WYNC’s Radiolab – the best public radio program I’ve ever listened to. Combines science and philosophy with high production values. Entertaining, informative, and moving. Interviews combined/produced into compelling narratives (like “This American Life” meets “Mr. Wizard”)
http://feeds.wnyc.org/radiolab

So Rachel isn’t a bot. Nor is she a mechanical turk, nor disinterested. Entirely the opposite. She’s a human with a sense of humor. And a self-professed Star Trek nerd.

Rachel’s response, followed by mine:

 

From: Rachel <rachel@banksimple.org>
To: Tim Taylor <tim@tool-man.org>
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:44:57 -0500
Subject: Re: Thank You from BankSimple

Hey Tim,

Wow. Thanks for the thoughts! I can see why you opted to turn it into a blog post! (I was in fact going to comment on your blog post, but I didn’t know if you’d like that, and I wanted to make sure you knew the response was really coming from me. If you’d still like a comment, let me know! And of course feel free to use this email on the blog if you like [and if you post it, you have permission to also post my email address].)

On my worst days, I’m probably something like a clever bot (at best), but most days I’m a real, actual person sitting at a desk in Brooklyn. Today is one of those days. I’m wearing a purple dress. Hi. For the record, the email you received was just an autoresponder, but it’s a mashup of my and my colleagues’ real feelings about what we *really* want to know from our prospective customers. Yes, BankSimple was smart enough to hire people who *really, actually* want to HEAR from customers. On the days when the autoresponder has my name on it, I really do get all the responses to it in my inbox, where it takes me anywhere between a few minutes or a few months to respond. If people put a lot of time and effort into their emails, I try to do the same with my reply. My plan is to try respond to all of the 300+ people left in my inbox! Whew!

And the reason I’m responding to you now is not that you questioned my very existence on a blog, but rather that I really love Star Trek: TNG. I too believe matter replication technology will (eventually, after it fuels brutal, tyrannical oligarchies for awhile) bring about an end to poverty and greed, and lead to more societal equality. However, that would be out-of-canon (the United Federation of Planets was formed well before the advent of replication), and I’m honestly not sure whether I’m more philosophically committed to global peace and equality, or keeping things in the Star Trek universe straight. Toss up. Anyway, a discussion for another time.

I also have to say that it means a lot that you took this opportunity for introspection. We deeply value our customers’ passionate and thoughtful responses to our request for input. Even though we knew there would be a lot of ire out there toward banks, especially the big guys, I am kind of overwhelmed at how damn *constructive* people’s thoughts have been. It’s so great to know that we’ll have some really awesome customers who will appreciate small touches and hard work, but also keep us in check.

Anyway, on to your list:

- “If it feels like a chore I’ll eventually stop doing it” — YES. Taking off my banker hat (cough) and putting on my psychologist hat (COUGH), your email contained far too much financial management guilt! Of *course* managing your money is a pain in the butt. Of *course* it sucks. We very much aim to take the suck out of banking. We’re creating simple, easy-to-use tools that (we hope) are a joy to use. (I’m sure you’ve seen it, but in case you haven’t, please take a look at this article for more on our UX philosophy and how we hope it makes banking suck a lot less: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663315/banksimple-wants-to-shake-up-banking-with-cutting-edge-ui-design)

- Yo famileh– You and Chuck should both make sure you’re signed up. One of the features we’re planning (but likely won’t have as we launch– soon after) is to have a way for couples to do exactly what you said– have separate accounts, but share expenses and save together for big purchases, and have a view of the “coupled” part of your account. In the meantime, you and Chuck (and anyone with a BankSimple account) will be able to easily and instantly transfer funds between your accounts.

- Outsourcing– Honestly, you are the first person I’ve had request a feature like this. We don’t have plans for anything of this nature, but I’d love to hear a little more about what you envision. How would it work? How might it be protected against fraud? How would you feel secure doing this?

