You heard it hear first: you need to see and hear Asleep In The Sea, three kids from Phoenix with a Moog Rogue and an attitude.
New stuff has been recorded here in Tucson with Jim Waters and might be released before the guys turn thirty.
Go see 'em while they're still playing in front of fifteen people at the local shithole. You'll thank me later.
Funny how the nitwit far-right Republicans are demanding laws--or a constitutional amendment--declaring that English is the USA's national language.
I can think of another country that has a national language, one that demands that all business be conducted in the national language.
That country, of course, is France.
Yes, the same country these nitwits go out of their way to denigrate ("Freedom fries," anyone?).
So, basically, the wingnuts are saying that America should be more like France.
Make up your fucking minds, douchebags.
I have a PowerPC-based Mac mini that, among other things, is a Subversion server. The repository lives on an external FireWire drive. Initially, the server was set up using svnserve started from xinetd. This works well enough, although I never quite got the svn+ssh thing to work. I decided to switch to using apache instead of svnserve. It turns out that Apple had posted some decent instructions, which work well enough. Note that Apple references older versions of both Apache and Subversion. I downloaded the Apache httpd-2.2.3 and Subversion 1.4.0 sources, and following the instructions, was able to build both for the Mac mini.
After an svnadmin dump and reload (to take advantage of the new svndiff format), I set pointed my browser to the URL of my repo and saw everything.
Next, I was able to see the repo from my Mac Book Pro, which was still running Subversion 1.3.2. I copied the source tarball to the MBP, ran the configure script, built and installed the new svn. svn --version told me I was running 1.4.0. So a simple test: the
$ svn ls http://svn.mydomain.foo:8888/svn/
returned an odd error: "Unrecognized URL scheme." Weird. Some web searches indicated that something was up with ra_dav not being loaded, and doing a
$ svn --version
confirmed it: ra_local and ra_svn were available but not ra_dav. So I did the reconfigure and rebuild thing, and during configure, I noticed that there was a comment about "can't find neon." A quick web search for "neon subversion" lead to the neon homepage, so I downloaded the latest and greatest. Buried within the subversion configure script output was a note about "get neon-0.25.5.tar.gz, unzip/tar it into the subversion source directory, and rename it to neon." I did that, reconfigured, and then got a complaint: turns out that the latest/greatest neon is 0.26.1, and Subversion really wanted 0.25.5. I downloaded the correct version of neon, put it in the right place, and reconfigured. There was no complaint about neon, so I did a make and a sudo make install, and voila! I was able to access the repo using the http protocol. Yippeee!!!
Our mortgage is owned by Chase. Originally, it was with Wachovia, but of course they sold it a month after we closed on the loan.
Anyways, like everyone else, Chase has online access to accounts. One login gets me to a credit card account and the mortgage account (there used to be four Chase credit card accounts, the result of their buying spree; I closed all but the oldest account).
You can pay the credit cards online and the payment is credited the next day, which at this point, all of the credit-card issuers let you do.
You can also pay the mortgage online. However, instead of electronically debiting the checking account and crediting the mortgage account, you have to sign up with their bill-pay service. And get this: rather than doing what's done with the credit card accounts, the bill-pay service debits your checking account, writes a fucking paper check and mails it to Chase Home Loans, a process which can take up to six business days. Yep, that's right: they mail a check to themselves. All that spewing to government regulators about how the big banks needed to combine all of their operations for the consumer's benefit turns out to be complete HORSESHIT.
You know, if I wanted to mail a check, I'd just write out a check and drop it in the mailbox at the post office (which is what I do). And it's worth noting that Wachovia's online payment system works as you'd expect: you schedule the date on which the payment will be made, and it's done and you don't have to worry about it.
A second issue with Chase's online mortgage-payment system is that there's no way to indicate that you want to pay any extra towards your loan principal. In fact, the system is too stupid to know your regular payment amount! So, you just fill in whatever amount you want to pay and they send a check to themselves and if you include an extra amount, you have no idea whether it'll be applied towards the principal or to the escrow or to the interest.
Since Chase tends to fuck up simple things like "please apply the extra payment amount to the loan PRINCIPAL instead of the escrow," I've had to call them and deal with their customer service. And every time I do so, I say, "oh, by the way, when will it be possible to do instant online payments like you do with credit cards?" and the answer is always, "I'll forward your request ..."
It turns out that there's a Real Good (from Chase's point-of-view, anyways) reason why they don't handle online mortgage payments like they handle credit-card payments: they offer their "Fast Pay" process, where you have to call them on the phone and authorize an overnight payment, a "benefit" for which they charge $12.
One imagines that there's a lot of people who have to do an overnight payment, and if you were Chase, you probably wouldn't butcher a cash cow, either.
But as a(n unwilling) customer, fuck that.
And fuck that black hole known as the Chase Mortgage Research Department. If your issue is referred to them, you're hosed. They want YOUR money immediately, if not sooner, but G-d forbid you close the loan and need to get an escrow refund.