Identity Thief Sends Purchase to My Address
I'm dealing with an identity theft situation today that I can't figure out. Last night, somebody ordered $259 poker jewelry from an online store using my business address, business phone, and email address along with their name. They paid for it with a VISA card.
I've checked my credit card providers and the charge wasn't placed on my cards. It appears the identity thief has established a credit card using my business address, phone and email.
I can't figure out what the thief hoped to accomplish with this order. I've found discussions on the Internet about carding scams, where people use someone else's address when ordering something with a stolen credit card, then intercept the package the day it arrives by waiting outside for the delivery person.
That couldn't happen here. My business address is at a UPS Store. There's no way a UPS driver would give a package to someone hanging out in front of the store.
The name used to make this order has used my email address before. In October 2007, he requested two car insurance quotes, and in April 2008 he applied for assistance from a debt-relief company.
I called the online store to notify them that the order was fraudulent, and I'm checking with credit reporting agencies to see whether bogus accounts have been set up in my name. I also am changing my business address. If anyone has advice for what else I can do, or what the thief was trying to do, your help is appreciated.
Chuck Todd is Hurting America
In the latest story about how Republicans are in trouble and we're in for 1,000 years of one-party rule, NBC News political director Chuck Todd unintentionally reveals one reasons most political news coverage sucks big rocks:
There are a number of ugly debates going on inside the Republican Party right now.
There is the debate over whether or not there is even something wrong; there's the debate over whether or not RNC chair Michael Steele should be trusted with making financial decisions for the party; there's the debate over whether or not the party should come up with an alternative to being just a party for conservatives; and there's the debate over whether or not all of this is just an over-reaction.
I have no stake in this other than as a junkie who enjoys a competitive political landscape.
And that is what is sad right now for junkies: things don't even look that competitive anymore.
The Republican Party is in deep trouble, Todd asserts, but it's only important to him because he likes politics to be "competitive."
One of the reasons I watch cable news so infrequently is because the TV networks' approach to politics is entirely based on who's up, who's down, who's ahead and who's behind. It's all about scoring points, managing expectations and winning the news cycle. John McCain got beat like a drum in part because he overvalued the opinions of the East Coast TV news producers who set the day's agenda. While his team was using manufactured controversies like "lipstick on a pig" to win that night's episode of Hardball, Obama was out there recruiting volunteers and pursuing voters to win an election.
If everything you knew about politics was learned from TV, you'd have no idea that anything was at stake in the decisions being made in Washington.
The saddest thing is that as far as broadcast journalists go, Todd's one of the smart ones.
Do Svidaniya, Tchaikovsky and the Year 1893
Maria de Jesus of Portugal died earlier this year, relinquishing the title of world's oldest known person at 115 years and 114 days. Born Sept. 10, 1893, de Jesus was a farm worker from age 12 who never learned to read or write, ate a vegeterian diet and outlived her husband by 57 years. Perhaps the most amazing facet of her longevity was that she got to know six great-great-grandchildren.
The death of de Jesus makes the oldest person Gertrude Baines, an American supercentenarian living in a Los Angeles nursing home. It also moves the line of oblivion, the starting date for the living history of the world, forward to Baines' birthday on April 6, 1894.
With the death of de Jesus, we've lost the last person who was alive when New Zealand became the first modern country to grant women the right to vote (Sept. 19, 1893) and Colorado became the second U.S. state to do the same (Nov. 7). She was also the last who could have remembered the first drive of a gas-powered automobile in the U.S. by Charles and Frank Duryea (Sept. 21) and the first sale of bottled Coca-Cola (March 12, 1894).
There's no longer anybody who could have shared a Coke with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky (died Nov. 6, 1893), saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax (Feb. 4, 1894), German physicist Heinrich Hertz (Jan. 1, 1894), English painter Ford Madox Brown (Oct. 6, 1893), or baseball player Ned Williamson (March 3, 1893), who hit 27 home runs in a single season, a record that stood until 1919 when it was broken by that young upstart Babe Ruth.
If you think my interest in this subject is obsessive, every day somebody on Wikipedia edits the entry for Baines to indicate her age down to the day. At 115 years and 35 days as of today, Baines is the 25th oldest person ever. She's the African-American daughter of a man born into slavery who's only voted twice for president in 115 years, first for John F. Kennedy and second for Barack Obama.
Bloglines Offline for Hours (and Outsourced to China)
Things aren't looking good today at Bloglines, the popular web-based service I've been using for years to read RSS feeds. The site has been offline for at least eight hours and isn't even responding to web requests with an error. Instead, requests time out with the error "The server at bloglines.com is taking too long to respond" (in Mozilla Firefox) or "cannot display the webpage" (Internet Explorer). Apparently, the Bloglines plumber who appears whenever there's a system outage has been laid off.
