maybe I am a foot man and don’t realize it. Does anyone else think it is incredibly sexy in that Cadillac CTS commercial when the woman is driving and right after she says “When you turn your car on, does it return the favor…” they show a woman’s high heel adorned foot mashing the gas pedal? That flips an internal switch with me for some reason, every single time.
Well my hope for a fix for my problem at work went out the window yesterday. It was back to a regular hanging schedule. Damn it. I have made another 4 or 5 changes since yesterday. It’s very hard to keep things straight at this point since I have made so many tweaks.
So tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Today was a throwback to the days when Ali was a regular employee. She actually got up and went to work with me as well as Nicki tagging along. (Nicki was extremely excited) The reason is after work all of us are going to the local running club meeting. I am doing a presentation about options available to the club as far as automatic timing of their races. We hope to get off the inefficient, slow and error prone card system that the club has been using forever. I am hoping the club goes with an RFID based chip system made by a German company called DAG. It seems to offer a lot of value for the money. If the club does go for this it is going to be my baby to make work. I look forward to the challenge of getting it off the ground. I think runners that participate in the races will really appreciate modern timing methods being used. My role in each race would be rather critical and I kind of like that.
After the meeting we are going to be picking up mom to stay over at our place tonight. I know mom is less than thrilled about staying over although I can’t quite tell you why. It’s no problem for us accommodating her and we have most of what she needs at the house already, plus we just enjoy having her over. It will be cool to have mom there first thing Thanksgiving morning to watch the parade, cook food and stuff. We will make our normal round of phone calls as well. Calling my grandmother on holidays has become a real challenge anymore. She apparently is getting to be real senile or under siege from Alzheimer’s. Any attempted conversations I have had with her in recent years are as painful as you can imagine. Any questions you ask are generally greeted with one word replies and you realize that she doesn’t even really know who she is speaking to. It is pretty miserable. I still think we need to make the effort. Last night I put the pool heater on to get the water cooking. It has a long way to go, the water was 69 degrees when I started. It was up to 74 this morning.
The rest of the four days off will probably involve a lot of painting related activities mixed in with normal housework crap.
When I worked an Entre/Ameridata/GE this was the time leading up to the famous Friday after Thanksgiving tradition, the Turkey Bowl. For a span of 5 or 6 years a bunch of us would leave work early Friday afternoon, put on the sweats, spikes and football jerseys and hit one of the local playing fields for a lively game of “two hand touch” football.
It was always great fun and always filled with controversy. The one year a friend of Tim’s almost got into a fight with one of the managers, Paul over overly rough play. Then there was Johnny Bravo, a guy that bragged about how good he was at football (and everything else for that matter) but when put to the test in a game, came up majorly short. Speaking of short, Bob Sensenig was a staple at early Turkey Bowls. Bob always insisted on being QB even though he was barely 5 feet tall and had no arm. Emmett was a Turkey Bowl powerhouse even though he was much older than most of the other players. The one year when I was playing against him I fell and got my head trampled by his spikes. I’m pretty sure I had a concussion. Mike Lien was deceptively fast and powerful despite his short stature and hairy face. Charlie was a little fireplug, throwing his body into harm’s way regularly with no concern of injury. Tim was tall and lanky like me. He made a few plays but his strongpoint was insulting the opposing team. Rusty was a big boy whom we relied on strictly for blocking and short yardage situations (which there were none of). And of course who can forget Heart Punch Kliney. He earned his nickname by punching oncoming rushers in the heart area of the chest as they approached. He was ruthless.
Early on in the Turkey bowl phenomena we would get together at a bar after the game and drink our aches and pains away. As the tradition was dying down, the after game bar visit went away.
It was a great time. I miss the camaraderie I enjoyed working with that group of people. Only one Turkey Bowl was ever captured on film. I was able to recover this footage from the NFL Films vault.
