Life is an IQ test

It took me a day to finally figure out what's going on with my Bank of America "keep the change" thing-y. So the deal is: asymptotically, they're paying you 5% for "the change" (well, after 3 months actually.). It's ok if you shop 2 times a day and on average, the change is 50 cents. Then your "change" is 1 dollar a day and 360 in total, so you get 18 dollars by, de facto, saving $360 dollars in Bank of America. So it is almost equivalent to a 5% annual interest rate saving's account. If you can find a CD of higher interest rate and you can plan your money well, you shouldn't really let them do "keep the change" to your account because they are transferring the change out of your checking account that you can spend.

So, life is an IQ test. Not only are you faced with those choices that you don't really know what to do with but also products are adding to the "intellectual" selection.

I bought a TI 83 plus calculator for my statistics class. The manual is as thick as my statistics book. Even though the contents are more spreaded out in the manual, still, which exactly is easier? I imagined the calculator would help me...

A friend got a home TV studio. We were trying to get PIP (picture in picture) but there are altogether 8 buttons on 2 out of 3 remotes that controls PIP. Well, if pressing one button should work, we are to try 8 times, if pressing altogether 2 buttons makes it work, we have potentially 64 choices. Oh, and we have 12 books of manuals too.

Another friend had this security system in her car that you need to do many things just to start it...

I've always liked complexities because above all, I'm a math major. But I just wonder why people are paying the bank (you think the bank is paying you interest but look at how rich the bankers get), the designers to make things complicated.

If I were to predict what's going to succeed in 2008, simple things. So "Linux for human" can make a hit, *indows that asks you whether to send out a problem report or how to deal with this security problem every other minute fails.

What will beat iPhone and Blackberry? Blackberry has the charming QWERTY keyboard, iPhone has its amazing features and visual effects. A phone that calls whoever you tells it to call and you input your messages through speech recognition. (This could be technologically hard, but no pain no gain right?)

So moral of the story: frozen food is good, again. Easy and simple :).