gotjenkins.com

It’s a good thing that I’m getting ready to move out. I’ve about had it with my neighbors.

Don’t get me wrong – these neighbors of mine have been a pretty consistent pain in the ass for a long time now. This isn’t really anything new; rather, it is just the latest chapter in selfishness, person irresponsibility, and ‘fuck-you-what-about-me’.

Politically, we’ve never been on the same side of the fence. They are tried and true bible beaters, with a 100% track record of ‘voting with God.’ So not only are they assholes, but they’re also political sheep, and they think that everything they do is ‘in the hands of God.’ Spare me.

These folks don’t exactly have the best track record with pets. There are no fences at the edge of their property (except for our fence, which might I add, they have bent and beat to hell over the years.) They have had a couple of dogs since we’ve lived next to them, and currently have two. One is a greyhound mix with a little bit of something else, but I’m not exactly sure what. The other is a stray mutt chihuahua that they found and adopted. Neither dog is particularly well trained or obedient, but nothing a little training won’t fix. They both have the potential to be great pet dogs. More frustrating than the dogs they won’t train are the cats. They ‘own’ two cats, neither of which lives in the house. Both cats roam the neighborhood at their leisure, crapping wherever they want and killing whatever critters they find. Cats are not outdoor pets. If you don’t want your cat to live in the house, don’t get a cat. One of the cats, however, is really friendly. I call him Jimbo, and I have every intention of stealing him once we move. Jimbo is actually a girl, but whatever.

Anyhow. Recently, the dogs they can’t control (much like the kids they can’t control) caused an accident and knocked a guy off of his bicycle. Naturally, the guy is suing them for something or other (because that’s what we do in america – we sue people for stupid shit rather than taking personal responsibility for our problems.)

So one of the conditions of settling the lawsuit: Either get rid of the dogs, or put up a fence.

Given that the standard MO here is “fuck-you-what-about-me,” naturally the dogs (which you have to be RESPONSIBLE to take care of) are going to go, because – wait for it – ‘we don’t really want to put up a fence.’

So now the dogs are going to go to the pound where, chances are, they will be put down.

We put down huge numbers of dogs on a daily basis because we can’t find homes for them and animal shelters are full. So what would Jesus do? Jesus would put dogs to sleep that have a home because Jesus doesn’t fucking want a fence.

You should be required to take and pass a test of proving your competence and accountability before you are allowed to be responsible for the well being of another living thing. Dogs, gerbils, fish, children, whatever – you can’t pass the test? Not yours.

I don’t usually watch American Idol, but I sat through it last night while I was waiting for House.

One of the guys did John Mayer’s Waiting for the World to Change, and I can honestly say that I thought it was horrible. The guy seemed like he was off key for pretty much the entire song and at points he couldn’t seem to even keep up with the music. I’m no real musician, and I’m certainly no singer, but it just doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to sing that song. Pretty straightforward song to not get right.

Maybe I’m being overly critical, but it’s at least a little unpleasant to see someone get on TV and sing a song that you enjoy like it’s bad karaoke.

Speaking of American Idol – what ever happened to that guy that co-hosted the first season? Weren’t there originally two guys – Ryan Seacrest and some other guy? Where’d he go? Season two came, Ryan was there, and the other guy had just faded into obscurity.

I’d like to see the curly haired guy do well this season, only because he reminds me a little of captain James.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to title entries. I’d sit here for a long time – probably more time than it took to write out the entry itself – trying to come up with something to call it. Now I know better – I write the entry first and title it later.

Anyway, not really what this is about. I digress.

The spam comments have really been out of control lately.

It used to be that I would post an entry, and after a few weeks or months, the spam comments would start coming in. Tons of links to bullshit websites about all kinds of things from viagra to online poker to breast enlargement pills. Easy enough to fix, since it was always the older entries all I had to do was disable comments.

Now I post an entry and there’s spam comments within a week. And I don’t mean just a few, there’s dozens. I deleted eighty eight just last night when I logged in to post the consumer terrorism entry.

I don’t want to just close comments entirely, although in all fairness it’s probably not that big of a deal given that my site traffic is at an all time low. So I’m not sure entirely what I should do.

I’m thinking that the ‘right’ way to handle it is to just start over. I had everything working really well with greymatter, but my webhost issued a decree from above that, due to what were apparently pretty significant security flaws, they were no longer going to allow the greymatter scripts to run on their servers. Which is really kind of unfortunate, seeing as I liked greymatter a lot.

So then I moved to movable type, which seems great, except for the fact that instead of building my website design around the movable type engine, I rigged movable type to work with my design. My design is just OK anyway, so I’m not opposed to throwing it out and starting over with a chassis that is built around the engine in the first place. I’m sure that it will probably make things easier in terms of design change and updating, which is something that I’d like anyway. Plus by starting over I would be able to use the modifications and extensions that are out there for things like spamblocking.

Scrapping this and starting over seems to be the answer that comes up with any website question that comes up. It just doesn’t seem like my website does what I want it to anymore. I think what I want to do has changed, but I haven’t implemented. And I’m not sure I know how to implement. I’ve been more of an accountant and less of an IS geek lately, so to say I’m rusty would be an understatement. I still want to keep the weblog portion going, but there’s other things that I’d like to do on top of that, and there are things that I still have up that I want to go away.

So I’ll figure it out. Maybe. I hope.

Credit card fraud is apparently a big problem in the financial world. Identity theft, obviously, is also a big problem. So I guess it should be no surprise to anyone that both banks and vendors are implementing programs to reduce or eliminate fraud.