I may have actually made some progress in stabilizing our cashiering system at work. The system is run on .NET 1.1. As I described earlier we have had terrible lock up problems since tax season started and any attempts made by the vendor to correct the issue have been fruitless. Well late last week I was digging around and noticed that I never had applied Windows Server 2003 Service pack 2 to the server. Reading through the bug fixes, I saw at least 20 .NET related bugs it addressed. Well I figured it couldn’t be any worse so I applied it over the weekend. Yesterday things magically settled down. We didn’t have to reset the box a single time which is a first since tax season begun. I don’t want to get too excited, as we have had time periods before where we thought the problem was fixed by something I tried, only to have it return later. We have never gone a full day without resetting though, until yesterday. Yesterday also happened to be the highest volume of over the counter payments so far. I’m crossing my fingers and holding my breath.
Heroes is really good again and supposedly there are only two episodes left. I am not quite sure how they are going wrap up this storyline so fast. Each episode there are at least 5 or 6 characters that don’t show up, there are just far too many of them. I wish they could make the episodes longer or not mutilate them with 6 or 7 commercial breaks.
I am feeling pretty beat up from my 300 yesterday.
I got my hands on the new Loose change flick, Final Cut. I am looking forward to viewing it over the 4 day weekend. If I come in on Monday all pissed off again you will know why.
Because of a combination of minor injuries and short weeks, I hadn’t done a 300 for two weeks. I should have known better than to bring the watch. Jeremy had shown me some clips of Cross Fit people doing the 300 and in those clips I saw people banging out the dead lifts rapid fire. I figured, hey I can do the same. So I start banging them out and I start getting really tired. I manage to do them almost a full 25 seconds faster than I normally do them. However I paid dearly through the rest of the workout. Spending extra energy early on in the routine left precious little energy left to finish it. I struggled through every exercise and by the time I got through the one handed C&P’s I was done. I was so tired that it felt dangerous like I could pass out. So even though I was still on pace to make a good time, I said f it and just sat on a bench for more than 5 minutes trying to regain my energy. After that I trudged over to the pull up bar and knocked out my last 25 pull ups in an unimpressive manner. The 300, at least for me is something I need to hit at least once a week. Anymore of a break than that and I lose some ability to hack it.
On Saturday I was ready to get my hair buzzed, so much so that I took the clippers, stood in the middle of the living room floor and started at it myself with a one inch attachment. I found that the one inch just wasn’t doing a good job so I went to a 3/4 attachment and then down to a 1/2 inch. I was doing this without a mirror so I couldn’t see how I was doing, instead I went on “feel”. I had ideas of going all out and doing my entire head with the 1/4 inch attachment but I stopped at 1/2. I laughed when I looked in the mirror. I basically had a mullet with some longer hair on the sides and back and short as a putting green on the top. I called Ali in to mitigate the damage. She used the 1/4 inch on my sides and back of my head and blended it in. I have never had my hair cut quite this short. It’s sort of a Justin Timberlake / David Beckham look. Ultra short and fuzzy, a degree or two above a shaved head. It’s as low maintenance as you can get. It’s quite the contrast from the long haired, nasty straggly bearded look I was sporting only a couple weeks ago. I’m digging it.
Before I start the weekend recap, I realized over the weekend that I totally forgot to blog about a movie I watched the prior weekend in addition to the 28 series, Mr Bean’s Holiday. I never had seen a Mr Bean movie but I sort of remember hearing they were funny so I grabbed it for us to watch. Ali always says I don’t get enough comedies. The movie started and just looking at the guy was funny enough. He is a very weird looking man. I thought it was odd that during the first 5 minutes he didn’t really say anything and instead just made silly noises as he went from one physical comedy scene to another. Then it continued and continued and continued. Evidently Mr Bean is more or less a modern day mime and he didn’t say a complete sentence the entire movie. His silly appearance and noises kept me entertained briefly but after that it fell off into just bizarro world. When it was done I told Ali that I thought that it may have been the stupidest movie I ever saw in my life. How this guy has managed to make more than one film is astounding to me. Yuck. I’d give it a D.
