? Is Borders that hard up for business that they need to advertise that they have free shipping on orders over $25? Right next to a transaction with Amazon? I have Amazon Prime so I don't really care. Even without Amazon Prime, this deal is no better than what Amazon does.

A month or two ago there was an ad like this for Dell next to a transaction at the Apple Store. Again, not like this ad is going to change my mind.

They also put ads for signing up for electronic statements and enrolling in some annual fee program to get your credit checked. One more reason I'm going to stop using this credit card and just use my USAA card which doesn't pull this kind of crap on me.

Things the US could learn from other countries

Every time I travel internationally, I notice some things that other countries do better than we do that just make sense. Here's a few of them.

Credit cards - Standardized PIN pads

In Australia and New Zealand, all PIN pads have the same layout of buttons and the sequence is always the same. Swipe/insert card, press button for payment type (cheque/savings/credit), then enter PIN or press OK. Additionally, they can use a PIN for credit card transactions which is quite convenient. US credit cards do not support this feature and require a signature.

Cash

Additionally, cash is much easier to deal with in Australia and New Zealand, for several reasons:

1. include sales tax in advertised price - this leads to round number pricing on most items. It is very common for prices to be whole dollar amounts.
2. no pennies - this one is a no brainer. Just round everything off to the nearest 5 cents (or 10 cents in NZ). Because of reason one above, this is often not even necessary.
3. 50 cent pieces and 20 cent pieces - this reduces the number of coins you need to make change for a dollar. In NZ you only need 4 coins max - a 50, two 20s, and a 10. In Australia it's 6 coins - a 50, a 20, two 10s, and two 5s. In the US you need 11 coins - three quarters, a dime, two nickels, and 5 pennies. Almost half the coins in that scenario are pennies. Update: if you remove the constraint that the total be exactly a dollar you can do it with 10 coins: 3 quarters, 2 dimes, a nickel, and 4 pennies. That's $1.04 total.
4. Dollar and two dollar coins - we have dollar coins and two dollar bills in the US but they aren't really used much for some reason. This is silly because we end up having to replace one dollar bills often due to wear. Coins last much longer than bills. Additionally, the two dollar coin allows you to make change for a 5 with just three coins - a one dollar and a pair of twos.
5. 50 dollar bills - when you withdraw cash from an ATM in Australia or New Zealand, some or all of it comes in 50s. Any business will commonly make change for a 50, even for a small transaction. In NZ, you get a mix of 20s and 50s from the ATM. When dealing with $300 it is really nice to have less bills - six/nine instead of 15 in the US.
6. Plastic money - leave it in a pocket and send it through the wash - no worries.
7. Different color for each denomination - we are moving this direction with the new versions of bills but in other countries each bill is fully a different color rather than just green tinted with some accent. Makes it easier to distinguish and sort bills.

Metric system
I can understand the barriers to change on this, but the metric system makes so much more sense. It seems to be intelligently designed rather than random or haphazard iike the Imperial/statute/whatever system that we have.

In addition to making things hard on ourselves dealing with unit conversions, we have to adjust to metric when traveling.

Not to mention our low performance in science education and trade deficits with the rest of the world... I have to think that switching to metric would at least improve our situation.

Cupertino Election 2009

Well, it's November again and that means it's time for another election. This time it is all local to Cupertino. I voted a couple weeks back, as I am a permanent absentee.

Let's go through the various issues:

Measure B

Measure B is an update to the Utility User Tax, which is not supposed to change anything about our current taxes, but simply to define terms to correspond to current usage. In skimming through the proposed changes, the only thing that stood out to me was that VoIP was specifically included as a telecommunications service in this tax, but I guess that is already the case.

Verdict: YES

Measure G

Measure G is an update to an existing $98 per parcel additional property tax assessment which expires in 2011. The changes are to allow this additional tax to increase by 2% per year (or the rate of inflation, whichever is higher), and to no longer have an expiration date.

The argument against this is that this is an unfair tax and that it will go up too quickly. The tax will go up a minimum of about $20 in 10 years. There is an exemption for seniors already in place that is carried over to Measure G.

Personally, I believe that our schools deserve funding, and to have a small tax which keeps up with inflation does not seem unreasonable at all. In fact, I believe it will benefit the property value and the schools to have this funding secured. A few extra dollars a year is not a big deal to me but will make a big difference for our Cupertino schools.