Some people are getting the error "Port 80 says: Bad Gateway ... proxy server received invalid response from upstream server," which suggests that there's a load-balancing problem with the site.
The Next Web reported in October that the owner of Bloglines, Ask.Com, tried unsuccessfully to sell the site and has outsourced the operation to China. An unofficial Twitter account, bloglines, has been tracking the site for a while and claims that it's now being run strictly "in maintenance mode."
I am a member of the RSS Advisory Board with Bloglines engineer Paul Querna. After I sent him an email to see what's up, I found out he's not the right person to ask either. He left Ask.Com in January to join Joost, not long after writing this on Twitter:
Ask.com has effectively killed Bloglines, and barely maintain it. I love the beta UI, but I'm tired of being abused by Ask.
Even if Bloglines comes back, it's clearly time to export my OPML subscription list and move to a new service. It's a shame that Ask.Com hasn't been able to make the service commercially viable. Querna and the other developers made it one of the best web-based readers, with full support for RSS and many of the RSS namespaces. We used Bloglines as one of the targets for the RSS Best Practices Profile. I am surprised there was no buyer, since it appears to me that the site has archived millions of RSS items it served over the years. That archive alone is valuable, and Bloglines also has a large user base. Deja News, an archive of USENET group posts dating back to the network's founding in 1979, was sold to Google in 2001 and became Google Groups.
I tried to ask Jeeves what's wrong with Bloglines? He's out of the loop too.
Update: There's a chance Google might have a cached copy of your Bloglines OPML subscriptions (the public ones, not the ones you've marked private). Search Google for the URL http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=rcade, changing rcade to your Bloglines username.
Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick!
I wish I could've been present at the meeting where they came up with Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick, a frozen microwaveable foodlike product that's also a great euphemism to yell when expressing vexation. The next time I hammer my thumb or your team beats my team in a sporting event -- a possibility which is, of course, unlikely -- I will exclaim "Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick!" instead of "Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick!"
The Chocolate Chip flavor of Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick weighs in at 13 grams of fat, 220 calories and 350 milligrams of sodium per stick (15 percent of your daily allowance). You could get two days worth of sodium from a single box.
Comics.Com Builds Community Around Comic Strips
United Feature Syndicate offers a bunch of social features with the comic strips on Comics.Com. There's support for comments, tags, embedding strips in blogs, and sharing them on Reddit, Facebook, Digg and elsewhere.
The site has managed to find an audience, judging by the number of comments posted each day by readers of Greg Evans' Luann. In the strip above, Toni has fallen off a wet ladder and is being caught by Brad, the title character's brother, a former slacker who became a firefighter after 9/11.
One commenter, HalfWreck, analyzed the physics of the fall:
The higher Toni begins her fall, the more time she accelerates, increasing speed, thus momentum. If Toni is 3 meters up (the height of a one story roof), she will be going around 5 m/s when she hits Brad. If she and her fire fighter gear has a mass of 60 kilos (a low end estimate), she has developed 300 kg-m/s of momentum. If it takes Brad 0.1 second to stop her, the resulting impulse is 3000 kg-m/sec ^2. Apply this force to the small area of her air tank, say .03 m^2, and Brad feels the same as if a narrow, 300 kg (660 lb) anvil is at rest on his chest, if he falls on his back. If he somehow stays on his feet, I pity the fibia/tibia that takes the stress. If Toni was up two stories, double the effect. This is way I could never watch the $6 Million Man without wondering what kept his "original equipment" spine from snapping.
Ignoring that gratuitous slam against the Six Million Dollar Man -- Oscar Goldman had mad engineering skills, dude -- HalfWreck was on the right track. Brad was knocked out and rushed to the hospital.
Supreme Court Justice Anita Hill
In December Vanity Fair writer Nell Scovell asked Anita Hill, currently a law professor at Brandeis University, whether she had considered the notion of being appointed to the Supreme Court.
Hill, much to my surprise, responded to the question:
Dear Ms. Scovell:
My mother would have warned me against answering your e-mail and participating in the kind of "devilment" you are up to. Last month I was speaking in Maine and was asked about being appointed to the Court. I responded, "That would be awkward, don't you think?" After all, there ought to be some level of civility, if not camaraderie, among The Nine. I'm very excited about Barack Obama's presidency and its potential for healing, but I don't think this is one that he can, or should try to, pull off.
Not that you asked, but high on my list of people Obama ought to consider for the Supreme Court are Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School (international law specialist) and Lani Guinier at Harvard. (She never had her chance to prove herself before the Judiciary Committee.) I'd also like for him to go outside the Northeast corridor and Ivy League Schools for someone who has been on a state supreme court deciding significant social/economic issues.
Best,
Anita Hill
I don't think that President Obama would consider appointing Hill -- Robert Bork has a better shot -- but it's an amusing line of thought. If anyone deserves to endure an uncomfortable workplace ...
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