My weekend had a pretty low chore quotient compared to most. Part of that was because we haven’t had to mow the grass for two weeks. I had almost my entire list done by noon on Saturday. On Saturday evening we picked up my mom to take her to her birthday dinner. I didn’t tell mom where we were going ahead of time. I kind of got the vibe that she may have suspected that I had picked the Turtle Club but she acted surprised. I had reservations for 5:45 but sunset was scheduled to go down a few minutes before that. I intentionally arrived early so we could possibly get seated before the big event. The plan worked out perfectly, they sat us right down and within 10 minutes we got to witness another perfect sunset. Mom was really excited about being there.
Just like the last time our dinner was very good. I kicked myself a bit when I realized that I hadn’t mentioned anything ahead of time about it being a birthday dinner for my mom to the restaurant staff. However when we ordered desert we just happened to mention it was mom’s birthday. The waiter brought the slice of key lime pie that mom and I were splitting with a single birthday candle in it and they had written Happy Birthday on the plate in some sort of raspberry sauce, which was very nice. The bill for 3 people was almost exactly 50% higher than the bill for two people as expected. After a very enjoyable meal we headed out and waited for the valet. The valet station was a bit of a circus. There was all sorts of confusion going on. They were bringing back vehicles that had no driver waiting for them while others waited and waited for their car to show up. I felt a bit bad when our Camry was brought back before a group of people that were waiting there before us. It seemed like all of the women that were in the crowd waiting were pretty wasted.
After dinner we asked mom if she would go to Lowe’s with us to help us pick out paint. Yes we are planning on finally putting some paint on the walls. The barren white walls that we have had since we built the house helps make the space feel big but it also makes it feel sterile and generic. We are starting out conservatively by painting the guest bathroom and bedroom. Most of the decision making process was left up to mom and Ali. Mom has a good decorating eye from her years in the furniture business something that definitely was not passed on to me. I can tell when a color scheme looks nice I just am not good at deciding what the scheme should be. The spare bedroom is going to be a grayish light purple color and the bathroom will be an earthy shade of green that I like. (green is my color) We are planning on doing the large living area of the house in some sort of tan, the shade of which has not been determined. Ali is very nervous about the prospect of painting. I am not. I don’t enjoy the process of painting but I am pretty assured that I will pleased with the end result. The walls have been long overdue in getting some attention if you ask me.
As part of the overhaul, Ali wants me to change up the surround sound system. We have a Bose lifestyle system that has little cube speakers that are white just like the walls. The normal person would hardly notice them. However to Ali these are a HUGE eyesore. Ali wants me to get speakers that I can mount flush with the wall and also wants to build some sort of door to hide the AV equipment above the tv.
It makes me chuckle when Ali goes on these tangents. She has this quirk about her where she focuses on the minute details of an issue instead of the big picture. We could have a room that is filled to the ceiling with junk and Ali would spend the time alphabetizing the post cards she found in a shoe box in the room. So likewise when faced with painting the interior of our house Ali’s primary focus goes to little things like stereo speakers. Hey I’m not complaining, you mean you WANT me to go out and buy a new up to date surround system? Twist my arm. I would welcome getting a new system that runs on infrared instead of the proprietary Bose RF shit that makes it not work with my Harmony remote. Then Ali mentioned further plans of hanging curtains on either side of the TV area that could be pulled back when we are watching it and closed when we aren’t. I may have to draw the line there.
So anyway I am hoping over the 4 day Thanksgiving holiday I have that we can get one if not both of the rooms painted. It should give those rooms an entirely different feel.
Sunday was another low key day. I performed my second week of water system bleaching. I am pretty convinced that the discoloration we have been seeing in our water is a result of algae in the holding tank. With our old water system I could pull the lid off the holding tank and after removing any frogs or bugs that had squeezed in there, I was able to drain it and blast the algae out of the inside with a pressure washer. Well the new fancy tank is totally sealed. great for keeping frogs out, shitty for keeping algae from forming. So what I have to do is drain the tank and then as I refill it I add bleach to a small hole that is normally used to pull air into the system to help bubble out the sulfur. Both last week and this week I added probably a couple cups of bleach. I have already noticed the water looks better than it did. I plan to do it for 2 more weeks and see the results.
