After an aborted attempt to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, I decided to see how Linux actually works. There are some appealing aspects about Linux. For someone who was a teenager in the 1970s, there’s a sense about moving back to something simpler; back to cars where you could actually seen the engine when you opened the hood – and work on it. Back to standard transmissions, where you not only had more direct control but could feel it. The downside of that era was that while you could work on the car yourself, you also needed to with some frequency – and analogy that also carries over to open source.

I had decided to install Linux on a new, unformatted hard drive which I had recently purchased (increasing the capacity from 80GB to 500GB), and leaving XP on the smaller drive as an alternative system. That sent me searching for information about what kind of format I should use to back up files for this conversion – for which I basically found nothing. Information about the installation was also extremely slanted towards those who planned to install Linux over XP, to create one dual-boot drive. That left me with the problem about formatting the new hard drive for Linux. The preferred format is ext3, but it seems to require Linux in order to do that – a double-bind.

I downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 and burned it onto a CD as the (limited) instructions described. What information I could find about the installation seemed straightforward, so I tried simply using the CD to install directly to the blank hard drive, in hopes that it would take care of formatting, too. I managed to get the CD to run and watched the drive spin for about an hour and a half. It seemed like a big hard drive – I had no way to guess what was happening or how long it should take. As it turned out, nothing was happening.

I eventually gave up, shut down the process, and checked again for more information. I found that the installation required getting the computer to boot from the Ubuntu CD, which for some reason was also not simple. (In my case, it required installing an extra piece of software from the CD to help with the boot process.) I got the installation started and – low and behold – not only did the Ubuntu disk take care of formatting the drive, it also installed Open Office, found drivers for my printers, and made a copy of all the files on my other C drive. (I’m still not sure how that happened.)

Over the next few days, using Ubuntu varied between wonderful and exasperating. Ubuntu starts up and shuts down in seconds – not minutes, like Windows. It is, in many ways, elegant in its simplicity. It’s actually difficult to find antivirus software for Ubuntu, apparently because it’s considered unnecessary. But it is clearly built and maintained by programmers and engineers, not designers.

Small things are only small if they are familiar. The image on an external monitor defaults to the same resolution settings as the laptop screen. Adjusting that seemed simple. You go to System: Preferences: Monitors, uncheck the box that says “same image in all monitors,” and then two monitor images appear with new choices for the external monitor. The only problem was that this caused the panels (like Toolbars in Windows) to disappear – so that there was no way to find or start any settings or programs on the screen. After forcing a shutdown, restarting, and doing some additional searching, it turns out that you have to turn off the laptop screen while using the external monitor, then everything works fine. But this kind of quirk seems to appear with regularity.

More critically, Linux represents many of the gaps between the ways that engineers think and operate in the world, and the way that “regular people” do. Average users simply do not work in DOS screens, or in lines of code found in root directories. Some of the help for small problems offered online seem to recognize this, as solutions are given in terms of “go to this place and paste in this line of code, then save…” But in general, Linux still exists in a world of engineers and programmers, and is not likely to gain large amounts of market share (despite being free) until that gap is narrowed.

Now on to actually using the system..

Two days after my posting about PNC’s online banking system, I got a call from one of the techs in the department to which big problems get elevated (the ones you can’t call from outside PNC).  He had also been with National City, so knew both systems well.  He listened fairly patiently to my rantings, but had no real explanations for the past problems – other than that it had taken a full year to switch all the new customers over to PNC’s systems.  He was able, though, to segregate my business from my personal accounts while we spoke, which immediately resolved the conflicts with payees and put the different accounts into different online areas, as they should have been from the beginning (one under personal banking and the other under small business banking, with separate log-ins.) Surprisingly, he gave me his contact information so that I could reach him for additional help as necessary.

He also corrected some of my misunderstandings about the system:

First, payment instructions from Quicken and QuickBooks do not go to Intuit, as I was told by one of the online reps.  They in fact go to Fiserv (see previous post), who acts as both the front and the back end of the process for PNC.  This is different than National City’s system, where they had their own OFX servers for processing Quicken and QuickBooks information almost instantaneously.  (Getting a similar system up and going for PNC is apparently in discussion.)

The easiest workaround, the tech rep confirmed, is to use PNC’s online web payment interface, which can then be downloaded to Quicken or QuickBooks for archiving, and for my end of year accounting.

The immediate question is whether to continue setting up accounts with USAA, which functions as something approaching an open source alternative for finance.  They maintain a large, low-cost system which relies on infrastructure set up by others.  (USAA customers can access most any other bank’s ATM’s, and have the charges for using them reimbursed by USAA.)  On a practical basis, using USAA requires still having a local bank account for deposits and transfer to USAA accounts.  There are apparently ways to scan checks directly to USAA, once you have been approved for a credit card (?) – or just to mail checks to them in San Antonio, but that obviously incurs days of delay for access to the money.

This all begins to feed into my other recent journey of moving from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu)… in the next post.

