Tom Simpson and the Raiders of the Lost Blog

Chris and I hit Philadelphia every couple of weeks for wedding preparations. I’ve put together a gallery where I’ll stick a lot of these pictures. The first few ones in the gallery are at the hotel where we’ll have the wedding. You can see the Philadelphia pictures here.

Ok, this is actually pretty disturbing. It’s a parody, part of a larger fake travel website for Molvania (“A land untouched by modern dentistry”). Check out ZLAD!

Our latest work project, we helped Radio City set up a blog with their newest Rockette. Check out Second From Left to see her post behind the scenes footage, pictures and stories about what it’s like as a first year Rockette.

So someone, somewhere (I think it might be Stillwater, Oklahoma) has stolen my debit card number! I checked in yesterday to see if a check had cleared and found hundreds of dollars worth of debit authorizations from Korea and London. Apparently someone had hacked a website I shopped at (no idea which one) and grabbed my number & expiration date.

So far only $30 had posted, and I got Citibank on the case to recover that. They removed the authorizations for the other charges, and hopefully they’ll never post. I froze that account and opened a new checking & savings account and moved all my money over. Now I have to monitor the old account while other things try to post to it from the last few days before I blocked it, then get the money back and moved to my new account before I can close it.

Scary! Since I’ve been doing a credit debt reduction plan all my credit cards are closed while I pay them down at a vastly lower rate. All my online purchases are made with my debit card. It hasn’t been a problem before, but just became one last week.

Kudos to Citibank though, they’re very fast and agressive about this, and quite helpful with moving my money over to a new account.

Why I think the perp might be in Oklahoma is there were a number of charges from “Grandma’s House” in Stillwater, Oklahoma, for $1 or less. I was advised that often the criminals will do these micropurchases just to see if the account is valid and working before trying the larger withdrawals. Thankfully I noticed this early, and was able to move all my money out to a new account before I lost anything other than a $30.48 charge to “Matchnet London”, whatever that’s about.

So be sure to go through your bank statements often and keep track of these things. Banks will work to get your money back, but when it’s coming directly out of your checking, you lose the money until you can get it back.

Many won’t remember this, but back in November, 1978, a truly awful Star Wars Holiday Special was aired. Shockingly worse than even the Star Wars Prequels have been, the only term that comes to mind to describe this film is “Deep Hurting”, coined by MST3k to describe the pain of Hercules Against the Moon Men.

I’d try to describe the action, but that would make my brain hurt more than it does now. You can read transcripts here and a review of the special here.

If you’re really adventureous you can find the video on most of the P2p download networks like eDonkey or others.