The First 10 Pounds Were Easy...

It was a few months back that I set a goal to myself to drop 25 pounds. Over this past winter, I found myself weighing the most I ever have in my life (around 225 lbs), was feeling frustrated when I exercised, and had stopped even trying to manage what I eat. It wasn't a good combination. I was out of shape, I knew it, and it pissed me off. So I told myself I'd change. Unfortunately just telling myself to lose weight didn't work. Instead I found out I actually had to change my habits.

Once I actually got in the mindset to do something about the round shape I was taking, I decided I needed to track my weight closely and do so over time. To do this I bought a good scale that measures to the 1/5 of a pound accurately and found a good weight tracking app for my phone. I also made a commitment to myself that I'd at least try to stick with things for a while before outright giving up.

I started at 224.6 pounds. It was ugly. I felt horrible. I struggled to run much more than a mile. I was hungry. I just wanted to quit. However, I didn't. Since I was being tracked and held responsible, I was motivated to try, and try I did. Slowly but surely, I saw some of the weight coming off. I'd fluctuate back up every now and again, but the overall progress was downward. I was happy! It was working!

...that is, until it wasn't. As you can see from the graph, things started to level out and stay leveled out. I found that I started feeling like I deserved rewards for good workout. I justified eating a bag of Oreos or an entire pizza by knowing I'd just run a bit more tomorrow. But eventually I couldn't exercise enough to offset my diet that had reset to where it was before I started this project, which is to say in a really bad place.

So I'm stuck and frustrated. 2/5's of the way to my goal and behind schedule I am tempted to give up. I'm not horribly out of shape. I exercise 5-6 days a week and keep active, but my diet is what's killing me. I have no willpower and I love food that's terrible for me. How could I get past this seemingly impenetrable barrier?

Go public.

So here I am, admitting I suck at my diet, but also noting that I have made some effort. My exercise regiment is pretty solid. I feel more in shape. However, my diet has gotten worse the better my exercise program has gotten. 215 pounds is less than 224.6 pounds, but it's still not 200 pounds. My new goal is to be able to break this plateau, work hard, manage my diet, and check back in a few months down the line and say I'm at 200 pounds, or at least closer to it than now.

Let's meet back here in a couple months.

TurboTax Business: Intuit Drops the Ball Yet Again

I really wish there was a decent alternative solution for doing multi-proprietor LLC tax filing and K-1 creation to TurboTax because this year I feel like I just wasted over $100 of my LLC's money on this junk software and will probably have to end up either filing by hand or handing off to a tax preparer to do.

The biggest issue is how utterly "glitchy" TurboTax feels this year. Last year's version was smooth enough (not the best experience in the world, but decent enough), but this year I can't even complete my K-1's to distribute to the LLC owners because the application continually hard crashes when filling out the business's information. We're not even talking about getting to the meat of the filing process--this is happening at the very beginning of the process. What adds to this frustration is that Intuit makes getting support difficult. I had to resort to using Twitter to attempt to get any type of help and they still haven't been very responsive or even touched upon the issue encountered.

I realize that the Business version of TurboTax is used by many, many fewer individuals than their other versions, but this doesn't speak well for their entire product line. I had switched from H&R Block's software to TurboTax last year so that I had a uniform experience when doing my business tax filing and personal tax filing, but I may go back to H&R Block for my personal taxes based upon my experience with the Business product.

It's quite baffling to me that Intuit can drop the ball so hard and let their products be so bug-ridden. It's not like they're creating a brand new product. They have an established product and just need to update it each year with the appropriate tax rules and maybe add a feature or two to make it look like they're not getting lazy, but they can't even make a usable product. I wish there was some way I could get get my money back since I most likely won't be able to file my taxes using this piece of garbage and will have to shell out more money to have it done elsewhere.

People Still Go to Stores to Shop?

