A couple of months ago, somebody stole my credit card info and charged a bunch of stuff with it. It was only because I obsessively check my online statement that I noticed it, and at first it didn't even register. This was about the time we booked our tickets to lovely sunny Cleveland, and I noticed there were charges that looked like airfare; at first I didn't think anything of it. But then I saw there were 3 charges, not two. Plus, each was for in excess of $500, way more than one should spend to go to The Heart of It All. There was also a charge for some stupid VoIP company, but that $20 charge paled in comparison. I canceled the card and was refunded the fraudulent charges.

Now, this is what irks me: a few weeks before this happened, my creidt card company had shut my card down; it discovered suspicious charges and stopped my account from working pending my approval. What sort of charges tip off the credit industry? For me it was Century 21, Netflix and cat food ... stuff I buy all the time. So I buy some stuff form stores I have bought from for many years, alarms go off and the security details suspends my account until I call into their lame automated call center. I verbally approve every charge and my account is back.

Cut to a month later: I notice airfare charges (from a company based in ROME, no less) and now it's up to me to convince them I didn't make these charges. What, are hackers so talented nowadays they can make stolen work seem more legit than the real stuff? Anyway, I will say the credit card company was rapidly compliant, closing the account and getting me a new card quickly. Among other things, we went out to Ikea with the new card and spent tons of dough on some new furniture and other crap we may regret in a couple of months. Then I tried to buy something with the card and it says it's not working again. Here we go again ...

I call in to find out what's up and they lame automated system tells me they have reason to believe (again) that fraudulent activity has taken place. They recite the list of suspicious charges, all legitimate, all mine, all for companies I buy stuff from all the time. But in all of this, they didn't mention the Ikea purchase at all; I asked about it and they said it wasn't suspicious. So my 20-dollar charge to a pet supply company I buy from almost every other month is more suspect that the enormous purchase from Ikea, from whom I've never bought from before? I just don't get it.

Anyway, it's all settled now at least and as far as I can tell, my account is safe for now. But one ironic outcome: I checked with the VoIP company to find out who used my card and they gave me the email address associated with the charge. It was my email with my first and last name reversed. Clever! So I emailed it:

From: jimmylegs
To: legsjimmy
Subject: having a good time

hey
are you using my credit card?

I didn't expect a reply, but the other day I got one:

From: legsjimmy
To: jimmylegs
Subject: RE:having a good time

yes. i have ur info when i hacked one shop. im sorry

I wanted to find out how he got it, so I wrote

From: jimmylegs
To: legsjimmy
Subject: RE:having a good time

ha! wow i didn't expect a reply. can you tell me what shop you hacked? i'm trying to figure out where it got out.

From: legsjimmy
To: jimmylegs
Subject: RE:having a good time

becos im úing thí mail for búyome thing :D that reply u man hehe i dont remember shop was hacked i have many many

I'm not sure why his spelling got so bad at the end there, but it momentarily spooked me that he still uses the email address to buy stuff. But he doesn't have my card info any more, and as his email is a gmail account, there doesn't seem to be anything to do about it. It feels like that episode of Seinfeld when Jerry's car gets stolen and he calls the thief on the car phone:

JERRY: can I have it back?

CAR THIEF: Mmmm, nah, I'm gonna keep it.

Labels: Bad Stuff, Funny to Me, Identity Theft, Money

We have plenty of cats we need to get adopted, but here's one of the few kittens in Brooklyn we DON'T actually have in our house currently. This little girl's name is Grey Eye Kitten, apparently following the fostering naming convention so you don't get too attached to the animal (see Big Giant Head and Littleface). The kitten's fosterperson found her near her Kensington home and just had to lend a hand.

Her person set up a blog all about her, so head on over if you're in the market for a babycat. I, myself, prefer my cats big and ugly but Cat Overpopulation means we can all find that special void-filler. GEK is about 6-8 weeks old, healthy but has tested a weak positive for FIV. However, this is by no means the end of the world; many kittens give false-positives for the Virus at this age; she'll have to be tested later on to confirm or deny the illness. so please don't let this stop you from considering adoption, it's almost a non-issue.

My experience has mostly been with street cats, feral and otherwise. In this arena, many groups actively denounce the act of FIV testing. Although this is in part due to the high cost of testing, it is also because it's not worth it for many other reasons. From Alley Cat Allies:

Kittens that test positive are not necessarily infected. If a kitten tests positive, the test may be detecting antibodies passed from an infected mother to the kitten through colostrum (an antibody-rich fluid secreted by nursing mothers). Positive kittens under six months of age should be retested between eight to 12 months of age, when any antibodies obtained from the mother cat will have disappeared.

So in fact, GEK's positive test may literally mean nothing at all. Let's hope that's the case!

UPDATE: The kitten's been adopted! I am arranging to ship several of our cats to her house right now.

Labels: Adoption, Cats, kittens

I usually post during the weekdays here, but I have been stymied in my efforts lately. As you may know, my company was bought out by another company some months back and we are finally being switched over to their network. This has been pretty annoying all around, but everything has been hammered out now and I enjoy full access to the many wonderful opportunities that await me at the new company.

