A bank transfer app that works as expected

To be fair, Zelle is a big-company app that's being shared out to a bunch of member banks. I tried it in October and it was unusable on the Capital One app I tried. But recently some friends with Chase accounts have got it working well.

So I may have to give it another try ... but another friend sent me a payment with Square Cash, and that worked beautifully:

It doesn't try to get debit card information from the picture of your debit card, just has you type in the number. It took me only about 4 minutes to get it set up and working to accept my friend's payment.

Their (Square, Inc.) revenue model is simple: transfers are free via standard one-business-day delayed ACH, but they charge a fee for you to collect your money instantly.

I can wait for today's payment, but the instant fee is only 1 to 1.5% if I can't wait.

My main bank BECU is working on their Zelle function; Square Cash is a high bar to meet, but I'm looking forward to it!

The Press and Democracy: 1971 and 2018

My lovely wife and I went yesterday to see Steven Spielberg's latest:



This is the story of Daniel Ellsberg's leak of The Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post's decision to publish excerpts after the New York Times was blocked by a federal judge.

The Times, the Post and the other papers of the day that published these excerpts stood up to the Nixon Administration and got the story out to the public. (Excellent movie, by the way.)

As you know, the situation has changed since 1971 ... our democracy has been challenged lately through fake stuff on social media ... and just today the New York Times had a long article on fake twitter accounts ...

Thanks, press for keeping on this issue ... New York Times and ProPublica and your local newspaper all deserve your support!

Here's to a less crazy political future ...

Maybe their pager was lost ... for 10 months?

Opentable's web interface is finally working again:

I can't believe it took this long, but I'm happy to see it working again as I don't want to be restricted to the mobile interface.

Maybe they found their missing pager or smelled competitors on their tail!

Bon apetit ...

Two books on old gods returning to manipulate humanity

My friend Curt recommended this book the last time I saw him:

I found an audiobook copy via the local library and tried it. It took a couple of chapters to really hook me, but overall I found it to be terrific.

It's set in a future society where there's been a political realignment after the Decline, which was caused by a virus called Mephistopheles ... leaving the "mark of Cain" on some of those affected.

Out of this decline has emerged a new North American state called the RUNA, surrounded by "provinces" that are not part of this entity. One of the protagonists, Justin, has been exiled by the RUNA and is living in backwater Panama, when he is called back from exile to serve his country again.

Justin is a "servitor" who inspects religious entities for conformance to the RUNA's rules. The RUNA was founded on science and rationality and forbids any worship of "fictitious entities." But Justin has seen some unexplainable things in his work ....

The other protagonist is May, a gorgeous ("9" genetically -- near perfect) Praetorian ... supersoldier. She meets Justin in Panama at the beginning of the book ...

And any more will spoil the story ... trust me on this one and just try this one for the first 40-50 pages at least. Five stars!

An older one that hits some of the same themes in a different way:

A man named Shadow is the protagonist. At the beginning of the book he is in prison and upon his release runs into (by chance, it looks to be) to this guy named Wednesday who says "you're late!"

Wednesday is a grifter, he says, and he finally persuades Shadow to work for him ... and complications ensue.

This one got me from the first few pages ... you won't be disappointed. Five stars!

Catching up on Enjoyable Audiobooks (mostly SF)

My wife and I got to see some old friends today for the first time in much too long and we got to talking about books ... and I realized I hadn't posted my recent favorites here for a while. So:

This is another Nebula Award winner (among other awards it won). The plot is very complicated (Wikipedia has a synopsis), with a spacefaring civilization set 1000 years in the future that uses AIs in reused human bodies (Ancillaries) for some functions and one of the ancillaries trying to track down and get revenge on the civilization's tyrant, Anaander Mianaai ... I found the whole series (sequels are Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy) very satisfying. Five Stars!

And I just finished the latest from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir:

Artemis is the first city on the Moon, and the protagonist is a brilliant petty criminal and smuggler named Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara ... Jazz is involved in an episode of industrial sabotage that leads into murder and intrigue ... there's a little too much plumbing and welding detail, but overall big fun. Four stars.

Another far-future story, with humans behaving even worse than normal:

Earth's ecosphere is collapsing, so various ships are sent out to various suitable-looking worlds that will be bombarded with an intelligence-enhancing nanovirus to speed up evolution on the earthlike fauna that have been seeded there.

But a saboteur in an "earth only" movement messes up the ship doing the seeding and the nanovirus misses the intended monkeys and helps the intelligence of a bunch of ... spiders ...

Complications ensue over millenia ... but there's a remarkably upbeat ending ... Four stars!

And for some reason I got this one free from Audible:

The reader only gradually learns that this is a post-collapse story ... that there is some terrible virus going around that infects humans and makes them "hungries" which will eat uninfected humans and whose bite will transmit the virus to those humans.

We only gradually realize this because the protagonist is a bright elementary student named Melanie and we wonder why she's locked up and wheeled in shackled to her classroom ...

I quite appreciate the way the author brought all this out gradually ... this one doesn't really have that much an upbeat ending, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Five stars.

And finally, one from Lee Child's Jack Reacher series that was excellent as usual but thematically relevant to a societal problem that's huge right now: the opioid crisis:

Five stars!

Happy reading ... or audiobooking!

Relief from the plague of fleas

Our cockapoo Myla summer 2016 brought home a bunch of fleas:

(one of Myla's cousins from the Internet)

(not actual size)

My fault completely; when I noticed her scratching early on and I said "fleas!!" my wife said no, she just has dry skin. So I filed her under "dry skin" and forgot about it.

Summer 2016: the "dry skin" took over our house ... first I spoke with our vet and asked for a solution ... "Internal or external?" he asked. I said "what's faster?"

He asked how much the dog weighed and then prescribed this:

This worked immediately and (after we bombed the house) we haven't seen a flea since. We just give the little dog one of these (pseudo?) meaty treats every 12 weeks. I can do that for the rest of her doggy life ...

Dog owners: do yourself a favor and get this for your dog!

First experience with Zelle, "fast bank transfer" app, not inspiring!

I've been reading about Zelle, this new app that's supposed to be a "new way to send money to almost anyone, on your phone, in minutes."  There's a footnote: it's "in minutes" only if your recipient is enrolled, 1-3 business days the first time. Well, OK.

I used the Capital One app on my phone to try and send money to my wife. She got a text message asking her to register for Zelle, which she left for me to do.

First, it offers to take a picture of the debit card to be used with your account. Cool! So I tried this, first with my wife's Aspiration card:

It seemed to work after jiggling the phone camera for a few minutes. I then put in the CVV number, checked the box "I approve the terms and conditions" ... and got a wait wheel and then:

Actually just "error 101" with no explanation: not "we don't recognize your bank", which I thought was a possibility.

So then I tried my wife's BECU debit card, my second choice because I don't want apps having access to any main bank account. But I tried it and first:

The glare from the finish seemed to keep the app from reading the numbers ... or something. It didn't work on this one. I messed around with this for a while and was just finished typing in the numbers and other information and hit continue and then:

I had been messing with the app for at least 1/2 hour!

Goodbye Zelle ... I may try this again in a few months, but sheesh.