The last couple of days I've gotten and oddly perverse sense of satisfaction in seeing Best Buy fall on their face yet again, this time by not fulfilling orders placed a month ago and only letting their customers know about it now. No doubt most of the items were Christmas gifts so now people are left in the lurch to scramble for something at the last minute. And with times as tough as they are for many, people have been pinching every last penny that they can so now if they want to get the same item they'll have to pony up extra money and will be forced to buy it at a brick & mortar shop instead of ordering online because, well, there's just not enough time to get stuff shipped out before Christmas. This is going to be a PR nightmare and could be the final straw that pushes people not only away from Best Buy but from the online outlet of other brick & mortar retailers.

I long ago gave up on Best Buy after numerous headaches that they put me through. At times, I thought they were making it their mission to make people's lives as headache-ridden as possible. I also gave up on the whole Black Friday shopping madness that has become so much more ridiculous than I ever would have expected in the last couple of years.

It really baffles me that people will "use" (I hesitate to use the word "waste") so much of their time to line up and wait outside of a store to save a few more bucks on something than if they bought it elsewhere or online, and then they're not always guaranteed to get what they want. And since people are doing everything they can to save a buck the chaos at stores, as seen through too many a YouTube clip, is becoming unmanageable no matter how stores try to curb the nutso environment that minimal savings bring out in people.

Maybe I've started looking at things a little too logically, but my time is worth more than the few dollars I'll save on a bottom-of-the-line LCD TV or some Blurays of movies I've already seen. I'd rather pay the extra few bucks it might cost me to get them non-Black Friday and save myself the insanity of Black Friday shopping.

But what happened with Best Buy this time around wasn't with their in store purchases from Black Friday--it was in regards to their online sales, confirmed online sales to boot. It's not like people ordered something, got a confirmation of the order's completion, and then received a cancellation shortly thereafter--it was a month later. I've had situations where I've bought something online during a crazy sale and got an email after my "purchase" stating they're out of stock or that there were more orders than they could fill. I have no problem with that. This was a month later, though...

...and to kick people in the junk while they're down, many of the items being "cancelled" are readily available for purchase online right now at BestBuy.com for their regular price. So it looks even more like a retailer is just trying to screw over their customers, eroding any potential loyalty they may have left.

I know I'm rambling, but it's crap like this that has ultimately pushed me to do all of my shopping nearly exclusively through Amazon. I have yet to be let down price-wise, service-wise, or communication-wise by them. And with Amazon Prime, nearly everything I order arrives 2 days later at my doorstep. I'm amazed that Amazon hasn't put the likes of Best Buy completely out of business by this point.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Shame on you, Best Buy. I hope you do your damnedest to make it right with the customers you screwed..." and that I'm ultimately, I'm plugging Amazon because they've been everything that a retailer should be.

Wells Fargo IRA Transfer Bug

Apparently my real world job in quality assurance has bled over into my everyday life as I managed to uncover a pretty frustrating issue with Wells Fargo's banking and brokerage website. Before I note the bug, let's set the stage and background...

I have my personal checking, business checking/savings, taxable brokerage, IRA, Roth IRA, and a mortgage with Wells Fargo, so I have a significant amount of involvement with their financial offerings. For a couple years I've had an automatic monthly transfer set up to take a set amount of money from my personal checking and contribute it to my Roth IRA. At the beginning of the summer I wanted to change that contribution amount, so I went through their website to update the contribution amount. Everything went swimmingly... or so I thought.

This last month as I was checking my statements closer, I noticed that for the last few months there were TWO transfers from my checking to my Roth IRA, one for the old amount and one for the new amount. This would explain why my personal checking felt like it was getting pinched. I wasn't wasting more money on Papa Murphys and comic books, but instead Wells Fargo was transferring more than twice what they should. I tried to rectify this by going into my online account to see what was up. Apparently the "change" to the contribution amount just created another monthly transfer and left the previous one in place. That appears to be DEFECT #1.

This quickly led into DEFECT #2. As I attempted to cancel one of the two automatic monthly transfers, I was given a dreaded red error message saying the website is incapable of handling the request. Thinking it might be a browser thing, I switched from Chrome to IE with the same results. Time to call them up.

I called the phone number that was in the error message only to find DEFECT #3--the phone number directs you to a support number for a department that can't actually help with the issue. I had to get transferred to another department and after I made my way through a couple of representatives I was finally able to talk to someone senior to help me through my problem.