- Automation– This is going to be one of the great strengths of our service, I think. Your automatic bill-pay with credit card will be set up more or less as you do it now. And even if you don’t set it up right away, your account will “learn” about your bill-paying habits, and make suggestions. For those payees who only accept checks, you can also set up your account to actually mail them an actual paper check each billing cycle. Don’t tell Chuck, or you’ll have to pay the electric bill

- Needlessly separate accounts– You’ve got the right idea. Your account with BankSimple will be conceptualized as one basic account– some of which is being saved/hoarded/set aside, and some of which is safe to spend. If you spend more than you have in your safe-to-spend area, we’ll draw from the savings area. No fee; it’s all your money. The way you put it is right on- “my bank thinks I have 2 accounts, whereas I think of them as the ways I get money I already have to people via whichever method they’ll accept.”

- RESTful API– check! Join the Google Group here: https://banksimple.com/api/

- Mobile– We designed our service around the mobile app. You’ll be able to customize the alerts you receive, and you’ll be able to deposit checks via your smartphone. And view your transaction history, etc. It’ll also be used as a second authentication factor for certain things, like wire transfers.

- Rewards– We’re a little old-school on this one, to be honest. Most bank rewards programs are paid for with penalty fees like overdraft or foreign ATM fees. We won’t be charging those, and we think our customers will get a better experience if we aren’t trying to shoehorn them into this program or that. We’re building great tools to help you make the most of your money by spending and saving wisely. So you’ll still come out with more money in the long run (we hope)!

- Getting your statements– Honestly, I’m not sure yet exactly how this is going to work, but you will be able to grab all your transaction data from BankSimple, either by downloading it into some data format (like .csv), or by creating a .pdf of your history. As I said, the mechanism of this hasn’t been completely fleshed out, but your data won’t have to live in BankSimple exclusively.

- Smartphone payments– this isn’t currently in the works, but we know a lot of our customers want it, and we are keeping abreast of forthcoming technologies with an eye toward how we could make a feature like this secure, smart, and hassle-free.

*whew*!  Okay. Once again, thanks so much for your thoughts, and please keep in touch if you have any further questions/comments/rants/Star Trek references/etc. I just want to say again how much it means that you are willing to put in so much time to let us know what you want. I know that if you’re willing to be patient, and to grow with us, we’ll be the sort of bank you want. And our team is really, really amazing, so I wouldn’t put matter replication past them. Personally, I’m hoping for warp drive first, so that we can make first contact with the Vulcans by the canon date of 2063. (I didn’t even have to look that up. /nerd) I’m forwarding them this email to see if they can get on that.

Hearts and stars,

Rachel

BankSimple Customer Relations

rachel@banksimple.org

To: Rachel <rachel@banksimple.org>
From: Tim Taylor <tim@tool-man.org>
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:31:02 -0500
Subject: Re: Thank You from BankSimple

Rachel,

Thanks for the thorough reply. Conversing with you and BankSimple evokes the memory of when I first read The Cluetrain Manifesto. I will post the follow up on my blog. Thanks for permission to use your email.

In case there was confusion, I was in no way offended by the auto-responder. Quite the opposite: the quality of the template gave me the strong impression there were real, interested people on the other end.

I took your request for my “loves, hates, quibbles, desires, hopes, and dreams…” literally. That largely unfiltered dump was more raw material for you to mine than prioritized list of must-haves, and clearly got dreamier the further I went. I knew of your plans for rockin’ mobile. I included that to affirm your choice to emphasize that. I missed the part about couples sharing until a more thorough exploration of your site after my email/blog post. I’m quite pleased to learn there’s an API. Overall, I’m feeling optimism that a clueful, (I’m assuming) agile company is going to get much closer to “right” for me than old-guard banking with their programmers chained to terminals, faces illuminated by amber glowing text.

The Outsourcing Idea

The outsourcing thing is more wish than fully formed idea. I’ve recently been introduced to the idea of using virtual personal assistants. I’m not sure I’d ever trust a VPA to my account, but what about an accountant? How’s that different than owning a business and hiring an accountant. That’s semi-rhetorical: if you’re smart then you’re an LLC or incorporated. But still, if you’re a small business owner, having your business tanked by an unscrupulous employee can be devastating regardless of whether they were isolated from your “personal” finances because you probably invested a lot of that into your business (especially in the early days).