We watched the Eagles beat the Dolphins. For a long time the Eagles tried to let the 0-9 Dolphins win. In fact thanks to 3 first half interceptions deep in Dolphin territory, the Eagles were behind at halftime 7-3. Late in the first half Donovan McNabb went out with an ankle injury. I truly could have cared less. After a rough start AJ Feeley settled down in the second half and did a solid job. He is definitely a more accurate passer than Donovan. So anyway in the second half the Eagles managed to score a couple times to win. Even though it was a win it really said a lot of negative things about the team. They struggled to beat an 0-9 team, at home, that was starting a rookie quarterback whom was playing in his first regular season game. Against this 0-9 team with a rookie quarterback they managed to register zero turnovers and get zero sacks. They are going to get so smashed by the Patriots next week. I hope they have a lot of body bags.
Sunday night we watched Die Hard 4. I really liked the original Die Hard. The sequels have been so so. It seemed like each sequel tried to outdo the prior one in terms of action and implausible acts of heroism by John McLain. Well Die Hard 4 takes the cake, it was a disappointment of blockbuster proportions to me. Ok the movie is doomed from the very get go because of one simple fact, the bad guy in it SUCKS. In order for a movie like this to be good, you HAVE to have a good villain. In Die Hard 4 they cast some metrosexual looking guy that looked like they painted a few gray hairs into his side burns. When the guy tried to portray anger he instead looked like he was ready to cry. What a joke. If there is such a thing as too much action in a movie, Die Hard 4 has it. Ridiculous scenario after ridiculous scenario goes down scene after scene. One minute John McLain can barely walk, the next minute he is sprinting like Marion Jones on roids. Some of the feats he pulled off would make Superman jealous. By the end Ali and I were just laughing at how silly things were getting. The movie was lame, plain and simple. The first one was sooooo much better. Die Hard 4 is lucky to get a C from me.
Last night before bed Ali was watching one of her many Oprah episodes on the Tivo. As I was getting Tuki water the scene on the TV caught my eye. It was a living room that was FILLED with junk on either side, piled 5 feet high with only a small walking path in the middle. I sat down and watched in horror as they showed the rest of the house. Every single room of the house was like this, jammed full of clothes, shoes, housewares and any other sort of various material items that this woman could buy. I told Ali I had to see the woman that was responsible for this, it truly made me sick.
So they finally show the couple who own this house. A chubby, tear factory of a woman and her husband that makes excuses for not being able to stop her. I instantly had a severe dislike for this woman. Anybody that allows their home to become a warehouse of things like that is beyond pathetic in my book. I was angry. I said to Ali that the woman should just die she serves no purpose and is pathetic. Ali chastised me for taking such a severe, cold position about this woman. I couldn’t help myself. I just have zero tolerance for people that put themselves into a miserable situation by their own hand whether it is being morbidly obese or in this case a compulsive “hoarder”. I continued my rant to Ali saying there are already too many people on the planet, someone like this serves no purpose. Of course I knew what I was saying was harsh but I was just besides myself with disgust. The show was filled with the woman crying constantly, saying she was trying to fill a void in her life first from her kids growing up and second because she had some siblings die in recent years. She turned her house into this mess over the span of a decade or so.
Her husband frustrated me almost as much. He said he guessed he was “somewhat” responsible for allowing this to happen. Ya think so? Grow a set of balls and establish a line. Take her credit cards, check book and access to cash if the fat dumpling can’t control herself. His excuse was he didn’t know how to stop her. Unreal.
So anyway Oprah brought in a crew of 100 people to clean up this disaster area. I said to Ali that I can almost guarantee that once Oprah is done with her, this woman will fall right back into her hoarding ways. You can just tell, she has no self discipline. This woman was the poster child for disgusting American consumerism that so many of us are guilty of, taken to an extreme degree. I guess I am a heartless bastard. As I have said many times, the herd needs to be thinned.
