Vacuum Molding

I picked up a vacuum former the other day for under a hundred bucks, figured I'd see if I could put it to use making radomes and such, or at least to prototype packaging. I ordered a bunch of different plastics from McMaster-Carr, and Charlie and I spent the evening molding shapes out HDPE, ABS, PETG, Acrylic, and (unsuccessfully) PVC. Haven't tried the polycarbonate yet. I'll post more of my results later, but shown above is the most functional thing we've come up with so far.

We used Jeff (the same scarab carving that served as a test subject for the MDX-20's piezo scanner, 3-axis milling, and urethane casting) to make a mold in 1/32" FDA-approved HDPE and then mixed up a batch of Jello Jigglers and cast a Jello Jeff. Shown above are the original, vacuum-formed mold, and Jello casting. Jeff's got a bit of an undercut around the base, so de-molding the Jello is tricky. Still, it worked reasonably well.

Spider

Found this guy on my office floor this morning. I hate spiders. Didn't squish him, though. Kept him around long enough to check him out under the microscope and then dumped him outside. The camera on the new boom microscope can't get any lower magnification than this - I had it on the 1x objective and 0.5x reducer. Works well for PCB inspection and assembly, though.

Working on commercial tracker stuff today, and trying some tweaks to my SSTV gadget to try to make it work reliably with the new camera modules. They're driving me nuts, and I think I may have destroyed at least one of them.

Finding a New Bank

When I set up my business checking account back in '04, I decided to go with a local bank - Mid-State Bank & Trust - on the theory that they'd be more likely to provide decent customer service. I'd had bad experiences in the past with both Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and I'd vowed that Wells Fargo in particular would never get another dime of my business. (The reasons are numerous - look up their class action lawsuits and take your pick.)

Some months ago Mid-State was acquired by Rabobank, and I'd hoped that being part of a big multinational bank might improve some of their online services; the website had always been terribly clunky and difficult to use. Alas, it's gotten far worse since then. I can no longer make payments on my line of credit, the system won't work with Firefox, and doing the most trivial of tasks is frustrating.

Worse, their service has really gone downhill. I'm currently missing a wire transfer and despite promises to track it down, I've heard nothing. It's a common pattern - call them up with a problem, they promise to look into it, and then nothing. I'm also missing mailings from them, important stuff like a routing number change that ended in me having to destroy 500 unused checks. And every time I send a wire transfer, the confirmation email comes from (and the return receipt goes to) a domain held by a squatter. Rabobank won't acknowledge the problem - like maybe they don't think that could be a massive invitation for phishing.

So today I decided to contact a few big banks with the same simple set of questions - can I make international wire transfers through your online banking system, can they be in foreign currencies, and what's the transfer fee? How the banks respond to the message (sent through their online contact form) will be as important as the actual answer - I'm tired of dealing with a bank that won't get anything done unless you park yourself physically in a branch.

I'll update this as it progresses, but here are the results so far. All questions were submitted at around 10:00 AM on Monday, January 5.

Union Bank of California
Immediate auto-confirmation by email promising response in 1 business day.

Received an email at 2:30 PM stating that online wire transfers are possible and to call a representative.

Called 800 number at 4:10 PM, got a recording (in English and Japanese) telling me to leave a message for a call-back within one day. Left a message.

Got a call back at 10:00 AM the next day seeking more information to direct my call. Was promised another return call within 30 minutes. Nothing yet, two days later.

WaMu
Got a response at 5:54 PM on Wednesday. Looks like a form letter pieced together from several canned paragraphs, not all of them quite relevant to what I asked. Wire transfers must be made from a bank; no response to the fee inquiry.

HSBC
Email response came in on Wednesday at 7:09 PM.

Called toll-free number (it has a 'Z' in it!) and spoke to a very friendly rep after navigating a reasonably short voice menu. Found out that they offer $15 wires (incoming and outgoing) and several currencies, and that they have an option for 5 free transfers a month. Also found out that I can't open an account because there's no branch close enough and they have to make a site visit. I was very pleased with the customer service, but it unfortunately it does me absolutely no good!

Wells Fargo
Got an email response at 11:53 AM on Tuesday. Wire transfers are available through their Commercial Electronic Office. Got a URL (no fees listed that I can find, mostly fluff and a lot of clicking to get a few nuggets of information) and a phone number.

Called the number provided and got a human after a short recorded announcement. I thought this was a good sign at first, but then it turned out the number I'd reached was only for password resets and token reassignments. The poor guy was confused and didn't seem to know why that number would have been given to me, but after a couple of minutes of awkward silence while he conferred with his team lead by IM he got me another number to call.