So the theory in my mind, that granting some limited abilities to a third party (who isn’t my SO), could be an acceptable risk when compared to what I know happens (financial stress and struggle) without the help. The magic here is “limited abilities”. A system of permissions and limits and alerts, well, managing that could turn out to be just as complex as doing all the work myself. Fail. A simple solution might restrict the assistant too much so I still have much do to on my own. Fail. So I haven’t any concrete ideas on how this might work. I’m just back to wishing for the personal finance genie who’ll take care of my finances, always working in my best interest, while I code or play Angry Birds all day long.

So for now, I’ll hope that simplified banking with BankSimple will be easy-breezy, I’ll overcome my current avoidance issues, find an accountant or advisor who actually helps to simplify my financial life, and realize that the amount of actual work left for me is manageable, nay, enjoyable. I almost believe it’s possible, which is a big improvement from a few days ago when I hadn’t heard of BankSimple.

I’m pretty ashamed of this story, actually. I struggle internally with an idealized vision of how an organized “normal” person manages their finances — the person I should be — and the equally unrealistic desire of what I want to do — which is none of it. I tend towards the ignore and procrastinate mode of coping, so my personal finances are currently in bad shape and it depresses me. So when (future online banking company) BankSimple asks me directly what I want from a bank, my “loves, hates, quibbles, desires, hopes, and dreams regarding your financial life”, well, the dam broke and I gave them damn near everything.

I could be replying to a clever bot, or mechanical turk, or an uninterested outsourcer [Update: Rachel is bonafide human. Read her response]. At a minimum it helps to me to share something I’m so ashamed of I avoid even allowing myself to think about, because paradoxically the sharing dispels some of the shame.

There’s also the possibility BankSimple will actually read it and at least get a chuckle.

From: Rachel <rachel@banksimple.com>
To: Tim Taylor <tim@tool-man.org>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 05:22:08 +1100
Subject: Thank You from BankSimple

Hi Tim!

I’m Rachel, a Customer Relations Representative at BankSimple.
Thanks so much for requesting an invitation to try out our
service! We’re still planning and testing, but we’ll begin
opening up BankSimple soon.

In the meantime, though, I’d love to hear your story. I want to
hear from you, personally, about what you want from a bank:
your loves, hates, quibbles, desires, hopes, and dreams
regarding your financial life. Really: what’s on your mind, and
what are you hoping for from BankSimple? We’re committed to
building the best service we possibly can, and the only way to
do that is to know what you’re looking for. So, what’s up?

We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on– and get
your insight into how we can make it better.

Thanks again. Hope to hear from you soon!

Keep up with us on Twitter at @BankSimple
or our blog at http://www.banksimple.com/blog/

Unsubscribe – {an unsubscribe link}

From: Tim Taylor <tim@tool-man.org>
To: Rachel <rachel@banksimple.com>
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2011 11:45:17 -0500
Subject: Re: Thank You from BankSimple

Hi Rachel,

Thanks for expressing interest in my story. I have a lot of ideas. I apologize for the verbosity that follows.

Simplicity

“Your Honor, it goes to his state of mind”

One time I hired a financial advisor thinking this would help me get a handle on my finances and financial obligations. It was a disaster. Instead of simplifying my life, she just created more opportunities for me to make money, but the net result was more things for me to think about and deal with. I managed in the beginning, but the system eventually broke down completely. This was largely my fault for not (yet) realizing that simplicity was more important to me than maximizing my income or investments. I probably just needed an accountant, not an advisor.

The moral of the story: if it feels like a chore I’ll eventually stop doing it. If my financial well being depends on it getting done, then things will go south and I’ll be a sad panda just like I am with Chase (checking, Amazon.com Visa) and BoA (mortgage, bleh). If it can’t be made simple, then I need to be able to a) automate it or b) outsource it.

Example of Chase and BoA Simplicity Failsauce

Chase and BoA, both of which I’ve used their online banking, try but fail to make it simple to keep track of where I spend my money. They make an admirable attempt at grouping my expenses into proper categories, but they fail at this enough (categorizing incorrectly or not at all) to make it untrustworthy. I don’t want to spend time manually correcting the categorizations if they’re not going to learn from my corrections, gradually improving over time. If they could learn, like my Mail.app junk mail filter, then it would be worth my time up front helping it categorize.

