Bruce's Blog

Roads: The roads in the New Paltz area were quite horrible after 8 inches of snow fell overnight. As usual the state managed roads, Route 32 and Route 299, were clear and well taken care of by the DoT but all of the roads taken care of by the local crews were muddy slushy messes. This has been the trend all winter so far.

Credit: I went to pay my MBNA credit card using their bill payment website and was greeted with a notice that I must upgrade my version of Netscape to use the site. I was rather angry considering I had been using their website to pay my credit card using various forms of Mozilla on Linux for at least two years now. After installing and configuring a User Agent Switching extention for Mozilla Firebird I was able to pay the bill without problem.

After I finished with the website I gave MBNA a call to let them know it was an issue for me and it only took about two minutes of phone time until I was directed to the appropriate department. The man I spoke with apologized for the problem and then started telling me about how to change the User Agent string in Firebird as a temporary workaround.

I was quite shocked at this and told him I had already done so but thanked him for the effort. He then mentioned they were working on fixing the problem on their end and that he had helped several Opera and Safari users with similar problems today. (Yes, tech support for a major bank actually knew what 'Opera' and 'Safari' were and how to support them. Amazing!) For a soul-less evil credit card company MBNA does seem to do a very good job with customer support.

I mentioned this story to a few people on IRC and one of them pointed out the irony of the official financing company for Apple products locking out Apple's own web browser. Hopefully this will be fixed soon (and I have no reason to doubt it).