30 Nov 06 Burned by WebLoyalty… right…
I guess it was bound to happen. My CC# got sold by a retailer (*cough* Fandango *cough*) and sold to a company called WebLoyalty. Today I logged onto my Online Banking website when I found this:
PURCHASE 90631128014076444262401 ON 11/28 AT WLI*RESERVATIONREWARDS. 800-732-7031 CT
for $10. Sure its only $10 but its simple fact that I never even authorized that. Googling this company resulted into a similiar experience by Adam Rosi-Kessel in 2004. He has been proactive about it as well. I praise him for going after this company. I wish I had the time and effort like him but alas I don. There are two things I learned.
1. Time to get a credit card for online purchases (which amount to maybe 3-4 purchases online a month)
2. Never get movie tickets from Fandango again.
I also praise my bank, Bank of America, when I alerted them of this transaction. They proceeded to shut down my debit card and reverse the charge (pending research). I figure the moment the research sees the words WebLoyalty… all will be well again. It is inconvenience to be without my debit card during the holidays but I’d rather have my account secure then to have my debit card number used in an unauthorized manner.
PS I know its Fandango because thats the only true “odd” purchase I made plus they are known to be linked with Webloyalty.
Adam Rosi-Kessel’s post: http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/webloyalty_aka_wli_reservations_is_a_scam.html
WebLoyalty and Fandango taken to court: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/09/12/lawsuit_claims_consumer_fraud_by_marketing_company?p1=MEWell_Pos3
27 Nov 06 Yay! It’s snowing
November 2006, a month I’ll never forget weather wise. We’ve had it all, tropical rains (that lead to massive floods), sun and and now snow.
12 Nov 06 The Kid Treadmill
Well I guess it was going to come any day now in order to slow down childhood obesity.
Here’s an idea a lot cheaper… send your kids outside instead of having them play their video games.
11 Nov 06 Pirates more cunning then ever
On Monday, Office 2007 went Gold. On Wednesday, Windows Vista went RTM. On Saturday both are available via Usenet download for at least 24 hours.
Windows Vista available with an activation crack that uses a License file from the betas so it accepts keys used during the betas. This is fixable by Microsoft as they can disable all given keys during the beta period in one swoop in the coming months. Vista being more attached to its host (Microsoft) then ever, crackers/pirates are going to have a hard time with this one. Hell even Volume Keys require some sort of license server to be present. This is known as Volume Licensing 2.0.
However Office 2007, uses Volume Licensing 1.0, which means “one key to rule them all”. The release that hit the web includes such key. What amazes me is the speed it took to get these products out on the good ol’ net. Frankly I’m waiting for Office 2007 (probably be released as 2008 to create confusion) for Mac to be released. Emulated Office 2004 sucks and Rosetta Stone is not all that wonderful and nice that Apple makes it out to be. Word takes a good 90 seconds to load as opposed to the 50 seconds it takes (still too long) under PowerPC.
11 Nov 06 Revisted: Zabbix
So about a month ago I wrote about Zabbix. Well it has been a month and after getting the corporate firewall team in Hightstown, NJ to open up specific ports between the two data centers we got Zabbix rolled out to our production environments. So far so good, if I even stop the Apache process for 30 seconds I get paged on my phone. We have severity levels setup so for example if the partition is 80% full it’ll email us as opposed to send SMS messages to our phone. However if a ping fails 3 times in a row then it goes nuts and hits everyone with a SMS.
The “Gooeyness” is useful to show management our uptimes and loads, plus it just looks purty. I love the CLI but I don’t mind a pretty GUI.
Screenies, click to blow up.
Note: This graph helped us actually discover a configuration problem as we were hitting our max connection limit (1500 per machine) frequently.
Edited: more screenshots.
10 Nov 06 The sound Vista users will hear
Well today Microsoft released the 4 second sound clip that Vista users will hear when their computer boots to their login prompt, note this is NOT the start up sound from when you login to your machine but this sound is played when your computer is deemed ready for use. Rumors are that you can’t turn this off. Microsoft continuously disabled and re-enabled the ability to turn on/off this sound throughout the beta testing period. One thing was constant though; it was always on by default. Final verdict remains to be seen in the RTM build that came out a few days ago.
Here is the clip….
06 Nov 06 Ken Schram: Ten reasons to enjoy the rain
From: Ken Schram: Ten reasons to enjoy the rain
Number 10: The storm has washed away the word “MetroNatural” that was painted on top of the Space Needle.
Number 9: It’s fun to splash pedestrians as you drive down the street.
Number 8: Can’t get enough of that video of salmon crossing the road.
Number 7: Fewer panhandlers because carboard signs just get soggy.
Number 6: No more doorbelling by political candidates ’cause they’re weather wimps.
Number 5: Not as many bicyclists to share the road with.
Number 4: Ducks swimming in Seattle’s pot holes look so darn cute.
Number 3: We need more mud right before the election.
Number 2: Traffic hardly sucks more than when the sun is in our eyes.
And the number 1 reasons to enjoy all this rain: All the crack-heads and hookers stay inside which means if you really want to, you can actually use that $700,000 toilet down in Pioneer Square!
02 Nov 06 Tux takes it from the FreeBSD Daemon
I’m sure many have already seen this image. But I saw it for the first time today when I heard Jason Dixon’s presentation of “BSD is Dying” at Columbia University.