This turned out to be the main catch-all customer service number, which dropped me into a voice menu system. It kept insisting on an account number to speak to a banker, but after a few tries it gave up and transferred me anyway.

The next person I spoke to (after a hold of a couple of minutes) couldn't talk to me if I wasn't a customer, and put me on hold for a couple minutes longer while I was transferred to someone who could.

At this point I finally got some questions answered. Wire transfers can be done online for $15 in numerous currencies, and incoming wires are $7.50, but there's a 6-month waiting period before you can enroll. Until then I'd be stuck doing $30 transfers from a branch.

The fees are acceptable and they seem to offer a broad selection of services, but the 6-month delay would be hard to swallow, and what I went through trying to find this out tells me that Wells Fargo is still the same bureaucratic hell that I remember.

Bank of America
1:30 PM - Got a form letter response advising me to call the wire transfer department. Called, got a voice response system. Got to a live operator, was informed there's no online wire transfer option. Outgoing wires are $45, she didn't know incoming rates or currency exchange fees.

Verdict

Of the 5 banks I contacted, HSBC is the only one that seems to offer any real improvement over Rabobank in terms of fees and customer service. And it's the only one that won't take me on as a customer. Union Bank of California could still redeem themselves by calling back with the information I requested, but I'm not holding out much hope at this point.

I'd be happy to pay travel expenses for an HSBC rep to come up here and make the required site inspection, but alas, I don't think that's going to happen.

Looks like I'm stuck with Rabobank for now, unless another option presents itself.

Update

Things are getting even worse with Rabobank. I submitted a payment yesterday on my business line of credit - used to be you could manage it directly and it worked pretty well. Now, to make a payment, you go to 'Messaging' and select the 'Line of Credit Payment' form letter. Apparently they print that out and enter it manually. Only this time they took the money from the line of credit and put it in checking.

So this morning I started Round 2 of the bank search, and started checking with local banks instead of the big ones:

Santa Lucia Bank
Santa Barbara Bank & Trust
Community Bank of Santa Maria
Heritage Oaks Bank
Mission Community Bank
Los Padres Bank

Only those last two don't have so much as an email address on their website, so I'm going to have to call or visit in person, and I don't think there's much hope of them having online wire transfers if they don't even have email. Community Bank of Santa Maria sent back an out-of-office response, so at least there's one person there with email. When she's in.

Space Station Parts

Went shopping for furniture at a local surplus warehouse and wound up buying some old ISS hardware. Got a good deal, but I don't know what I'll do with them - they're not even compatible with my space station.

DHL

I've always liked DHL. They've always been great when it comes to delivering stuff in a hurry to odd places all over the world, even when being shot at. When I needed a domestic courier for overnight packages, I went with DHL because I was already using them for import and export shipping, and because I could get really good prices on prepaid shippers through Costco.

Lately, though, I'm having second thoughts. For quite a while I used their overnight services with no major problems - the worst was a rural delivery that got lost for a few days. When they moved the cutoff time for shipments from 4:45 to 3:45 it was tolerable, if annoying. But several weeks ago, I discovered that two days after dropping off a couple of urgent packages at the local depot well before the cutoff, they hadn't even been removed from the drop box in front of the depot!

Apparently something like half of their drivers just walked off the job. After pleading with the woman at the desk for about 10 minutes, I finally got her to give the packages back, since they weren't going to make it out that night and one of them absolutely had to be delivered the next day. I had to carry that one over to UPS myself and pay about $50 for UPS Red next-day shipping. Fortunately UPS has a much later cutoff time.

I never got my money back on the wasted prepaid shippers. They've never made good on any delivery guarantee, for that matter. I've filed a couple of claims and never got a thing out of it.

The worst was last week when I got a call from a customer who'd ordered a part to be delivered to their hotel room while they were briefly in the country on business. It hadn't shown up on time, and when I called DHL to inquire about it, I was told that since it was outside of a major metropolitan area they couldn't provide next-day service. Ok, I thought, two days should still be plenty. Nope - turns out that they don't even try, they just hand it over to the post office. Estimated delivery time on this 'overnight' package? Eight days! For under $5 I could have handed it to the post office myself and had it there in two days.

Turns out DHL is scaling back their US operations. I'm sorry to lose what was, for a while, a very attractive shipping option. I shipped a lot of stuff crammed into reasonably priced flat-rate mailers. Guess I'll have to work on some UPS or FedEx options.

