I spent the last week in Austin Texas for Supercomputing 08. It’s the first time I’ve been to the conference and it was “ok”. The amount of high end computer hardware there was staggering. Networking hardware that trumps anything I’ve ever seen, and computing hardware that would blow your mind. I also had the privilege of seeing the NOC for the conference, and was offered a chance to work the compsec side of the NOC at next year’s conference in Portland.
Some good news I just noticed today is that my student loans are eligible for a 1% drop in their interest rates right before my next birthday. That’s pretty cool. I had totally forgotten about it until I went to go balance my ledger in Quicken and noticed the “benefit” on the loan website.
I tested the waters this last month in regard to my motorcycle loan and the direct principal payment address. You see apparently Honda has different addresses for standard monthly payments, and non-standard direct principal payments. They go to two different states also, odd.
Anyways, you need to call Honda’s customer reps to find this out. They give you the other address without question, but they point out that you need to add an “Attention so and so” to the address so that it goes to the right place.
Well, I don’t buy stamps (I’m thrifty, what can I say); I make my bank pay for the stamp. So I usually send payments electronically. Well, the bank has a database of customers that it will gladly send payments to “immediately” instead of the normal 5 days that it takes to send a physical check to them.
This second Honda address conveniently was listed in the customer database, but there was no way to add the “Attention” line, and I wasn’t about to send random sums of money to an payment dept that wasn’t going to directly apply it to principal.
So you can tweak the address lines of these customer lists at the bank until they meet your approval. So I moved the original address down a line and added the “Attn” line that I was told to add. I decided to send a feeler out to make sure it was applied correctly; 50 bucks, something I wouldn’t cry over if something went awry.
Sent the payment electronically and would you believe it, the payment went to the correct address, dept, and was applied directly to principal; cool!
So now that I’m sure that will work, I intend to more aggressively pay down the bike. It’s close anyway, so why bother holding onto the debt.
In the video game world, I’ve been let down yet again. Last Remnant received terrible reviews from IGN; I’m so dissappointed. I was so looking forward to that game, but like other Square games recently, I’m going to have to forgo buying it because it sounds dreadful. There are a couple of good (hopefully) titles that have come out recently that are still on my wishlist, but I’m going to hold off until after Christmas and keep an eye out for sales.