I’m glad Friday is here. With work being as hectic it has recently, weekends are even more appreciated than normal. This weekend we are going to be taking my mom out for dinner for her birthday. Her birthday is actually today, happy birthday mom! I know my mom is much like me when it comes to a severe dislike for the unavoidable process of getting older. It’s funny how the 20 year and one month age difference between her and I seemed like centuries as I was growing up. Now it seems much, much smaller. The age difference between her and I is shorter than the amount of time I have been out of high school.
Speaking of time flying, in a month we will be leaving for Vegas! Sheesh, that means that Christmas is a heartbeat after that. My sister and brother-in-law were nice enough to hook us up with tickets to see the Blue Man group while we are out there. I’ve done absolutely zero Christmas prep so far.
The other night I tipped the scales at 179. I now weigh the same or slightly less than I did my freshman year (3 months really) of college. I think dropping the 15-20 pounds I had when I was pumped on creatine is a good thing for my body overall. I know my knees have felt much better in recent months. I may be fighting an unwinnable game against the clock but at least I can go down swinging.
The past couple weeks have been very busy due to the extensive problems we have had with the new cashiering system. For some reason today things have mysteriously quieted down. I made a few changes yesterday with the system but nothing that I would have expected to make a dramatic difference.
Oh remember the pool cage guy that said he should be by to fix the screen around the pool cage by Tuesday? He hasn’t shown up, hasn’t called to say why. Just another typical Florida service experience. I’ll wait till Tuesday to call him so I can use the line “You said you were going to be out to fix it a week ago…”
My running comeback has been ongoing for a few weeks now. I am taking a different approach this time. Instead of increasing my distance I am still only running a mile at a shot, but faster. Each time I do it I bump my speed up one tenth of a mph on the treadmill. Today I clocked in at a 7mph pace which translates to a 8:34 mile. So far, knock on wood, I have had absolutely zero knee ramifications. To me running a mile fast is a better fitness test than slothing along for a longer distance. If I could run a sub 7 minute mile on the treadmill that would be flying for me.
So I went over to the Sheriff’s office yesterday to file a report regarding my CC fraud. I was sitting in the lobby for quite awhile waiting to talk to someone. While I was there some balding, chubby, unhappy looking guy came into the waiting area as well. He walked over and grabbed a magazine, walked back to a set of chairs on another wall and sat down. He sat the magazine on the chair next to him and never looked at it. About 15 minutes later I was surprised when I saw a deputy come in, stand him up, frisk him and then cuff him. Evidently he was turning himself in for something.
I waited a good 40 minutes and was just about to leave. I told the deputy at the window that I had to get back to work. He called back and found out that they were actually ready for me now so I turned around and headed back in. I was introduced to Deputy Matthews. I could tell right away that the deputy had some sort of physical problems. His movements were very slow and deliberate and his speech was had a lot of gurgling in it. So before I got into my story he asked for my driver’s license first. As he looked it over he also seemed to be evaluating me, perhaps to see if I seemed legit or not. So finally he asked me what happened. I get into the story a bit and he stops me in the middle of it and says , “ok so someone is trying to commit identity theft” I told him how I had talked to someone at the office on Friday and they said I needed a CC statement with the fraudulent charges on it. I told the deputy I didn’t have such a statement because they were immediately removed from my account. He said that I should have requested a listing of the charges, I told him I didn’t know I could/should do that. So we called up my CC company and after I answered the security questions and we got through to a CSR, I gave the phone to the deputy. He explained the situation and what he was looking for. The CSR said he could fax an official list to the deputy but he verbally gave him a list of the charges.
Deputy Matthews hung up. He told me how internet based crime like this is extremely rampant nowadays. He said in fact it is a bigger deal than drugs at this point. So I then continued on with my story trying to accurately recant the sequence of events (something I am normally piss poor at) I told the deputy that I am a network admin so I had a solid knowledge of how to track down information on people trying to hide out on the net. I showed him the emails from the bogus gmail account, including the one that had the ip address of the person that signed up. I also brought my profile information for the two supplement companies that had my home address, work phone and work email. (earlier I went through all my old statements and these were the ONLY two that had this info) I told him how the IP address traced back to a location in Madison Wisconsin and how coincidentally one of the supplement companies was also based in Wisconsin. He said that it seems pretty sure that there is a tie in between the two facts which is what I immediately suspected as well. I was pleased that all of the legwork I did actually was useful and he in fact kept all the documentation I brought. He said I had to fill out a sworn statement that outlined everything I told him. I received some blank ones to take with me and then I could get them notarized at my office. At the end of our meeting the deputy decided to try out some very dry jokes on me. I did my best to act like they were funny. I thanked him for his time and I was back to work.
