April 30, 2006

E*Trade

There are very few companies that I've done business with for many years that haven't undergone a name change during that time. T-Mobile for awhile was Voicestream and before that, when I signed up with them back in June of 1998, they were called Omnipoint. In fact my GSM SIM card still says Omnipoint on it. E*Trade, well E*Trade Bank in particular, used to be called Telebank when I first started doing business with them back in Mar of 1999. If you haven't guessed, I'm also fairly loyal to companies, if they continue to offer the features I want at a reasonable value. I'm sure there are others but those come to mind first since my mobile phone is sitting on my desk next to a letter from E*Trade Financial/Bank.

It seems that the reason I signed up with Telebank many years ago, which was their killer super savings account which morphed into the SmartSaver Account, is being discontinued. At the time Telebank had some of the highest interest rates available, a cool online banking site, and a few months later, cool electronic bill payment if you also had a checking account with them. This was before ING Direct and other similar financial products had really broken into the mainstream, or in some cases even existed. Alas, E*Trade has decided to convert their SmartSaver accounts into Money Market Accounts. This might be one of those times to check and see if my loyalty to them has wavered.

Tags: banking etrade history tmobile

April 30, 2006

Gas Prices

I had to fill my car up last night. I had been running the tank to empty in anticipation of getting the fuel filler hose replaced as part of the recent recall. Turns out the tool initially created to handle the repair doesn't work. Nissan is in the process of redesigning the tool and it should be ready sometime in May. Let's hope my car doesn't catch fire :)

Since I had run my tank almost dry I needed a lot of fuel. I was unhappy that on pulling into the local gas station the premium fuel cost was back over $3. Even with how little I drive my car, or more importantly need to drive my car, $45 to fill up a tank is starting to get into the crazy territory. Unless I'm doing highway driving the Z doesn't get very good city mileage so that tank doesn't get me very far. I'll be curious to see how high it goes this time.

Tags: car gas history