(See ginourmous paragraph under Automation for another Chase failwhale)

Shared access

Mah Famileh

My partner Chuck and I have our own accounts. We’d like to keep it this way. But I’d also like the ability for Chuck to access my account without me sharing my username and password. And because BankSimple will be so rockin’ awesome and Chuck will have his own account, he’d like to be able to grant access to me to his.

Outsource your life

To help manage my life, I’ve been considering hiring a virtual private assistant and/or part-time accountant. Once I determine they are trustworthy, I want them to access and use my account on my behalf also without having to divulge my username and password and to be able to disable and revoke (or just revoke) their access when I am done with their services.

Automation

I’m notoriously bad at keeping up with my finances. It’s like a chore for which I do everything in my power to avoid and procrastinate on. Part of this a character flaw; I’m working on it with my therapist. But partly I recognize that I’ll never be that super organized guy WRT banking and personal finance because I just don’t want to be that guy. In my eyes, that guy is boring and no fun. So I have to find ways to work around who I’m really going to be; one of those workarounds is automation.

Automatic Payments Saved Me From Myself…

…or at least partially. Things were much worse before I finally ditched the irrational shame of not being able to “hack it” at paying bills on time manually and first took advantage of banking automation.

I learned that getting my bills paid on time meant automatic bill payment. First, I use my credit card for every recurring payment I can. Those which only accept checks, if it’s a fixed monthly payment, I use Chase’ automatic bill pay. I have no good system for recurring bills with varying amounts which don’t allow me to pay via Visa. Such as my electric bill.

I used to authorize my electric company to deduct from my checking directly.  But I got leery of them having such access with having no control or limits, even to the point of having to trust them to stop deducting from my account when I requested it. Solution: Chuck pays the electric bill manually.

I would go back to automatic deductions if:

• I could generate a new account # just for that payee
• That account is automatically funded
• I can set limits on debits
• I can disable/revoke the account at my leisure

For purchases I use PayPal whenever possible. Failing that, I use my Amazon.com Visa.

So a large portion of bill payment goes on my Visa. Making sure that’s always paid off every month is a less than perfect process.

Chase’s Automatic Banking Failwhale

And so I also have automatic transfers from Checking to my Visa (xfers since their both Chase accounts). But it’s fixed at $400 every 2 weeks, which I once estimated — ala The Price Right — is the closest amount without going over of charges I incur in that time period.

Problem is, I then go and make an impulse buy of the entire Beatles collection on iTunes, and register for some conferences, and buy my husbear some roses. And then I’ve maxed out my (intentionally low credit limit) because I didn’t remember to sign in to online banking and do a 1-time extra transfer of funds (you know, from that 1 account Chase knows about to that other account Chase knows about) and because I refuse to buy their overdraft protection because it’s a royal screw job from people who learned the rules of banking last millennia. And then my cell phone bill’s automatic payment fails, which triggers AT&T to immediately disable automatic payment in perpetuity, so then I’m also racking up late fees on my mobile bill because my automation house of cards came down from one tiny gust that only existed because my bank thinks I have 2 accounts, whereas I think of it as “my big ball of money with 2 ways to give it to other people depending on which method they accept”.

Extra Credit: Public API

I’m a coder. Give me a RESTful API and I’ll happily code up some of my own automation without your development team having to suss out exactly what specialized long-tail needs I have. And I’ll share it on Github so you can use it, too, in case I’m not the unique and special snowflake I think I am.