Writing out the sworn statement was a pain in the ass. I haven’t done this much writing by hand since High School. I filled nearly four pages with my story. During the afternoon there were actually a few more chapters added. I have been periodically checking the bogus gmail account the guy made to make sure nothing else pops in there. I couldn’t believe what I saw. In the bogus email account was ANOTHER message congratulating me on creating ANOTHER bogus Gmail account, this time [email protected]. This f’in idiot used the first bogus gmail account as the secondary email address for the second bogus gmail account.
I immediately tried the same trick I did on the first one, resetting the password so I can get access to it. Unfortunately this time the culprit added a security question I did not know the answer to so I couldn’t initiate the reset chain. I was flabbergasted that this moron was still trying, the card is dead, there should not be anything else he can do with it. I was quite pissed with the Gmail system. How can they allow you to use a Gmail email address as a secondary email address for ANOTHER gmail account, that just seems stupid as hell. I muddled through screen after screen of bullshit trying to find a way to contact Gmail about the bullshit going on. After about 15 minutes I finally got to a form that I could fill out and submit. It immediately generated a canned reply that didn’t apply in the least to my situation. I am sure nothing will come of my request.
The other interesting thing happened when I decided to once again call the company in Wisconsin. I had called them Friday and they told me they had no security problems at all. So I call back and ask to talk to a manager. I get a woman named Nellie. I explain how someone committed CC fraud against me and how there are several things that are pointing towards it being associated with the transactions with their business. I again asked if they had any CC problems recently. This time I got another story. Back in the late April, early May time frame they did have a few customers that had fraudulent activity occur on their cards. It just so happens that the two orders I placed with them occurred in April and May, imagine that. Since that time she said they totally redid their security system. Well that is all well and good, except for the people that are getting f’d. I asked her if the company sent out a notice to their customers informing them of the security issue? She said no since it was isolated to only a handful of people. Of course the real reason they didn’t tell people is because in one fell swoop they would instantly lose all of their existing customer base. Who wants to deal with a company that has security problems when there are dozens of others just like them to buy from. The lady was nice and willing to provide any information she had if it is needed during the investigation. She related multiple stories about the CC abuse they see running their internet store.
So anyway I added this additional information to my sworn statement, got it notarized and dropped it back off at the Sheriff’s department after work. Who knows what will happen but I can only hope there is a big boulder of hurt rolling towards the little worm hiding in the dark corners of the internet. How sweet it would be to be there as police knock on his door.
The weather the past week or so has been FANTASTIC. I don’t think we intentionally had the AC running at all during that time.
Friday night I relayed to Ali all I found out regarding the attempted CC fraud. Of course this has made both of us rather paranoid. I have printed out all the fake gmail account emails as well as the CC statement. The problem is since those charges were fraudulent they were instantly removed from my statement. I am going to call the sheriff’s office again today to get a clarification. They said they needed a copy of the statement with the fraudulent charges on it. Since those charges are not on the statement because my CC company immediately cancelled them, I’m not sure where I stand. I think I will go to the sheriff’s office regardless today to talk to them about it.
My 3 day weekend started with a super busy Saturday. Ali was behind at work so she decided to go in on Saturday. I was on the first day of a three day weekend so that means one thing normally, bust ass like mad to get all the work done so I can do whatever afterwards. I went outside and trimmed up the remaining trees that were in the back half of the property. Some of these hadn’t been touched in years and years. It wasn’t so bad since it was only a total of 5 trees. Then I went inside and cleaned the bathrooms, the bird cage and did some other minor indoor clean up. I remember thinking it was ironic that I was the one cleaning when Ali was home three days during the week. However I rationalized it because Ali was at work on Saturday and during the week she had been having some serious issues with her back hurting. Plus it doesn’t kill me to do the cleaning once in awhile. I was surprised that it was 1pm and I had most of what I wanted done, done. I came up with something else to do.
