April 2008

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Mountains of Nevada

April 14, 2008 in Photo | No comments




DSC_0375

Originally uploaded by zacharyc

For those of you who I haven’t told personally yet (or haven’t seen me update my facebook profile), I have moved across country. I moved from New York City to Menlo Park, CA. This is just one of a few pictures I’ve posted from my trip across country. This was picture was taken of the mountains of Nevada in the morning on my last day of a week long drive.

This was the first time I had ever driven across country, and I have to say it was quite an experience. I’d recommend everyone give it a try at least once (though not by yourself in a Penske truck in the middle of the winter).

Cheer Resource Intro

April 14, 2008 in Cheer Resource, Programming | No comments

Cheer Resource is the name of my current web project. The whole goal of this project is to contribute to the cheerleading community by providing a centralized resource for cheerleaders, parents, and coaches alike to share knowledge about their programs and experiences. There is much work to be done on this project, including refining our goals and design, but most of that will be posted on the project page:

http://zacharyc.com/projects/cheer-resource/

Keep in mind that this is still a rough sketch, and this not what I do for full time employment. This is a “project”, or something I work on for fun. More details to come in the future. For now, I’m just excited to have set up a basic code base and database structure.

ConEd Does Not Accept Visa, Are You Kidding Me?

April 3, 2008 in General, Usability | No comments

While I have still yet to write the long overdue post, I have moved from my NYC apartment to the west coast, California, specifically. With this, I terminated my ConEd account. Now, in the process of setting up my account I had hooked direct pay up to a bank account I almost never put money in and it just turned out that balance in that account was not enough to clear my last ConEd Payment.

This translate to me having to pay with a check card or mail in a check. While mailing in a check would have been cheaper, it requires more of my time and a little more effort than I wanted to exert, so I decided to pay the $4.95 fee to pay by phone.

I call in over the weekend, and after entering my card number twice, I hear that the payment system does not believe my card to be a valid number.

So I call in again this morning, same thing.

Finally get myself to a representative after 30 MINUTES of holding only to find out that they DO NOT ACCEPT VISA!!! No wonder my card wasn’t working, it was a Visa card.  Mind you, there was no warning of this over the phone.

Bottom line, I finally ended up paying my with a Mastercard and everything worked out, but I have two comments:

One, why would a company like ConEd not accept Visa, but accept Mastercard and Discover? This is stupid, if you are provider of any product, whether it be software or a serivce, you should make it as easy as possible to for people to pay you. Visa is a very popular card, you should accept it.

Two, if for some RIDICULOUSLY STUPID reason, you find yourself in a position to not accept a standard card (/protocol/whatever) you should explain to your user that you that it is not accepted, instead of making them wait. I could have payed with a Mastercard over the automated system, if they had just let me know. Communicate with your users, it is the best way to make them happy.