| CapitalOne continue to indicate their desire for my business |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|09:07 pm] |
Last night Capital One fraud department called again urgently wanting me to call them back. I was on my date night with Aleesa so I didn't call back until today. We go through the same rigmarole of identity-checking questions and the nice lady says I no longer need to go to the bank and do in-person verification (in fact she didn't see any record on my account that this was necessary) and my card is now activated. Yay.
Five minutes later they call back and oops, sorry, guess you need to go to the bank and verify your identity in person after all.
What the fuck? Why the hell should I trust people this disorganised with my finances? |
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| Rabblerabble |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|07:06 pm] |
I got my credit card in the mail today (ended up going with Capital One). The very same day I got a call from their anti-fraud people. After half an hour on the phone answering random questions, it seems like that wasn't enough; I have to go to a bank in person to verify my identity for them. I'm guessing my being a furriner without much credit history might have something to do with it, that or I fluffed a question about having other credit lines open if I still happen to be on one of LaVera's cards or something.
I also had a brief panic attack when I realised I only had the phone message's word that the number I called was Capital One's fraud division and I'd read out a whole bunch of sensitive information to them (card number, address, last 4 digits of SSN), so I phoned the (different) number mailed with the credit card to make sure things were legit. Fortunately, they were, but I'm still stressed. I hate phone calls at the best of time; add in possible identity theft and I am not a happy bunny.
The people on the phone and their emails keep on thanking me for banking with them and saying how glad they are to have me; could have fooled me. I guess they have good reasons for all this crap, but it's still pretty annoying. |
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| Onward, to the future! |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|11:44 pm] |
Windows 7 is actually pretty decent so far. Nothing too much bad to say about it, and it's pretty stable and has surprisingly good hardware support for a release candidate. I've run one game under it just fine (Battlestations Pacific) and to the best of my knowledge my other two current games (Arma 2 and Eve) should also be fine once they've finished downloading. AVG doesn't seem to work, but given how tightly antivirus software is tied to the OS version that's not too surprising.
Windows Live, on the other hand, can suck my nuts. Annoying piece of crap. |
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| Fail |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|05:46 pm] |
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I managed to get myself Trojan'd and AVG can't fix it. I can't even boot into safe mode. Oh well, it's a good idea with Windows to burn it all down and reinstall every few years anyway, so I figure it'll be a good chance to ditch XP and try out the Windows 7 release candidate; I hear it's pretty shiny compared to Vista's initial release. |
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| Nature is grumpy today |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|05:26 pm] |
You know, you really would think I'd have more sense than to go out for a walk to find stuff to make for dinner when there's a thunderstorm brewing. I feel like I swam home.
On the plus side, now I've got the stuff for sausage and chip butties for dinner :) |
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| My entry into the world of usury |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|10:21 am] |
For the first time ever in my life, after my bank has (once again) caused me hassle in trying to buy things online (in this case my trip to Iceland for fanfest), I'm considering getting a credit card. I don't anticipate carrying a balance as a matter of course, it's more for hotels and plane tickets - but I also wouldn't mind having it available as a line of credit should I get laid off, so not having a huge APR would be nice. My credit rating should be good, with the caveat that I probably don't have much credit history, not having had a credit card or bank loan before (unless anything I had jointly with LaVera might be in there). I do pay my rent on time every month but I don't know if that makes it into credit history.
Holly recommends Capital One. Any recommendations or ideas from anyone else? |
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| Trippin' |
[Jun. 13th, 2009|08:30 am] |
Off to Chicago in a few for the Goonmeet. Unfortunately my email has been down since yesterday afternoon, so if anyone's mailed me and not got a reply, well, that's why :/ |
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| Moohaha |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|09:42 pm] |
For the first time in Eve, I am a billionaire. My long-term plans to put one of my characters in an Archon proceed apace. |
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| :smith: |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|12:30 pm] |
A week or so ago a Goonswarm member committed suicide. He was an Iraq war veteran and from the sound of it that experience severely messed him up.
I knew him in-game, though we weren't close friends or anything - he actually ran the first special-interest group I joined, our reconnaissance division, and before that I remember him posting a year ago or so on our forums about gaming from a base in Iraq (apparently it's hard to play Eve when your satellite dish is knocked out by mortar attacks). He was a cool guy. I wish I'd known how he was feeling. As far as I can tell, we in Goonswarm were pretty much his only friends...his suicide note apparently left instructions to give messages to several named people in the Swarm and that's pretty much it.