When implemented poorly, however, fraud prevention programs wind up being not just a pain in the ass, but also becomes consumer obstructions. Preventing fraud is good, preventing the consumer from spending money they want to spend is not so good.

A case in point, if you will. I recently bought a new laptop. So recently, in fact, that it just came today and I haven’t even installed anything on it yet. This laptop came from Newegg.com, which has a pretty good reputation as far as online retailers go, and I got a really good deal on it. $1,300 bought a computer much more powerful than it should have.

It’s worth mentioning that I have to be difficult when it comes to credit cards. My billing address and my shipping address are never the same – my billing address for everything banking is a PO box, while my shipping address is always my house.

Anyway, last week I order the laptop online, I order a pizza from papa john’s, and I order thirty dollars in Wii virtual console points, in that order. As far as I can tell, everything seems to have gone OK, up until the point that I buy the Wii points. When I try to buy the Wii points, Nintendo rejects the credit card transaction. I don’t really think anything of it – there have been situations before where my card has been declined because I used it too much in too short a period. I assumed that this was one of those times.

The next morning, I’m at work and I get an email from newegg telling me that my card has been declined; they tell me that I should contact the bank and clear up whatever is going on so that the charge goes through. I call chase and naturally wind up dealing with someone who speaks very little english at all. She tells me that there have been several transactions that they are holding so that they can verify whether or not they are fraudulent. Still no big deal. She goes over the list, and there’s probably half a dozen charges that they have ‘held’ so that they could verify them. They date back to almost a month earlier, and they never called me to verify them.

This pisses me off a little, so I ask why no one ever called about these transactions. She tells me that they have tried to call me, but they keep getting ‘disconnected’ by whoever answers the phone. I ask her when they’re calling, and she says that it’s usually between 9 and noon.

You’re disconnected by whoever answers the phone? Well no shit! The person answering the phone is an answering machine! So I explain to her that they will never be able to get ahold of me calling that number at that time because, well, I have a job. She clears the transactions and tells me to go ahead and have the vendors re-run the card; everything should be OK.

Great. That’s what I wanted to hear. One more thing before I go, miss non-english speaking lady: Let’s go ahead and change my phone number to my cell phone so that when you need to call me you can actually get ahold of me. She changes my business number from my work number to my cell number, and I get off the phone.

Seeing as I’m in the clear, I contact Newegg and have them re-run my card. Ten minutes later, I get another email from them and I get a phonecall from mastercard at about the same time. The email says that the card was declined again, and mastercard is calling me to verify that I have recently made a change to my personal information.

Good timing, I say – Yes, I’ve changed my phone number on file. While I’ve got you on the phone, I just got an email that this charge was declined again, and I was told by the last person I talked to a few minutes ago that everything is OK. What’s the deal?

“Oh, sorry about that, sir – you see, when you make a change to your personal information, we have to place a temporary hold on your account.”

WHAT?!? Why didn’t the gal I was just talking to tell me that? I never would have changed any of it if I knew it going to complicate things further… Why wouldn’t you guys tell me that when I made the change, knowing that I was going to be re-processing a credit card charge immediately?

She apologizes after I flip out on her, and she tells me that if I tell them to go ahead and run the card one more time, it will work. I’m pissy about it, but I do it, and within ten minutes there is a pending authorization on my card at chase.com. Thank God, I’m done.

Except, I’m not.

Fast forward about 6 hours. I’m getting ready to go home, and I check my email one last time before I go. I have another email from Newegg telling me that my address has failed verification with the credit card company, and that I need to log in to my account at Newegg and fix the incorrect information.

Great.

So I log back in and look at the address information. The billing address, which gets verified against the credit card, is OK and has no flags. It’s the shipping address that is flagged, and it’s flagged because the shipping address isn’t on file with the credit card company.

I’m starting to get a little pissed at this point. I call the people at newegg this time so that I can actually talk to someone, because my billing address is different from my shipping address and the shipping address isn’t on file. It shouldn’t have to be. The two aren’t related. I could be buying this laptop as a present for someone I live with and I may need to have it shipped somewhere else so that it’s a surprise. The verification policy at newegg has made that impossible and begs the question – if the shipping address has to be on file with the credit card company, why give anyone the option to ship to an address other than the billing address in the first place?

So I call newegg and they tell me what to do: Call the credit card company and have them add the shipping address to the account as a secondary address.

FINE. By now I’m making it a point to tell anyone who I talk to about this how much of a pain in the ass it is. I call the credit card company, I have them add the address, and I have newegg re-run the verification. As I’m getting off the phone with Chase, what does the gal say to me? ‘Sir, I noticed just now that you don’t have any of our fraud protection services activated on your account. Are you interested in using any of these services?’

NO. No I’m not. You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve spent the better part of a day arguing with people because of fraud protection, I absolutely don’t want anything more than what you’ve already given me.

Finally I’m done and the laptop is on the way, right? Right. Except for the fact that – wait for it – by adding the address to my account I changed my personal information and my account was placed on temporary hold again.

Anyway, you see where this is going. The long story short is that, after more bullshit complications than I thought were possible, the laptop came today.

This might be kind of a messed up parallel to draw, but in a way this is at least a little similar to terrorism and terrorism prevention. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not at all equating the two. Consumer convenience is nowhere near as important as physical safety – I’m not necessarily comparing the two, just drawing an interesting parallel. But if you look, in both cases, we’ve suspended conveniences that seem easy and day-to-day in the name of keeping people safe; consumers have to provide 3 digit security codes and bring copies of birth certificates and multiple proofs of identity; travelers have to take their shoes off at security and can’t bring liquids on a plane. In the case of consumers, it’s protection of identity; in the case of terrorism, it’s protection of self.