I think it's worth mentioning that the USPS does an awesome job about 99.6% of the time. Even after all of the rate increases, you can still get a 1 lb package coast to coast in about two days for around $5, even to remote rural addresses. I've shipped thousands of pacakges by first class and priority mail, and they've lost or seriously delayed maybe half a dozen. The local clerks deserve some credit, too. Mario, Dave, Esther, Lynn - you guys are great. Edgar - you're new, so I'll cut you some slack.

SARCity

A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to help out with a session on APRS at SARCity, an annual search and rescue conference in Barstow. I'd actually been to SARCity twice before, as an Explorer with the Santa Maria SAR team, so I was looking forward to seeing what had changed in the 15 years or so since my last visit.

Originally the class was supposed to be on K9 tracking, but thanks to some cancellations I wound up doing the whole 90 minute session myself and had the focus of the class shifted to general APRS use for SAR - I'm really not a dog person and didn't have much to show in that area.

Byonics and BigRedBee gratiously loaned me examples of their latest integrated tracker/transmitters, and I tried to keep the talk vendor-neutral. I had one of the first prototypes of my transceiver package there, but it's programmed for 12.5 kHz channels and won't tune 144.39 Mhz, so I didn't have it running as part of the demo. The final, 5 kHz/6.25 kHz radios are due in this week - I'll try to get something posted on them soon.

The class went pretty well, I think. I managed to run a bit over my time limit without really looking at my talk outline. This is probably the third or fourth time that's happened - I think I need to learn to just put the outline away once I'm satisfied with my slides and know what I want to talk about.

In all, the weekend was a blast. Surprisingly, I didn't see anyone I recognized from the Santa Barbara County team. Which was probably just as well, I suppose. There are some great people on that team, but I'm still bitter about how my association with the team ended and there are a couple of people I'd rather not have to deal with. I can't even write about it without getting angry all over again, so I'm not going to try to explain.

It was very gratifying to hear from members of several other teams that they thought I had something valuable to contribute to SAR, though. I've been invited back to talk again next year, so hopefully next time I'll have a lot more to demonstrate and I'll be able to do some more hands-on exercises.

Maybe I'll be able to overlap it a bit with the GIS track put on by ESRI - from my motel room in Barstow I was able to hack together a new output module for the Tracker2 that produces the same format as the Thales radios they had already interfaced to ArcMap, and on Sunday morning we were able to successfully plot APRS stations. ArcMap/ArcView/ArcGIS and that whole family have a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag, but apparently ESRI has some sort of grant program for SAR teams, and they're so far beyond the usual mapping applications most teams use that there's really no comparison. Assuming you've got a ton of computing power and a trained operator, anyway.

Croatia

Wow - I'm way behind in my blog postings. I'd better start catching up now or I'm never going to get it done. I guess I'll start with my vacation in Croatia.

I flew to Dubrovnik by way of LA, Frankfurt, and Zagreb on June 18th. Arrived at the apartment (just across the street from the right-most tower in the picture) a little before midnight on the 19th. My friends Noelle and Rachel arrived separately on the 20th, from Iraq and Florida respectively.

The old city is absolutely beautiful. We spent a day visiting all of the local museums, another island hopping in the Elaphiti Islands, took a day trip to Mostar in Bosnia, went horseback riding, attended a very touristy 'authentic village dinner' party, went on a scuba trip, and after Noelle and Rachel left on the 27th, I made a day trip by myself into Montenegro to see Kotor and Budva. The Bay of Kotor is gorgeous, but Budva is way over-touristed.

A couple of chance occurrences on the trip happend to contribute to my decision to leave my day job when the vacation was over. First, the guy seated across from me at the dinner party in the village turned out to be the former head of research for a major water utility in the UK - and had experimented with some of the same approaches we were working on in our project, and abandoned the effort because of the same problems that have always made me doubtful about our prospects for success. And over a bottle of Havana Club back in the apartment, Noelle described her personal experience with the Army system we were in the process of writing a proposal for. Turns out the system was an even bigger boondoggle than I'd guessed. And something she mentioned about another, entirely unrelated program, turned out to be directly relevant to what the company later tried to convince me to stay on to help with.

I had a 7-hour layover in Zagreb on the way back, and a local OpenTracker user picked me up at the airport and took me out for a beer. I found out a little more about commercial use of my trackers in the country, and maybe even got myself a legitimate business expense deduction for part of the trip.

I'll post pictures to my Flickr account when I have time, but I think that's enough for tonight.