A Swarm member left this at his memorial.
Anyway, what brings it to mind and prompts me to post is our spymaster posting a tribute to him. Goodbye, Roy. You're missed. I hope you're happier now wherever you are. |
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| Shiny |
[May. 28th, 2009|05:54 pm] |
I am going to go have sex with our new fridge now.
That is all. |
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| A frantic morning |
[May. 28th, 2009|10:26 am] |
8.45am, Jo is disturbed from his slumber by the phone. 'Hi, this is the apartment complex, we'd like to replace your fridge. When would be convenient?'. Full of sleep, Jo foolishly says, 'today would be fine!'. They say back 'ok, then just make sure the old one is empty for us'. Jo thinks 'Fuck!'.
9am, Jo empties the fridge, fitting some of it into the cheese fridge. Well, that wasn't too bad, he says, sweatily. I'll get to work on time.
9.01am. Fuck! I also need to empty the freezer.
9.15am. Fuck! I also need to get the magnets off the front and sides and the stuff off the top.
9.25am. Fuck! I also need to clear a path so they can get to the fridge.
So I'm at work late, sweaty, damp from the humid walk in, and generally somewhat cranky. On the plus side, new fridge soon. If there is not new fridge soon, instead There Will Be Blood. |
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| Sleepy morning |
[May. 12th, 2009|08:22 am] |
We just took Calliope in for her dental surgery.
So sleepy. Yesterday it was because Issie and Bitsy made a racket at about 5am. Today it's because Calliope was noisy last night; more understandably, since she was shut in to make sure she didn't eat anything in preparation for anaesthesia.
I hope my kitty will be ok :( |
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| There's a kink in the tubes |
[May. 11th, 2009|10:43 am] |
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Our internet connection at work keeps going down every few minutes. It's very annoying. |
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| Oh dear |
[May. 7th, 2009|09:46 pm] |
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Calliope has a really bad, probably genetically-predisposed mouth infection and is due for surgery on Tuesday to remove about half of her teeth. The poor thing is on pain medication til then. I feel bad we didn't take her in earlier, but the poor thing didn't seem in that much pain. It's just hard to tell with cats :( |
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| Penguicon |
[May. 4th, 2009|10:36 am] |
So, there was a Penguicon. And I was there (unlike Wil Wheaton, sadly, who came down with flu).
It was fun...I didn't go to that many actual talks, though I did catch an interesting one on the new Ubuntu startup process and another on mediaeval combat. I did however get to chat to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rbradakis and sheryl67 which was cool, and also bumped into zoethe.
Lots of drunken room-party-ing of course; I bumped into a Scottish guy over here to visit his fiance (hope he enjoyed his first con) and another who moved here from Britain at the age of about 10; he could switch between British and American accents at will, which was kind of cool. Apparently he kept the accent because his mum (still living in the UK) refused to speak to him on the phone when he was brought up unless he 'spoke English' (i.e. didn't use an American accent), which kind of amused me.
Also went to a talk about using real-life tactics in MMORPGs...that wasn't so applicable to me, really, 90% of the people there were WoW types and it was mostly basic discussion of things like flanking and kiting. The Great BoB Disband did get mentioned though.
The only negative was the Brazilian beef - we'd both paid in advance for it (having loved it at the last con) but they were late in starting up the grill, didn't have enough grills (I believe there'll be two not one next year), and also spent about 45 minutes grilling beef to take up to the vendors first, right in front of all the people who'd been queueing for about an hour at that point. Under the circumstances I think they should probably have told the vendors to wait. We were in the queue for an hour and a half (having paid in advance, we weren't going to just shrug and leave, though some people did). I gather some people were there for three hours.
On the whole though, lots of fun. I look forward to the next one. |
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| [Eve] Adventures in fleet command part 2 |
[May. 3rd, 2009|09:39 pm] |
So, I finally got the chance to kill some people as a Skirmish Commander (that is a Goonswarm junior fleet commander; the guy who tells everyone where to go and what to shoot).
( Long-ish ) |
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| Back from Penguicon |
[May. 3rd, 2009|02:14 pm] |
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Back from Penguicon. V. sleepy. More details later. Had good time :) |
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