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Gifts that Keep on Giving....
Jan. 31st, 2021 03:54 pmA bit too big an umbrella, but it'll do:
This journal. Once I hit post, I will have accomplished a not quite goal of having something to say here every day for an entire month. I've also gotten more responses to those sayings than I'd become used to (which is to say, usually, none). So thanks and you're welcome. Not sure if this will continue for the next month, much less year, but it's been a good discipline to get into, so at least I'm likely to continue posting more than the probably twice-weekly average that had been common for the past few years.
----
Naughty h@ckrs. A few months ago, I discovered that one of my credit card numbers had gotten loose in the wild, and was used repeatedly over a period of a week or so to make a bunch of gaming site purchases. I only found this out by looking up the card account for some odd reason; the total damages never got much beyond around 30 bucks, they stopped the authorizations before I even found out, and once I did "report" it to remove the charges they did slip through, they issued an all new card with a new number, expiry and sekrit code on the back. The weird thing was, it didn't get hacked by being skimmed or copied or anything like that: I never used the card for in-person purchases, keeping it more for emergencies, like the $700 we DID rack up on the kitten's diagnostic emergency vet bill in December, and automatic purchases of Prime things. For this is the card that is tied to the Amazon account, and we earn points for the things we use it for (as do other cards in other ways).
So, in this weekend's installment of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie: Eleanor decided that she wanted to get an air fryer, this year's foodie craze judging by social media feeds. My sister had sent her a gift card from Tarjay that would just about cover it. But the Bullseye's selection wasn't the best, so next I knew we were looking on other store sites, where delays and shipping charges started pushing up the price- until yay!, Bezos to the rescue! There was a model, and a better price, and arrival on Monday, and hey, I chimed in, I have something like 15 bucks we can knock off if I use the points from the Amazon credit card!
To which the hackers replied, No you can't:P No, they didn't hit it again, but Amazon still has the old useless card number as the only one that points can be used with. I tried manually switching to the new card, which it happily added, but without the points being transferred to it, even though they all accumulated after the new card arrived. Neither the Amazon nor the bank website had any contact option for fixing this other than those four most dreaded of words: Please call customer service.
F that. I discovered a workaround: bank allowed me to transfer the $15 of points into a payment ON the credit card, and I then went and paid the price for the thing. Net result was the same, but the time it took to do it was three times longer than just having the points come off the price- still not nearly as long as I'd have been on the phone with someone about it.
----
Netflix and such. Our latest discovery is multicultural: Lupin, a French-language series from a British showrunner featuring a Senegalese main character reprising the adventures of the titular literary-hero "gentleman thief" Arsène Lupin, the popularity of whose early 20th century stories rivaled that of Sherlock Holmes, only from the criminal's POV. The first set of episodes only includes five, which we're more than halfway through and will likely finish tonight. I was a little underwhelmed by the pilot at first, which looked to be a fairly pedestrian heist story and not with very competent heisters; but, as with so much of this series, all is not as it appears, and the story of the heist goes back a generation to the Lupinesque character's father, a particularly evil aristocratic French family, and a bad cop. All of these threads intertwine through the story which slips seamlessly back between 1995 and 2020. My only remaining gripe is that they dub it into English, and the translations you hear often doesn't match the subtitles- but sometimes you get more clues to what's really going on that way. We've since heard we can switch the audio back to French, and I think we'll do that for the remaining ones.
The writer behind it is also responsible, to varying extents, for other Netflix crime things including Killing Eve (which I'd heard of), and one called Criminal, (which I hadn't- each episode consists of a single police interview and is done in several countries in their own languages).
----
Voter integrity:
The Baseball Hall of Fame (No) Class of 2021. The cheater, the bat thrower and the one who lost his head-
- all fell short of the number of votes required for induction. There will still be a ceremony this summer with the holdovers from 2020 that didn't get one last year. The threesome will have one more year of eligibility, although Schilling has requested removal from the ballot in hopes he'll get a fairer shake from a different committee sometime in the future. Either that or he's planning on supporting an insurrectional riot on Cooperstown.
