Patrick’s Rants

So I was looking for movie to (re)watch in my collection. I ran across one that made me angry. Not because of the content of the movie, it is a childrens’ film, but because I bought it from Video City.
We have to go back a few years - but I can keep a grudge so a few years is nothing. I recall standing at the checkout counter at my locally owned… well it used to be locally owned before it was bought by some company out of state… video store. I was standing there wondering why they were telling me that a movie that I don’t remember renting was overdue. It wasn’t that the clerk was telling me the movie was overdue, it was the collection notice that I received for the price of the movie that caught my attention. That’s right, the video rental place I had been going to since it opened its doors was telling me that I owed them for a movie.
It’s not that I wasn’t late returning movies from time to time - this was an out and out “pay us for the movie”.
As I questioned the “manager” about the movie I was told that I had rented it five months before. Five months and countless trips to the video store in between. Countless trips where no one asked, “do you still have this movie? Our records show it is still out.” Well maybe not countless, but we rented movies at least once a month. So somewhere around five opportunities to remind me that we had a tape out. And five months for that tape to find its way out of my house - we searched high and low for the movie, did find out that we had indeed rented it (we had forgotten), but could not find the movie.
They sent me another collection notice and placed a “bad mark” on my credit report (big deal). So I sent them a check along with my membership card cut in half. If they couldn’t bother to tell me when I was there - on multiple occasions - that I had an outstanding movie then I was done using them as a movie rental establishment.
Yes we found the movie later - no I didn’t take it back and no I haven’t been back to rent any more movies from them.
We are quite happy with Netflix now thank you.

Win number 7 for Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France.
I’m personally happy to ride a couple of miles without being overly winded.

Here you go… http://whatreallyhappened.com/
http://www.911wasalie.com/phpwebsite/
I can’t even comment on these sites… it’s just so flabbergasting.

The company I work for part time recently rolled out a revised Emergency Procedures Manual. It has a color coded warning system that looks suspiciously like the one from the Department of Homeland Security.
We have a “hunker down” section in the book. What that essentially means is that we - meaning the management - choose a place to gather all of our customers. In that space we are to have enough food and water for three days. We are also supposed to have duct tape, plastic sheeting for all the coverings, vents etc. In addition we are to lock the doors. So, the space chosen is well… maybe 800~900 square feet. I estimate that when we are full this means 300 people in this small space.
We also have to secure the computers, telephone system and shut down the airconditioning. And last, but not least, “transfer or destroy” confidential information and records. If you can’t take it with you destory it. Well… if the terrorists come I’m just gonna flip the switch that ignites the thermite, burning through the file cabinets into the core of the earth itself finally to land in Satan’s Den kind of like that spicy chicken sandwich from Karl’s Jr. We can’t have the terrorists digging through our confidential information and you can bet that I’m not hanging around to shred all that paperwork. I think I’ll make a sign for our customers, “Your records are safe with us, in case of terrorist attack we will burn your records with a fire so hot even the devil himself would scream in agony.”
Now, where did they put that switch?

There’s a place to complain: http://www.fthisjob.com/

Referrer Karma is a little “plugin” for blogs of many flavors. The design is simple, usage requires including a file at the top of your main index page or any other page designed to take comments and adding the check_referrer() function to the top of the page as well. And the logs are filling with unwanted spam that has been turned away
The main reason for using this plugin - and I quoted that above because it is not a true WordPress plugin by design - is because my referrer logs were filling up with garbage. This is the main goal of the referrer spam; increase the value of their links by hitting a large number of sites who list the referrer somewhere. Once I finally configured it properly it seems to be working rather well. I may make some code modifications so that I can just throw a link to the logs up without having to run redirects through .htaccess and maybe change the resulting links on the log so that they are not “valid” to a search engine…. so far it looks good though. Time will tell if it reduces the junk on my stats page.
Try the plugin on any blog.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to extend and even make parts of the USA “Patriot Act” permanent¹. I also took my 12 year old daughter to the credit union to open a savings account. While to most people, these might seem like very separate acts they are very much intertwined. As part of the “are you Osama bin Ladin?” part of the application they use your Social Security number to check you out. In my daughter’s case we provided our address (Patriot *demands* a physical address which discriminates against people in Northern Arizona since even cities the size of Page, AZ all use PO Boxes - the Postal Service will not deliver on the street. Period.), phone number, birth dates etc. The usual stuff when you open an account. What they don’t tell you is that they take that information, run an instant credit check and a check on a federal database. My daughter failed. While I did not expect her to have a credit report, she is only 12 after all, I did not expect to find out her address didn’t match. Didn’t match? This is a kid who doesn’t have a credit report - but they clearly, somewhere in one of the databases had our PO Box. Her birthdate also raised red flags. Up popped some familiar looking dates - her mother’s and mine.
Now I’m not sure which databases are “harvested” to supply this information, but this is scary. The credit union probably can get into trouble for me being able to see this information on the screen as well… since “Patriot” demands secrecy too, you’re not allowed to know if you are being investigated - so they can’t tell you if you’re not being investigated either.
When they start building the 6° database we will all be in it, we will all be terrorists or know someone who knows someone who knows a terrorist. It can only be a matter of time that we will be able to be arrested and held because someone we know, knows someone who knows something. (say that five times fast)
Remember that Patriot was not a response to 9/11/2001. 9/11 finally gave the backers enough public fear to pass it; they were after our liberties a long time before 9/11.

1 - House approves renewal of Patriot Act

In an increasing invasion of rights and erosion of the fourth amendment police will begin checking bags of commuters on subways in New York City. And if they find something other than a bomb? Yeah, you’ll be arrested for that too even though there is no probable cause to search you and your belongings.
The answer will be for everyone to start telling the police they are attorneys and what is in their bag is covered under privilege. Remember there will be no racial or other kind of profiling so little old ladies and babies should stay home.

While many sat and watched Dubya announce his Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts, I wonder how many simply wondered what was wrong with Bush’s jaw. If you watched closely, you would have noticed that during most of his speaking pauses, his mouth did a kind of sideways wiggle. It looked like Dubya was chewing gum - or even a miniature cud.

You may remember that I posted about getting my credit report disclosed to unauthorised parties a while back. In order to try to head off any damage to my credit reports I logged into experian.com, did the “Click here if you’ve been a victim of fraud” dance, placed notices in all three reporting agencies.
Now I’m getting email from the credit reporting companies(well one so far) with offers to purchase my credit report and scores. This would all be well and good EXCEPT they way they do it looks like internet scammers trying to “phish”¹.
In what way does this: http://truelink.m0.net/m/S.asp
Not look like these:
http://pages.ebay.com.rsh.pl/
http://paypal.tbk.co.kr/.cgi-bin/ws/
The first one happens to be legitimate… I only know that because I gave them a different email address than my regular one and I know who it came from - it’s from Transunion. The next two are designed to fool you into clicking the links and are supposedly from ebay and paypal. What would happen if you clicked the first link?(you can’t here, because I purposefully didn’t make them clickable) I would venture to say that you might be less suspicious of links like the second and third after not being exploited by the first link.
This is irresponsible behavior on behalf of TransUnion. I might even call this negligent behavior by TransUnion. I went to their site because I received a notice that they - the credit bureaus - released my information improperly. Now they send me email with links to a different web site? Best case is that they don’t sell as many of their credit reports with scores, worst case is they are teaching the public that clicking unknown web sites - that ask for personal information - is ok.

1 - Define: phishing