Verdict: YES

Cupertino City Council

There are three open seats for Cupertino City Council, and seven candidates running. This is definitely the toughest decision I had on this election. I watched two debates with all the candidates, and read a lot of campaign mailings and websites.

In the end I decided to vote for Daniel Nguyen, Darcy Paul, and Marty Miller.

Daniel Nguyen is a Cupertino native who went to Cupertino public schools. He brings a different perspective than many other candidates, being the youngest candidate this time around, and I was impressed that he has a facebook page in addition to the usual candidate website.

Darcy Paul impressed me in two ways: 1) he only sent one campaign mailing on a small card (pointing out that this was to reduce environmental impact), and 2) he was the only candidate that in the debates suggested implementing a school bus program. Growing up in Texas and taking school busses for granted through most of my years in school, I am amazed that in one of the top school systems in the Bay Area we don't have bus service. This creates huge traffic problems at our schools when all the parents have to come pick up the kids at the same time. An additional benefit of a bus program would be that parents would not have to adjust their schedules to pick up and drop off kids, except if the kids needed to get to school early or stay late.

Marty Miller has many years of experience on the planning commission. He seems focussed on ensuring our sales tax revenue is increased and that we keep costs in check. Revitalizing Vallco and filling up our empty office and retail space appears to be his top priority, as well as controlling spending.

Verdict: Daniel Nguyen, Darcy Paul, Marty Miller

Cupertino Union School District Board

This one was easy. There are four candidates and you can vote for three of them. Three of the four provided information in the sample ballot and one did not. Also, apparently two of these three are already on the board and one is heavily involved in the PTA.

Verdict: Gary McCue, Ben Liao, Anjali Kausar

Cupertino Sanitary District Director

Again, an easy choice as only two of the four candidates provided any information in the sample ballot packet. These were also the only two candidates which mailed information to me.

Verdict: Don Sun, Steve Andrews

How to set up port mapping for iChat video chatting

Here's how I set up to be able to receive incoming connections for iChat for video chatting (or audio chatting or screen sharing). These instructions should work for a Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme, or AirPort Express.

Step 1 - Set up static IP addresses

The first step is to make sure that all computers on your home network have static IP addresses. The easiest way to do this is to simply have the AirPort Base Station/Time Capsule hand out the same IP address via DHCP each time. You can do this using AirPort Utility. Select your base station and go to Manual Setup. Under Internet -> DHCP -> DHCP Reservations you should add an entry for each computer.

You will need the Ethernet MAC address for each computer, which you can get in System Preferences -> Network. Go to the interface you use to connect (AirPort or Ethernet) and click Advanced... and go to the Ethernet tab. There will be an Ethernet ID listed which is a sequence of numbers and letters A-F with colons. This is what you want.

Copy and paste this into AirPort Utility, or retype it as appropriate. Then assign an IP address which is below your starting DHCP range. In my example, the dynamic range starts at 200, so anything under 200 would be fine. I use 100, 101, etc. for the statically assigned addresses.

Repeat this process for each computer on your home network that you want to use iChat video chatting/audio chatting/screen sharing with.

An alternative to this would be to use the use DHCP with manual IP address option in System Preferences -> Network. This option works best with desktop machines, since laptops may move to different networks and the static IPs you assign will likely not be valid on other AirPort networks.

Step 2 - Set up port forwarding

Now that you have the IP addresses assigned, you can redirect incoming connections to these static IP addresses as appropriate. This is done in AirPort Utility as well, under Advanced -> Port Mapping.

The port range for iChat is UDP ports 16384-16402. Starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, iChat will first try 16402, and then continue with the lower numbered ports down to 16393. Earlier versions of Mac OS X use 16384-16392 as well. If you just have one machine you can map the entire range, but if you have more than one, just assign one port to each and then the remaining ports to the computer that is most likely to be used for chatting. Here are some examples:

As you can see, you can enter both ranges of ports with a dash, or a list of ports with commas, or a combination.

Other routers

For other routers, such as LinkSys, you have to use the web configuration interface (which is usually just the router's IP address). As far as I can tell the standard LinkSys firmware does not support static DHCP reservations, but custom firmwares like HyperThibor do.

Port mapping on the LinkSys is done under Applications & Gaming -> Port Range Forward. It is not as flexible as the AirPort, so you will need one line for each continuous range of ports.