They advised me that you cannot cancel ongoing transfers to an IRA online. You have to come into a branch, sign a form, and then they can stop it. This seemed a bit ridiculous since I could create contributions online without needing to fill out a form. When I asked about this, the representative stated that actually, no, their systems since January of this year are incapable of allowing you to make or change contributions to IRA transfers. After I walked him through what I did and what I still had access to we noted that, as I had suspected, we found DEFECT #4.

After a bit of arguing about why it is somewhat dumb for me to come in and sign a form so they could key in the cancellation of future transfers that have yet to occur when I'd already given them more personal identifying information over the phone than I would on a form, all of my automatic transfers were canceled. For the immediate future I'll just make one-time manual transfers to my Roth IRA since it seems like Wells Fargo's online transfer system doesn't have all the kinks worked out of it after merging in Wachovia's system.

More Snowblower Goodness

First, why do all of the service reps call a snowblower a snowthrower. I've lived my entire life in Minnesota and never heard a snowblower called that before this year. I guess that must be what they call them in Phoenix or Texas or wherever it is that Sears' call center is located.

After numerous more calls with Sears by both myself and my parents, it appears they just don't give a flying crap about their customers, but since I don't have a truck to haul the snowblower back to them to return, I'm trying to deal with their service as best I can.

Oh, and here's an interesting thing of note if you buy an appliance at Sears--you can't return the item to any old Sears. No, you can only return it to the Sears you bought it from because of some stupid-ass commission scheme they have. So I would have had to return my snowblower at the Sears my parents got it at, which is like 100 miles away.

Anyways, after more grueling telephone calls, Sears is supposed to be showing up today while I'm at work to fix the thing. I left it outside so they can work on it, but they have no clue what's even wrong with it as they never asked. And I'm still skeptical as to whether they'll actually show up at my place or go to my parents' house again, like they moronically did last time.

Anyone want to take bets on whether or not I have a functioning snowblower when I get home? I'm gonna say it's still sitting there totally broken.

Are You Kidding Me?

The snowblower fiasco continues. Sears never showed up at my place yesterday to fix my snowblower, which kind of really sucks since there is still snow in my driveway and I stayed home from work so that I could be there when the repairman came.

The repairman did show up to fix the snowblower, just not at my house. Even after leaving detailed instructions with the Sears repair center, they still sent a repairman out to my parents' house instead of mine. No one was home there during the day, obviously, and they called my dad's cell instead of me and left him a message.

When my parents called up to ask them about this snafu, they gave two options--wait until next Friday to have the repairman show up (hopefully at the right place) because that's the earliest open time they have or I can run over to a Sears store 20-ish miles away, get the broken cable myself, and install it myself. Seriously, why should I have to do all the work when my parents bought a $250 service plan on the snowblower?

Honestly, Sears screwed up. Their stupidity is keeping me from blowing out the rest of my driveway. Their faulty craftsmanship left me with a broken snowblower out of the box in the first place. I'm really tempted to tell them to come pick the damn thing up and take it back. I'll buy something somewhere else. If this is the quality of service I'm going to get, I don't know if I want to have anything to do with Sears. And they wonder why their stores aren't doing so well. Might this be one of the reasons?

I plan on calling them tonight to try and get things sorted out and hopefully get them over to fix things, get some type of refund, or make some sense out of the ridiculousness that is the Sears repair department. Screw Sears. Seriously.

Way Too Many Chances

I don't know why I do it, but I keep giving Audible more chances. They've pissed me off so many times in the past, but I still keep coming back, mainly because I don't have an iPod (so buying audiobooks through iTunes is out) and there aren't any other good resources for legal audiobooks online. I know I can illegally get audiobooks just about anywhere, but I like to actually pay for things I enjoy instead of illegally attaining them.

Why does Audible get another chance? A few reasons actually. The first is that I picked up a 1 GB Sansa m240 on Woot a little while back for $18. My previous mp3 player stopped being recognized by Audible's software after their last upgrade, leaving me out in the cold with no way to listen to the books I purchased. $18 seemed like a low enough price to pay to get at what I've already bought.