I pulled the party van out of the spot it has been more or less sitting in since we got back from out west to examine the large wet spot under it. I wanted to verify what substance it was. A quick swipe of the finger confirmed it was oil. So I popped the hood, checked the dipstick and saw it was a quart low. I told Nicki we were going on a trip. She was very excited. I stopped at the convenience store to grab a quart of oil and throw gas in the van. What I was doing was making the trip out to Lehigh Acres to pull the For Sale signs of our lots. The market is so depressed right now the only way we could sell the lots would be at a number barely over what we paid for them which we aren’t interested in doing, hence there was no reason to have signs up.
So I get to the first lot on Genoa. As I drive up I don’t see the sign. Well I figure maybe it got knocked over or something. I get out and walk back and forth looking for the sign. It is nowhere to be found, someone snatched it. Bastards! I angrily hop back in the van and head to the Bell Blvd lot. This lot had the sign stolen once before. The last time we went there I installed a sign hanging off a mailbox mounting post to make it less likely to be easily plucked from the ground. Well the sign and post were there but they were knocked over. From the looks of it they had been knocked over for quite awhile. The signs themselves were busted up. I was even more annoyed. Of course since we don’t live exactly close it is quite difficult to police our signs. My theory is the signs are stolen, knocked over by other people trying to sell lots in the area to minimize their competition. Who knows, maybe even the realtors themselves do it. I don’t know for sure, all I know is it annoys the hell out of me. Oh well it doesn’t matter anyway, we aren’t going to unload the lots at firesale prices.
Late in the afternoon I decided to plop down to watch 28 Days Later. 28 Days is a modern day Dawn of the Dead. When I was younger I would routinely watch scary, horrifying stuff like this. It gets the adrenaline going. Since Ali hates stuff like this, over the years I simply have not sought it out. Well now since there are a lot of times when I am home alone it is a perfect opportunity for me to watch movies that Ali would not deem watchable. I saw Dawn of the Dead. That was some scary, scary stuff. There is something classically horrifying about watching your friends get attacked and killed by zombies and then have them become a zombie themselves and be faced with killing them or being killed or zombified yourself. This situation presents itself quite often in 28 days.
The movie is pretty damn nasty. You get attached to characters only to have the become infected with the “rage virus” and see them killed. There is tons of gore, tons of horror. It is all very well done. If you like that sort of stuff you would like this, A.
On Sunday morning Ali was planning to go to the gym. She said her back was feeling better. So much so that she was thinking about doing a spinning class AND a group power class. I told her she shouldn’t overdo it but I wasn’t strong enough in my warning. She did the group power class and came home looking for an icepack. She aggravated her back again. I told her it’s funny, she did something I normally do, push things when they shouldn’t be pushed. last night she said she hardly slept cause her back was bothering her so much. Backs are a touchy thing.
The Eagles played the Redskins Sunday. I pretty much expected the Eagles to lose. Into the fourth quarter they were well on their way. The defense allowed the Redskins to march up and down at will for most of the second half. However the Eagles managed to mount a comeback and actually make some plays on defense. At the end of the game there was almost a monumental f up by the Eagles. The Redskins had no time outs and just turned the ball over to the Eagles. The Redskins were down by one. The Eagles had the ball with something like 2:13 to go. They had the ability to basically run the clock all the way out and end the game. Instead they hand off to Westbrook, the Redskins part like the Red Sea and allow him to go in basically uncontested. This was brilliant on their part because after the Eagles kicked the extra point, the Skins were only down by 8, a touchdown and two point conversion away from tying it. Of course Fat Andy didn’t even think about this possibility. Luckily for the Eagles and Andy, their coaches oversight didn’t get a huge glaring spotlight cast on it because the defense was able to squash the Redskins final comeback attempt. The point is a good coach would have eliminated the possibility of that chance from ever coming to be. Oh well, they won.