----
And, of course, more Bernie memes:
----
Time to hit send and farewell to January....
This journal. Once I hit post, I will have accomplished a not quite goal of having something to say here every day for an entire month. I've also gotten more responses to those sayings than I'd become used to (which is to say, usually, none). So thanks and you're welcome. Not sure if this will continue for the next month, much less year, but it's been a good discipline to get into, so at least I'm likely to continue posting more than the probably twice-weekly average that had been common for the past few years.
----
Naughty h@ckrs. A few months ago, I discovered that one of my credit card numbers had gotten loose in the wild, and was used repeatedly over a period of a week or so to make a bunch of gaming site purchases. I only found this out by looking up the card account for some odd reason; the total damages never got much beyond around 30 bucks, they stopped the authorizations before I even found out, and once I did "report" it to remove the charges they did slip through, they issued an all new card with a new number, expiry and sekrit code on the back. The weird thing was, it didn't get hacked by being skimmed or copied or anything like that: I never used the card for in-person purchases, keeping it more for emergencies, like the $700 we DID rack up on the kitten's diagnostic emergency vet bill in December, and automatic purchases of Prime things. For this is the card that is tied to the Amazon account, and we earn points for the things we use it for (as do other cards in other ways).
So, in this weekend's installment of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie: Eleanor decided that she wanted to get an air fryer, this year's foodie craze judging by social media feeds. My sister had sent her a gift card from Tarjay that would just about cover it. But the Bullseye's selection wasn't the best, so next I knew we were looking on other store sites, where delays and shipping charges started pushing up the price- until yay!, Bezos to the rescue! There was a model, and a better price, and arrival on Monday, and hey, I chimed in, I have something like 15 bucks we can knock off if I use the points from the Amazon credit card!
To which the hackers replied, No you can't:P No, they didn't hit it again, but Amazon still has the old useless card number as the only one that points can be used with. I tried manually switching to the new card, which it happily added, but without the points being transferred to it, even though they all accumulated after the new card arrived. Neither the Amazon nor the bank website had any contact option for fixing this other than those four most dreaded of words: Please call customer service.
F that. I discovered a workaround: bank allowed me to transfer the $15 of points into a payment ON the credit card, and I then went and paid the price for the thing. Net result was the same, but the time it took to do it was three times longer than just having the points come off the price- still not nearly as long as I'd have been on the phone with someone about it.
----
Netflix and such. Our latest discovery is multicultural: Lupin, a French-language series from a British showrunner featuring a Senegalese main character reprising the adventures of the titular literary-hero "gentleman thief" Arsène Lupin, the popularity of whose early 20th century stories rivaled that of Sherlock Holmes, only from the criminal's POV. The first set of episodes only includes five, which we're more than halfway through and will likely finish tonight. I was a little underwhelmed by the pilot at first, which looked to be a fairly pedestrian heist story and not with very competent heisters; but, as with so much of this series, all is not as it appears, and the story of the heist goes back a generation to the Lupinesque character's father, a particularly evil aristocratic French family, and a bad cop. All of these threads intertwine through the story which slips seamlessly back between 1995 and 2020. My only remaining gripe is that they dub it into English, and the translations you hear often doesn't match the subtitles- but sometimes you get more clues to what's really going on that way. We've since heard we can switch the audio back to French, and I think we'll do that for the remaining ones.
The writer behind it is also responsible, to varying extents, for other Netflix crime things including Killing Eve (which I'd heard of), and one called Criminal, (which I hadn't- each episode consists of a single police interview and is done in several countries in their own languages).
----
Voter integrity:
The Baseball Hall of Fame (No) Class of 2021. The cheater, the bat thrower and the one who lost his head-
- all fell short of the number of votes required for induction. There will still be a ceremony this summer with the holdovers from 2020 that didn't get one last year. The threesome will have one more year of eligibility, although Schilling has requested removal from the ballot in hopes he'll get a fairer shake from a different committee sometime in the future. Either that or he's planning on supporting an insurrectional riot on Cooperstown.
----
And, of course, more Bernie memes:
----
Time to hit send and farewell to January....