Ugh…

I hope whoever got my debit card number is enjoying whatever it was that they bought for $300 on Target.com…

Sarah makes fun of me for checking our debit and credit card transactions semi-religiously, but if I hadn’t today, I probably wouldn’t have caught it for quite some time. I canceled the card and ordered a new one and then went in to fill out the paperwork to report it. They said that people usually get their money back within 3 to 5 business days, so I’m guessing that means that it’s usually not a problem to get the money back.

At first, I saw that it said the purchase said Rockville, so I immediately thought Rockville Road, and that it was at the Avon Target. That would have made things easy, since TPS Brian would have done everything in his power to catch the guy. But sadly, it looks like it was Rockville, Maryland and probably an online purchase. I’m sure they can track down the IP address it came from and look at the shipping address, which would probably work for finding the person if they’re in the US… But it’s probably someone in Nigeria, or other foreign country, which means nobody will ever get caught.

In happier news, tonight is the Tori Amos concert, so hopefully that’ll take my mind of my stolen identity.

EDIT: The bank was awesome and already refunded me the money before even investigating with Target, so that’s cool. Now I’m just looking forward to hearing if they find the guy.

Google Latitude

Google Latitude is finally up and “working” for the iPhone. I say “working”, because in the few minutes that I’ve played with it, it’s crashed Safari twice. 🙄 Also, it basically just showed me and my coworker as somewhere in Greencastle. I checked the Google Map app, and it did the same, so I guess that’s really more of an issue of our location (read: the middle of nowhere).

It’s one of those things that makes you think that we might be taking technology too far sometimes, but at the same time, I think it’s interesting to think about what it means about the possibilties in the future. Like, right now I think it’s kind of lame and stalker-ish to think about wanting to see where my friends are. It could be helpful in some situations where you’re trying to meet up with someone, but you both have to be running the software, so I feel like with that much cooridination, it would be easier to just call / text and pick a place to meet.

The interesting part about it I think, is that even though something like this (and good web interfaces, useful apps, GPS, etc) is only available for the smartphone market right now, it was only 10 years ago that it was rare to find a camera on a phone. Guaranteed in 5 to 10 years, all the new technology we see now will just be standard features on any phone (or other mobile device).

GPS and Google Maps has gotten so common place for me between my car GPS units and my phone that it throws me off when someone asks for directions to someplace. I understand that what that says about me is that I’ve become far too lazy and reliant on technology, but at least once those kind of technologies become common place for everybody, the playing ground is a little more level in both that it’ll be a lot easier for people to use technology as it become more standardized and user accessible, and other people will hopefully be as lazy as me and not make me look so bad. 😉

Sarah’s Birthday

We had a rushed, but fun day on Saturday trying to hang out with friends for Sarah’s birthday. I had started making plans to surprise her a week or two before, but then she started inviting people to the Indians game, so we kind of had to meld the two sets of plans. Which resulted in many people being confused and not being able to show up on time. Sad face.

We went to The Ram with Andy, Linette, Shayne, Christie, and Jared, but we only had time for a quick beer and appetizers before we had to meet up with Sarah’s mom and brothers to go to the game. Andy and Linette came with, and Scott and Lisa showed up too, so that was fun. A couple more beers at the game, and then we tried to go to Alcatraz for an actual meal, but didn’t have time before going to Crackers, so once again we just had time for a quick beer. It’s kind of sad to have to try to make a meal out of comedy club food, but when you’ve had 4 beers and another one at the comedy club, it doesn’t really matter. Everybody else had to be up in the morning, so me and Sarah met up with Dave at Crackers. My phone was being all wonky and losing signal every 10 seconds, so I couldn’t get a hold of anybody else to go.

Crackers was a lot of fun. Last time, the openning act wasn’t very good, but this time both openning acts were really good. And then Chris Hardwick was the headliner. Hilarious. The best part was after the show, we stopped him to say hi has he was walking by, and he was actually really cool. Got to talk to him for a bit about nerdy stuff, so that was fun since he gets to play with all the stuff that I want to play with.