My day off yesterday that was pretty chore free wound up just not being all that great. In the morning I did a couple chores to make me feel useful like washing the truck followed up with cleaning the water equipment. After that all I did chore wise was unleash my robotic cleaning arsenal on the house. I had the 3 roombas sweeping, the Dirt Dog running in the garage and finished up with he Scooba scrubbing the kitchen, utility room and bathroom floors. After that the day was mine.
Of course one of the ways I spent the time was playing WoW. I had yet another incredibly frustrating incident that follows the same script as most of my other frustrating incidents. I got grouped up with a bunch of annoying as hell, ADD-riddled kids. The group unraveled within the first 10 minutes but only after a series of insults back and forth. Afterwards I was just disgusted and logged off, seriously wondering why I spend time playing a game that can make me so angry over virtual, meaningless shit?
To clear my head I decided to watch the second 28 flick, 28 WEEKS later. The movie starts with an absolutely terrifying scene as a cottage of people hiding out gets overun with the zombies, killing all but one person. The story line of the second one was actually a little better than the first movie. It was scarier, more gory, more disturbing than the first, a hard trick to pull off. It makes one take a look at mankind and just how fragile our existence could be if a deadly, untreatable virus was introduced into the human race. I’d give this one an A as well but be warned, nightmares are a pretty safe bet as a result. I woke up this morning at 5am with scenes from the movies running through my head.
Eh this is long enough.
Remember that Gmail account that was created mysteriously this morning? Well for the hell of it I decided to reset the password on it since whomever created it was dumb enough to put my work email address in there as the secondary email. Once I got in there I was shocked at what I saw. There was a pile of emails confirming enrollment in various things including napster, cybertv and some other weird stuff like e-gold.com. Son of a bitch! Well these confirmation emails gave me lots of helpful information.
Through the confirmation email for the 65 dollar cybertv purchase, I was able to get in contact with customer service for the company. I explained to the woman on the phone that I was the victim of credit card fraud and that one of the things it was used for was to buy stuff from them. I gave her the gmail account the guy used. I asked her exactly what information was given during the transaction. The guy (or girl) had my name, home address, work email and work phone number along with the CC number. They even had the 3 digit verification number on the back.
This narrowed things down for me quite a bit. There are only a few situations that come to mind where I have performed transactions involving my work email address and my credit card, namely the online stores where I get my protein powder which I have delivered to work instead of home. Perhaps one of these site got hacked and exposed customer information. The e-gold confirmation email had a gleaming nugget at the end of it, a little line that showed the time, date and IP address that was used to create the account, GOTCHA!
I did a reverse look up on the ip and it pointed to a Charter Communications ip located in Madison Wisconsin. It just so happens that one of those online supplement stores is located in Wisconsin. Hmmmm… So I called up this business and asked if they had any known security breaches. I explained my situation and how there were very few situations where those pieces of information would be tied together and their site was one of them. They said as far as they knew everything was fine and they have had no incidents. Well I asked that they check into it and they agreed they would. I called the other supplement site I had used and gave them the same information.
Then I focused on Charter Communications. After a couple of calls I got in touch with their law enforcement division. I explained what happened and how I suspected the person that stole my cc info was operating on their network. The woman explained to me that the only way action can be taken is through law enforcement. When a formal subpoena is entered, they will release the customer that was on that ip address at that time and date.
So, I called the local sheriff department to find out how it all works. I need to bring in a copy of my cc statement with the fraudulent charges and they go from there. I have already done a lot of the leg work for them. Because the dollar amount is small I am not sure how far they will pursue it, although I am almost positive if I didn’t jump on this immediately my credit card would have been maxed out in no time. So I am going to pursue it regardless. This idiot got unlucky and decided to f with someone who can track his slimy ass down. Man, I hope he gets nailed. Piece of shit.
There is the possibility if the guy was smart he bounced off proxies to hide his ip address but I don’t think he is very bright. Using my work email address as the secondary contact for the bogus gmail email account makes little sense and is not something a “smart” hacker would do.