The announcement that National City was being acquired by PNC Bank happened towards the end of October, 2008.  It was many months before the signs on the local branches where I live changed, and not until the third weekend in February, 2010 that the online banking system switched to PNC.  So basically, PNC had about 16 months to get ready for the switchover.  Since then, it’s hard to believe or explain how many ways they have failed.  (Admittedly, this is only person’s experience, but you can’t have this many problems just by accident.)

I had multiple accounts with the bank, including savings, personal checking, my small business account and a business credit card.  Right out of the box, PNC merged all of the accounts into one online space, therefore also merging and scrambling the online payees for the personal and business accounts in their website.  It seems like that should have been an easy fix.  Six months later, apparently it’s not.  More importantly, the hidden problems behind this were more than I could have guessed.

The first set of transactions from PNC’s online system sent three payments to American Electric Power.  One of those was for the electric bill, as was scheduled.  The second was for our water and sewer bill, which should have gone to the city utilities.  The third was a fairly large credit card payment.  By the time I discovered the error, of course, the credit card payment was overdue, creating problems there.

I contacted the local head of the bank to explain the problem.  The first thing that I discovered was that he had no clue as to how the online banking system worked.  In fact, he admitted, his wife paid their bills at home.  He did try to help, but it took three weeks to get this first problem resolved.  AEP understood the problem (sort of) but their accounting system was not set up to give money back to customers.  That required certified letters from the bank, and time to process.

Long story made short, it required many phone calls over a couple of months before I finally found someone who could even explain the different actors involved.

I use Quicken for our personal accounts and Quickbooks for the business.  What I learned, though, was that when I set up a payment in Quicken or Quickbooks it was separate from the online payment website.  My payment instructions went first to Intuit (the maker of Quicken and Quickbooks) and was sent in batch to PNC the next day.  The important point is that the list of payees in Quicken and Quickbooks is also separate from PNC’s online system.  I could manage the payee information in PNC’s system.  I could not, though, even see the payee information that PNC received from Intuit.  So in this case, I could verify that my payee information in my copy of Quicken was correct for the credit card company, but I could not see what PNC received from Intuit (wrong address, wrong account numbers, etc.), much less correct the information.  Nor, apparently, could PNC’s online assistants.

The next piece of information was that PNC does not directly transmit money from my accounts to the vendors I am trying to pay.  That is done by third-party called Fiserv (http://www.fiserv.com/).  (Fiserv acquired Checkfree, which was an electronic bill payment service that I used in the early 1990s, before banks had their own online systems.)  So it was actually Fiserv that transmitted my credit card payment to the power company, based on information or reasoning that I did not have access to.  (PNC online banking would not give me a direct number to talk to them, though at one point they did conference a representative in on a call in yet another failed attempt to resolve one of the problems.)

Since I could not access or correct any information from Intuit (if that was the problem) inside PNC’s system, the solution seemed to be to quit using both Quicken and Quickbooks and work directly through PNC’s website, entering my intended payments there.  That would have been OK, except for the original problem of merging all of my accounts together.  When I went to the Pay Bills tab in PNC’s site, the only account linked there was my business checking.  I was unable to schedule payments from our personal checking account for our personal bills.  Without the gory details, it took until the end of August to get the personal account linked.

In the mean time, payments continued to get misdirected.  I got up one morning to find no water coming from the faucets in the house.  I eventually discovered that the city had turned it off for non-payment, for which I had to drive to the city offices to pay by check, including a reconnection fee.  This time, the local bank head didn’t even bother to return my call.

The latest episode involved yet another payment made from the wrong account while I was traveling on business, overdrawing the account and locking me out of the electronic payment system.  This time, the number that showed up in the message was directly to Fiserv.  The representative there explained that Fiserv actually makes payments from its own accounts, then recoups the money from my accounts at PNC.  In this case, they had been unable to get the money for some of my payments because PNC said that they did not recognize my account numbers.  They were within moments of bouncing yet another payment, asking the vendor for their money back since they could not get it from my account at PNC.

The Fiserv rep guessed that there was a problem with the account numbers (though many payments in the past had gone through, obviously).  He advised me to go to PNC’s system and correct the account numbers, which I explained was absolutely impossible.  He seemed unable to believe this, and took the extra effort to conference in a PNC online banking rep.  The woman there verified that not only could I not correct the account numbers, neither could she.  She had no idea who Fiserv was, nor what the problems might be with the payments.  She forwarded the call to a higher level tech office for PNC, who is also not accessible from outside lines.  The rep there verified that he could see the entire log of problems and calls over the last six months, and apologized – but with no resolution.  When the Fiserv rep said that he had done all he could, he hung up, disconnecting the call with PNC as well – and needless to say, there was no call back from them.

If there was an easy banking alternative where I live, I would obviously have switched months ago.  Living in small, rural areas comes at price, though.  Bank of America gets great reviews, but does not operate in Kentucky.  No other large, national bank is close by, either.  Since I travel internationally with some frequency, I need to have dependable access there as well.

I have just set up an account at USAA (http://www.usaa.com), an online banking system originally set up for US military personnel, which now allows other members as well – for some services.  Unfortunately, you really need a local bank account as well for making deposits, etc., so this is only an interim solution.  More as the saga unfolds…