Rewards

I love my Amazon.com Visa. Chase just about ruined it a couple years ago. Here’s how it used to work:

1. Tim earns points by spending with his Amazon.com Visa
2. Tim’s points balance reaches X
3. Chase or Amazon mails Tim $25 gift certificate
4. Tim opens mail, signs in to amazon.com, and redeems using unique code printed on dead trees

Then Chase turned it into a generic rewards card. Now I’m earning generic Chase rewards points for Chase’s generic rewards catalog which at least still contains the $25 Amazon.com gift cert, but now my rewards process works like this:

1. Tim earns points by spending with his Amazon.com Visa
2. Tim has to periodically check if his points balance has reached X, usually he just checks infrequently and then his balance is some uneven multiple of X
3. Tim logs in to Chase’s online banking, clicks around until he remembers how to find the rewards catalog
4. Tim searches for Amazon.com gift certs amongst all the other rewards he doesn’t care about
5. Tim adds N number of $25 gift certs (because they only come in $25)
6. Tim check’s out
7. Chase or Amazon mails Tim $25 gift certificate
8. Tim opens mail, signs in to amazon.com, and redeems using unique code printed on dead trees

Don’t offer me a rewards program that’s such a pain to use that you are obviously hoping I won’t bother redeeming. I’d be happy for a return to the simpler “original” way, but here’s how it should work:

1. Tim links his Visa account to his Amazon.com account
2. Tim earns points by spending with his Amazon.com Visa
3. Tim’s points balance reaches X
4. Bank debits X loyalty points, bank tells Amazon.com to credit $25 to Tim’s linked account
5. Amazon.com emails Tim: “Hey, you’ve earned a $25 reward…”

Mobile

Why can get my account balances and recent transaction history as an SMS reply (after linking my phone number), but I have to fully sign in to the Chase or BoA iPhone app just to see the same information? The first time using the app, I should be able to authorize/link it to my account. After that, I should be able to see my balances and account history. There’s no more exposure there than with the SMS linkage. Maybe I could even deposit a dead-tree check received occasionally. Only when I tried to do transfers, payments, or add/edit stuff should I need to provide my password.

Evernote — or — @BankSimple, You Don’t Have to Do Everything Yourselves

I’ve adopted Evernote as my trusted digital file cabinet. Every month, I’m notified via email that my checking account statement is available. Then I log in to online banking and find the statement — because the email didn’t include a direct link, or better yet, the PDF itself. When I click the statement it loads up a clever popup window with the PDF in an iFrame. Then I open the frame in a new tab (finally, this is the PDF!) and I clip this PDF to Evernote. Then, I switch to Evernote and change the “Created” date to match the closing date of the statement and change the title to something meaningful like “Chase Checking Statement” and assign it some tags. Oh, and then I repeat this some other day of the month when I receive my credit card statement.

It would be a dream if I could link my Evernote account and my statements automatically got posted to the notebook of my choosing, created with a reasonably informative title and consistent creation date.

100% Digital (Pipe Dream Mix)

Why do I even need to carry a wallet around? Why should I have cash or plastic when I carry a device (iPhone) which has direct access to my funds. Wave my iPhone across one of those “Blink” transaction pads, pick credit or debit as usual, confirmations, signatures, etc., done. RFID or QR code the pop/snack machine, make my selection in the iPhone app or on the machines website, $$ as bits change hands and clank my Coke or bag of Cheetos is vended to me.

Loaning money to a friend, paying my lawn care guy, donating to the Cub Scout outside Kroger? We should be able to do that by both opening up our app on our PDA/smart phone/portable-digital-device/forever-online-body-implant and I pick an amount, confirm that I’m linked to person across from me (not Joe Blackhat with a Yagi antenna 300m away), and flick the $$ over to them like I’m playing Tiddlywinks.

Never gonna make you cry (Star Trek NG Mix feat. @toolbear74)

Invent the Matter Replicator, a variation on the Transporter technology, thus abolishing the scarcity of physical goods and the basis of wealth. A societal revolution ensues and we boldly go where no person has gone before.

Denouement

I’m looking forward to any number of these, but especially the Matter Replicator followed by banking that is so easy breezy simple even a slacker like me can appear financially responsible.

Read part two of the conversation

Upsides:

• All the content migrated
• Same top-level URL: http://blog.tool-man.org/
• Version of WordPress will always be current (security holes fixed, spammers defeated)

Downsides:

• Permalinks broken (if I’d stuck with the default scheme that wouldn’t have happened. Meh.)
• Comments’ author names retained, but I think you’ll need to register again
• Old RSS subscriptions may be broken (if you were previously subscribed via RSS and you’re seeing this, comment below and I’ll change this to an upside)
• WordPress.com doesn’t have a MarkDown plugin (boo, hiss) so my manual conversions after the migration showed up as a bunch of article updates. Only a downside, really, if old RSS subscriptions still work.

