Hokie
Hokie's JournalMedallion Signature Verification
I just went through two days of pure hell trying to find a bank to do a Medallion Signature Verification for a document I needed to send to Fidelity. I went to six bank branches (three of which I am a customer) and either they no longer provided the stamp or only did it for customers. I ended up driving three hours round trip to a Fidelity office in Naples where they accepted the form w/o the Medallion stamp since it was their document.
The form was a simple two page document to allow me to transfer money to my adult daughter's Fidelity account from time to time in excess of the default limit. On this particular form Fidelity requires a Medallion signature guaranty on a paper document. A simple notary is not acceptable.
The experience also taught me how hard it is to call a bank branch. On most of them I never was able to navigate voice automation hell and get to a real person.
Does anyone watch Peacock TV on the Samsung app?
I watch Peacock TV using the Samsung app on my 3 year old QLED TV's. Some channels have no sound. It started a couple of weeks ago. One channel in particular with no sound is the one that carries the Dan Patrick Show and Rich Eisen Show. The app works on Firestick and Chrome TV. I have tried a bunch of things like rebooting the TV and reinstalling the app.
Optum Rx Mail Order Pharmacy is terrible
I am on a Medicare Advantage plan offered by AARP/United Health Care. They use Optum Rx for mail order prescriptions. I changed from the UHC Medicare Supplemental plan to the Medicare Advantage plan at the beginning of 2021.
On the Supplemental plan CVS handled mail order prescriptions. I never had a single problem with them. When I switched over in January my first problem was that Optum RX said they could not port over my prescriptions that still had remaining refills from CVS. OK, no problem, I had my doctor write all new scripts to Optum. One of my prescriptions is for a combo high blood presure med. It is a generic for Exforge or Alodipine/Valsartan/Hydrochlorothiazide. I had never experienced any problem getting it from two other mail order pharmacies.
I waited for weeks on the BP medication and all Optum could tell me is that it was out of stock. No they did not know when it would be in stock. So finally when I got down to a week's worth of pills someone at Optum RX finally said they could fill it with individual prescriptions for the components. However my doctor would have to wrote new scripts. So that is how I proceeded. Now I had to take two extra pills every day.
Last month at my six month checkup I asked my doctor to try to see if I could get the combination drug again. So he apparently wrote the prescription for Exforge, which is the brand name. Optum RX first sent me an email saying order needed a clarification from the doctor. The next email said the order was cancelled. The third email said they were filling the Exforge order and the cost was $1450 for a 90 day supply! The cost of the generic I was supposed to be getting was $0.00. The fourth email said the prescription was under review.
This is a simple medication that I have taken for over 10 years and never had a problem getting. Now Optum Rx is wearing out my patience. I have checked the AARP forums and others have found them to be terrible as well.
Now I have no clue what is going on. Their customer service folks are polite but are all ESL clueless and spend the last 5 minutes on the phone trying to get you to say they have solved the issue (they never do) and making sure you give them a good rating.
Windows keeps removing the Firefox shortcut from my task bar
This is a weird one. On one of my computers Windows keeps removing the Firefox icon from my task bar. It is an older (2011) HP desktop running Windows 10. It doesn't happen on another HP desk top nor on my laptop.
When it happens the icon turns to a white rectangle and no longer works. I delete it then drag the Firefox icon on the desktop down to the task bar to add it back. I have the lock task bar choice checked in settings.
Can't figure why the NYT isn't calling Arizona
Biden is up over 90K/3.4% with 98% reporting
NYT now has Georgia tilting Biden
63% Biden now.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-president.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-2020®ion=TOP_BANNER&context=election_recirc
Good sign: Our absentee ballots made it from Florida to Colorado in 5 days
Mrs. Hokie and I are in Florida for the winter. For several reasons I was late requesting absentee ballots for us. Fremont county in Colorado mailed them out on the Saturday before last. We received them last Wednesday, voted them and rushed to the post office before they closed. I just got notice today they have been accepted. Thanks to our county for working on Saturday to get them out to us.
I hope this is a good sign that despite Trump's best efforts to kill it the folks at the USPS are getting the job done.
Has anyone applied for a cancellation with Orbitz since the COVID-19 crisis?
I have used Orbitz for booking flights for a number of years. I never needed to apply for a refund until this weekend. I had a business trip scheduled that had to be canceled because of issues related to the epidemic. Since my flight was on Untied I went to my account there to cancel. Their site just has a button you click on to cancel. When I clicked it said since I had booked through a third party I would have to go through them.
I went to Orbitz and found that instead of just clicking on a button you have to fill out an on line form. Nothing from the reservation carries over to the form. You have to enter the locator code, departure date, and booking date all over again. The form instructions are goofed up too. It asks for the itinerary number but after trying to enter that multiple times without success I figured that it actually wanted the ticket number.
I will try calling today but the web site warns about very long wait times. I am getting the sinking feeling my refund is going to take weeks. I did screen shot everything I entered and the confirmation page when the form was finally accepted.
Is "fast boot" in Windows 10 causing issues for anyone?
I learned recently that Windows 10 by default turns on a power setting called "fast boot". I won't go into what it does but you can Google it and find all the details. The bottom line is that with this setting turned on you are not really doing a full shutdown when you shut down Windows. The RAM is still powered and holds some things in memory.
That's great if it works but I began having start up issues on my HP Pavilion 590 desktop after the last Windows feature update. The PC would boot to a dark gray screen and lock up. I had to hold down the power button for 5 seconds to get it to reboot. Crashing down like this can be a recipe for disaster.
After trying several things I finally stumbled across this fast boot setting under the system and power menu. I turned it off and that seems to have cured the issue. I believe the problem might have been related to installing an NVME M.2 SSD and moving the OS over to that. It does take slightly longer to boot but still boots quickly with the SSD as the boot drive. If your PC is having trouble booting at times you might check this setting.
To change it go to Settings, System, Power & Sleep, choose Additional Power Settings, then select choose what the power buttons do. The settings will be grayed out but you can click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable". You have to be logged in as an administrator to access the setting.
I want to add an SSD to an older HP desktop with two 500 GB mechanical drives in RAID 0
I have 7 year old HP desktop. It has two 500 GB mechanical drives in a RAID 0, 1 terabyte configuration. I just did an SSD upgrade with a Samsung 500 GB SSD on my laptop and it worked very well. I cloned the existing mechanical drive to the SSD using a USB cable and then replaced the mechanical drive with the cloned SSD. This worked very well. It cut my boot time way down and everything runs faster.
Now I want to do the same on an HP desktop. I have about 250 GB used counting the OS, programs and data. The new SSD is a 500 GB so it will hold what I have now. I want to keep the existing mechanical drives for data. It dawned on me that this might not be as simple to do as I thought. What I plan to do is install the SSD and hook it up to a spare SATA port (not where the RAID drives are connected). I will clone the RAID 0 C: drive using the Samsung cloning software. Then I will remove or disconnect the existing mechanical drives and reboot. I might have to change the boot order in the BIOS settings.
Here is where I am stumped. I am thinking I might reformat the existing mechanical drives on another PC and plug them back into the desktop. Can I keep the RAID 0 setting and use these drives for data? I have a sinking feeling that this might not work and that the PC still might try to boot from the RAID drives when they are installed. I suppose I can turn off RAID in the BIOS and just install them as single 500 GB drives? Has anyone tried anything like this?
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