Sidebar: I'm getting so sick of the way office people use the word "opportunities" when they really mean "failure." Instead of saying they screwed something up, they always say they see "areas of opportunity" like they did somebody a favor.

Anyhow, one unfortunate opportunity in this regard is that the new company apparently thinks blogger is dangerous to productivity and has it blocked. This will either have the result of finally, after 5 years at this, to move this operation fully to the server instead of using Blogger's infrastructure. Or maybe I won't bother.

Even worse for me, Flickr is also blocked. I hate that. Half the time I spend during the day is checking to see if anybody has posted new cat photos! Hey, to thine own self be true. So I'm thinking maybe I'll get one of those nifty iPhone things and write it off as a business expense.

In any case, all this upheaval will culminate with me moving offices yet again, a little further downtown. For some reason, nobody is able to tell us when exactly when we will move, but I hope they give us at least a few more days; my cubicle is full of cat food I need to lug home still.

On the home front, I am happy to report the Mugsy (pictured above with perennial worrywart Freddie) is feeling much better and is back to looking like his usual disheveled self. Thanks to Empty Cages Collective, I got some Lysine gel to add to his food, which appears to have helped him fight off the infection. He still could use a good powerwashing but this is about as good as he ever looked.

Labels: Cats, Feral, Job, Tedium

I took an actual vacation from work, but now I am back and I am trying to determine if the time off has made any difference. So far today it seems that all the work I left before is still here, plus a bunch of stupid crap that has piled up in the mean time. I don't mind it so much since I can pull the "hey, I just got back from vacation and I am swamped" for the next week or so. I suppose the fact that I don't mind this means the vacation succeeded in relaxing me adequately. I blew off just enough steam to once again resume my cog-in-the-wheel status.

In two weeks my office moves downtown, which would be interesting if it didn't mean I will have to start dressing up for work. I think I have to start wearing ties and shirts that tuck in. Does anyone know if they make pre-tied neckties that can be buttoned in the back? Not a clip-on, which is pretty obvious, this would be something that would look like a real tie from the front but be easy to attach in the back (the clasp would be covered by the collar). I looked for this but I couldn't really find any; doesn't this seem odd? Why do people waste valuable time tying their ties every single day? I thought about just loosening the knot so I could put it back on, but this tends to rumple the tie. Is this a million-dollar idea the corporate world has been waiting for?

Anyway, I'm back. Our vacation consisted of a short jaunt to the Greater Cleveland Area, to visit some people up there and generally not do anything. The highlight of the trip was holing up in the lovely Super 8 motel, eating junk food and watching cable television. Of course after 3 days of this, we were both totally sick of junk food and agreed that even with 60 channels there was absolutely nothing to watch (although we could almost get by on just Bravo and Animal Planet). We hung out with my sister's family and finally got to see lifelong friend James' new house. We hit up Corky & Lenny's, Tommy's Diner (soy milkshakes!), Aladdin's (best baba ever), and drank free Starbucks the entire time using the gift cards our bosses had given us last Christmas. We ran through the endless aisles of Giant Eagle and the non-crowded Whole Foods, went to the mall and bought some clothes, and remembered to swing by Big Fun on the way to the airport to buy some crap (actually I bought some tin crickets to help train the cats to do my bidding). In short, we lived like Ohioans, if only for a short time.

There is something to be said for sequestering yourself away from your life. I kind of scoffed at that sort of thing in the past, but the older you get, the more necessary it may be. Even if we hadn't gone to Cleveland, we could have booked a room at some local fleabag motel to get out of our house for a couple days. The remainder of our vacation was spent at home, and although we got a lot of work done on the house, that's exactly the problem: you can't sit at home and do nothing. I've tried before but sooner or later I find myself weeding, or fixing something, or god forbid, cleaning. In that Super 8 with the uncomfortable headboard and nonexistent maid service, we were forced to actually do nothing, which is harder than it sounds.

Anyway, when we returned to Brooklyn we set about out our tasks, which included hitting the newish Ikea. We've been in our house for almost 2 years and we still haven't bought any furniture or anything. My night stand is a storage chest; Jeannie's is a chair. Our couch (a gift from our pal Sean M, who has basically outfitted our entire home with his hand-me-downs) once was an elegant fixture from the 50's, but it has been used to the point that it cuts off leg circulation when you sit on it for a while. I don't know that I ever had any political issue with the opening of the Brooklyn Ikea, but if I did, I forgot all about it when I realized we could outfit most of the house for less than one couch from Room and Board.

Ikea was nice enough, we picked out tons of stuff, then came home and bought it online. Annoyingly, a few items were not available online, so we'll still have to go back there at some point. The shipping costs were also outrageous, but we still came in several hundred bucks below my intended ceiling. Who knows when we actually will get the stuff, this doesn't seem to be their strong point.

Labels: Cleveland, Good Stuff, Job, Motel, Ohio, Vacation