Just before we left, I got a picture with him.

This ranks right up there with meeting Kato Kaelin at Crackers in Broadripple at 8 in the morning.

That’s right Colbert. I’m stealing your picture pose.

Speaking of celebrities, I thought was interesting to hear that Brad Pitt is promoting Kiva.org. Maybe Twitter isn’t so bad after all… Probably still won’t try it out any time soon though.

Kiva.org

Dave told me about this website, Kiva.org, where you can participate in microfinancing by getting connected with business owners in developing countries. For example, my first loan was $25 to a Moji Esan in Lagos State, Nigeria. Of course, most people cringe when they think of giving money to anybody in Nigeria over the internet… But I have faith in this program.

Finally Being Productive…

Wait. Is this productive? I suppose not.

But I’ve been pretty productive lately. I optimized the Chart Builder AND Employee Search programs drastically yesterday, and today I cleaned up the two purchasing pages. I blame yoursciontc.com being down for my recent productivity.

If I keep this up for the rest of the week, I’ll have some time to relax and experiment some next week, which will be nice.

Side note: I saw in my “At a Glance” section that I had 2 comments. Turns out they were spam. Sad face. Thought maybe I was interesting to someone for a second. 😛

New Hobbies

Been a while since my last post. Trying out a couple hobbies to play with lately. Sarah bough me an RC plane for our anniversary. She gave it to me on Wednesday and the first flight went directly to the ground. After that, it wouldn’t fly at all. I replaced the propeller today, and that seemed to get it flying again. Got a good 10 minutes or so of flying/crashing until I bent that propeller as well. 😛 Still definitely worth it.

She’ll get her anniversary gift next weekend probably. Probably on Sunday for Easter. I’m still letting her think that I’m putting it off as long as possible.

I also bought a couple golf clubs today to add to the set that Andy gave me. I think I’m going to try to buy a bag tomorrow from the guy who I got the clubs from and then go to the driving range with Sarah, Andy, and Linette. Should be a good time.

Skittles Marketing Idiots

Really? REALLY?!? Who in their right mind would think that either of those things is a good idea. How could you possibly think that linking to what other people are writing on another site is, in any way, shape, or form, a good idea?!? Have these marketing people ever seen the internet?

I’m not a marketing genius, but I would think that if you’re a candy company, rule number one would be to advertise to kids… which I wouldn’t think would include asking for your birthday to make sure you’re old enough to see your marketing material…

The internet has such great potential to provide information and services to do good and make the world better, but I have a hard time believing that that’s going to actually be accomplished any time soon when companies do things like this. At least with Skittles, they’re really only shooting themselves in the foot. Sadly, you have people who work for defense contractors who apparently don’t understand how the internet works either…

Out of Sequence

I’m sitting here at the drive-thru at Wendy’s, feeling out of place. It’s truck-SUV-truck-SUV-truck and then me. Apparently only people with large vehicles can eat here.

Give Me Money, Mark Cuban!

Mark Cuban is giving out money to startups who post their business plans in his blog. The trade-off is that your business plan is out there for the public to see/steal. I read through about 20 of the proposals and none of them were impressive. A few of them were just jokes/scams, and the rest were just ridiculous ideas.

I e-mailed LaWayne to see if he wanted to post our business plan on there. We’d definitely have one of the better ones, so we’d probably have a chance of getting some of his sweet, sweet cash. That would be great, since potential clients are flaking out due to the economy, which is exactly what this “open source funding” is supposed to fix in the first place. We’ve got plenty of college students about ready to graduate wanting to work for us. We definitely could use the help, but it’s just a risk to hire anybody on without some more guaranteed cashflow.

It’s all Catch-22. Need more people to write programs to sell to clients. Need more money to hire people. Need clients for more money.

So Sweaty

Just did 3 miles on the elliptical in 21 minutes and burned. So so sweaty.