This leads me to a side note, however. It only cost me $18 for a 1 gigabyte player, which will hold like 10 audiobooks. Why doesn't Audible simply give out a player for free with a subscription to their service? I know they had promotions in the past that were similar to that, but it was usually "get a free mp3 player or 4 free audiobooks". Most people who already had mp3 players would take the free books, as I did. If the mp3 player was simply a part of the package, it would make so much more sense and Audible would know that users always had a player that could play their software.

The second reason Audible gets another try is the length my bus rides to and from work have grown to. With the 35W bridge gone, my bus route is more traffic packed so it takes me like 35 minutes or sometimes more to get to work and the same to get home. My bus has also gotten way more full, with the bus filled to capacity and having tons of cramped standers jammed in by the time I get downtown. So reading an actual book or playing my PSP is hard to do as cramped as I am. And besides, when I get on going home sometimes I have to stand, so it is simple to just listen to my audiobooks.

The final reason I gave back in is that I was sick of having to split mp3 files and organize them appropriately when I downloaded ripped copies of the audiobooks from Suprnova or Oink. It was just no fun having to do that extra overhead work to listen to books I'd already bought.

So Audible, you get one more shot. Let's hope you don't piss me off again or I may give up on audiobooks altogether.

More Comcast Awesomeness

It looks like Comcast is making even more friends by cutting off service to their users. It's interesting that Comcast has been making the news lately (geek news at least) for throttling torrents and cutting off service. At the same time, our internet service, which is through Comcast, has been quite underwhelming.

We've experienced the torrent throttling and packet shaping since many of my torrents won't seed to people, even when connected. Also, our service has been abysmally slow as of late. Recently we've been having a hard time getting more than 30 kbps and web pages take forever to connect to their source and then load.

We've done the usual--reset the router, reset the modem, restart the computers--and nothing changes the fact that our service is slow, our ping is astronomical, and my Skype calls are warbly. What sucks is we don't have any alternatives for internet service in our area since Comcast was allowed to have a monopoly in our neighborhood. And I'm sure that my calling to complain will be in vain since they KNOW that they're the only option in town. The bastards.

Screw Comcast

I really really really wish that we had more options for internet in our area. Right now we have Comcast and... Comcast. That's it. They have a monopoly on the internet in our area. They've been the worst possible company to deal with for anything. They've screwed up our billing repeatedly, given us the wrong hardware for cable and internet, not been able to properly authorize our router, and now are throttling and outright denying bittorrent traffic.

Both my roommates and myself use bittorrent for many purposes and we are now unable to seed particular torrents or use bittorrent. I know that once our running special on internet + cable runs out with Comcast I'll be switching to DishTV for television instead of Comcast and I might have to suck it up and try to see if I can somehow get DSL here at my place to avoid continued usage of Comcast's services.

If you have Comcast, call them or email them or do something to let them know you don't think this is a fair practice. We're paying for our internet service at $44.99 a month so we should damn well be able to use it, not just use it for select tasks that they feel people should use it for.

Those Crazy Moving Staircases

One of the most frustrating things to experience when walking somewhere is getting on an escalator where no one is moving. You're walking along at a nice pace, you need to go up or down a floor, so you hop on an escalator, but you can't keep walking because the person(s) in front of you decided that since the floor started moving underneath them like some form of medieval magic, they can no longer move their feet -- they're so awestruck in amazement that they've forgotten how to walk.

Really, why do people automatically stop walking once they set foot on an escalator? Are people really that lazy that they need to take a break and let the floor ferry them up or down a level. Maybe if you're some gargantuan fat ass and you're on an escalator going up, I can understand how you might not want to attempt making steps in an upward direction, but there's no excuse when you're on an escalator going down.

This might not be so much of an annoyance for me if there were also stairs alongside escalators so I could walk up them and get to where I'm going faster than waiting on a slow moving escalator, but many times there isn't.

In my frustration, I've decided that instead of waiting behind lazy ass people when getting on a magical moving stairway, I'm going to simply maneuver or push my way around people and walk up. I can't take any more of this. My pet peeve cannot be contained any longer. Lazy escalator riders, fear my wrath!