GitHub Repository for DHTML Library on the Way

Sometime before 2011 arrives I’ll release my dated DHTML library to GitHub. Then anyone who uses it — no, really, you should be using JQuery, Dojo, YUI, GWT, but if you insist — will be able to fork my library and, say, fix that pesky IE8 bug, and easily share it back to the world on GitHub. This will be far superior to the current approach of pasting fixes in comments which everyone has to manually apply to their copy.

I’ll probably also add another license (LGPL or something) in addition to the current MIT license.

I’m more than surprised at the longevity of my little library, particularly in the presence of robust libraries like Dojo, JQuery, YUI, GWT, and others.

I have nothing but thanks to everyone who has supported this project through your links, bumps, bug reports and suggestions, bug fixes or patches, or use of my library.

I have special thanks to everyone who made a donation. I’ve removed the donation box from my site and I will tally up the donations received (as best I can) and donate the 50% to Dojo and 50% to JQuery.

A testament to web standards, my library has held up surprisingly well in Safari and Firefox. Internet Explorer, not so much.

I’m leaving my library code and example site up as well as keeping this blog around. Be patient if I don’t moderate your post right away, but I will get to it. My license remains the very permissive MIT license. The code and examples are yours to do with what you want.

Again, thank you for the interest and support.

[1]: http://www.studiowhiz.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7896
[2]: http://www.studiowhiz.com/

You suck:

Sincerely,

Fed Up With Beat Software

At this point I’ve given up on Backup and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner

Here are the Top 5 Reasons to be Excited about Version 0.2:

1. IE support. Most examples have been verified to work properly in IE6.

2. Rewritten from scratch; designed for reuse. The new library is more
   modular, better packaged, and less likely to have name collisions with
   your code and other 3rd party libraries.

3. It’s free! Permission granted for personal and commercial use via the
   liberal MIT license.

4. Improved quality. Cleaner, less duplicated code. Where possible,
   library modules have unit tests written using Selenium.

5. This is only version 0.2. It just gets better from here.

ToolMan.junkdrawer().serializeList(myList)

It returns a string representation of the list as described in the remainder of this post.

Tim Erfle and several others have asked a question like the following:

Is there anyway to report the order of the list after it has been sorted by the user? Its a super cool script, but it would be helpful if store the user modified order in the database.

Because the sorting is done by rearranging elements in the DOM, all you have to do is iterate over the parent element’s children to extract the new order. For example:

function foo(listID) {
    var list = document.getElementById(listID);
    var items = list.getElementsByTagName("li");
    var itemsString = "";
    for (var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
        if (itemsString.length > 0) itemsString += ":";
        itemsString += items[i].innerHTML;
    }
    alert(itemsString);
}

To use this in a form submit replace alert(itemsString) with something like myHiddenInput.value = itemsString. Or you could stuff itemsString in a cookie or pass it back to the server with XMLHttpRequest. The above example uses items[i].innerHTML which works fine so long as your list items are plain text. A better approach is to give each LI element a unique identifier. You can use the ID attribute or — if you’re not concerned about valid XHTML — invent a new attribute to use. A list would look something like this:

<ul>
    <li listID="325"><a href="...">Copper</a></li>
    <li listID="27"><a href="...">Gold</a></li>
    <li listID="131"><a href="...">Gold</a></li>
    ...
</ul>

And use a script like this to extract the order:

function foo(listID, formInput) {
    var list = document.getElementById(listID);
    var items = list.getElementsByTagName("li");
    var itemIDs = "";
    for (var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
        if (itemIDs.length > 0) itemIDs += ":";
        itemIDs += items[i].getAttribute("listID");
    }
    // do something with itemIDs
}

I don’t know if you are interested, but I was playing with one of your examples of the drag and drop sortable lists and made some changes to allow dragging between multiple lists. I don’t really know how useful that would be, but it seems to work for the most part.

I think it’s pretty damn useful. I especially like that he highlights the drop targets.