I think I’ve worked for about a dozen companies in my lifetime, and my new employer is the first one of those that gave me Election Day off work as a paid holiday.

Consumer Experiences
I think I’ve worked for about a dozen companies in my lifetime, and my new employer is the first one of those that gave me Election Day off work as a paid holiday.
It’s done. I just deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. It was fun for a few years, but the relationship turned sour after one of us started lying to the other, then pretended to take steps to improve but just kept lying.
Separation took a few months of planning and preparation. Here’s the blog post I wrote about this process several months ago:
And now here is the result:
For those who want to get in touch, here is my contact info:
So what am I doing now for social media? Over the past 9 months or so, I’ve gravitated to a mix of Reddit, Twitter, my blog, and MeWe.
I’m gonna explain an easy thing you can do to reduce your risk of being a victim of credit card fraud. I first read about this trick a few years back, and started doing it myself. I can say from first-hand experience that it works.
The basic idea is this: Get two credit cards…
Here’s how it works. The vast majority of credit card fraud is from people stealing your card details at the point-of-purchase. For example, there are credit card skimmers attached to gas pumps at the service station that record the details of your card as you swipe it to pay for gas. And untrustworthy workers at the supermarket, restaurants, etc.
In fact, I just read an a few days ago about how “merchants who operate gas stations and gas pumps are facing a rash of attacks from cybercrime groups wanting to deploy point-of-sale (POS) malware on their networks.” — https://www.zdnet.com/article/visa-warns-of-pos-malware-incidents-at-gas-pumps-across-north-america/
On the other hand, online purchases are much safer. Despite the news stories you’ve read about criminals stealing data from websites, your credit card information is very safe in your web browser and at any online merchant, and every place in-between. It’s much more safe than when the card is used at an in-person (POS, of “point of sale”) merchant.
But what’s the biggest pain in the ass when you become the victim of credit card fraud? It’s that once your card is canceled by the bank, you have to go to all the vendors you do business with and update your card details with them. In my case, that’s Amazon, Apple, my mail-order pharmacy, the cable company, the power company, the phone company, and many more. So, it makes sense to give all those companies the credit card that is the least likely to be stolen, and use the card that’s most likely to be stolen only at places that don’t automatically charge my card every month, like the supermarket, gas station, etc.
Make sense? To recap:
Online-only Card | Non-online Card |
Stays in a drawer at home | Stays in my wallet |
Used for recurring payments and online stores | Used for individual purchases at brick-and-mortar stores |
The two card approach isn’t perfect. There are some other risks and side-effects. For example:
Since you read this far, here are a few quick suggestions for reducing your risk of being a victim while doing online purchases:
Since this past spring, I’ve been working to arrange composting at my condominium complex. And this week it starts to pay off.
Denver Compost Collective is an organization that collects food waste from apartment dwellers and takes it to their large scale composting facility. Then they give the resulting “black gold” to a local urban farm/food charity. The city has been encouraging composting the past few years, but if you don’t have a big garden, it’s tough to do. So this group fills that gap.
Here is me with my new bucket. I’ll fill it up throughout the week with food scraps (no meat or dairy) and then put it in my building’s parking garage for DCC to pick up Monday morning. They weigh each bucket, dump it into a bigger container on their truck, rinse the bucket out, and put it back in the garage.
In other news, I voted today. The ballot and issues were so easy this time I decided to do it while enjoying some quasi-legal recreational drugs. It’s great to live in Denver.
Saturday, maybe Casa Bonita. Seriously.
Earlier this week I learned about a recall of MacBook Pro computers from 2015. So I went here to read more:
https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall
And I learned that my personal laptop is part of the recall! I wonder if they were going to proactively contact me, since Apple know that computer belongs to me and where to find me. Regardless, I contacted them and am now taking it in to the Apple Store next Tuesday for warranty service to have the battery replaced.
It is supposed to take 1 to 2 weeks, but I guess that’s better than having the battery explode while I’m using it.
Someone has made 12 fraudulent charges on one of my Visa credit cards since May 31, including buying 6 airline tickets on Allegiant Air, renting U-Haul trucks several times, and staying in a couple hotels.
Now, of course, the bank has canceled my card and are sending me a new one that’ll arrive Monday or so. What a hassle.
That reminds me – didn’t Apple announce some new Apple credit card thing with a rotating number to prevent fraud? I should go read about that sometime. Oh, here it is: https://www.apple.com/apple-card/privacy-security/
Angeles City in central Luzon (Philippines) was a unique stop on our travels. It was the only place where we had local friends. In particular, Robert and Mel, formerly of Boulder, Colorado, now live there again. This is where they met and married long ago. They lived here in the 1970s, and now again in the 2010s. So they know the place pretty well. Mel was born and raised in a small village not too far from Angeles, and has much extended family in the area. Bob has lived here both as a civilian and while in the US Air Force. They did some hotel scouting for us when we were first planning our visit, and made a few recommendations.
One of the biggest concerns when renting a hotel room in Angeles City is that a lot of the low to middle cost hotels are part of the vibrant local sex trade. The Imerex Plaza Hotel is one of few hotels that isn’t used for prostitution, and gets decent reviews on the travel websites I looked at. So we chose this and booked a room for a week. We checked in on Tuesday October 27, and checked out Tuesday November 3.
The hotel was a “mixed bag” but had so many problems I thought I should jot down the pros and cons for other travelers who might care. I’ll start with the bad things, but stay tuned for the good things.
And I guess that sort of sums up the experience with this hotel. Almost everyone kept “dropping the ball“. There were individuals who seemed to have a sense of customer service and they resolved problems — some of the servers in the restaurant were really good! — but as a team providing a hotel service, they were not good. To me, this is a sign of bad management.
There were definitely some nice things about this hotel, though. It wasn’t all bad.
Oh, in case you’re interested, here’s my cell phone camera video I shot of a worm wriggling in the pool of water next to the toilet. We didn’t see these in any of the 20-or-so places we stayed on our trip before this.
I bought a couple TSA-compatible luggage locks from Amazon. My plan was to use this on my new eBags TLS Workstation Laptop Backpack to secure my laptop and other stuff during our travels through Asia later this year. Unrelated to this, I also couldn’t remember the combination to one of my suitcases that also has a TSA-compatible 3-digit combination lock. And I found a video that explains how easy it is to open (some of) these locks, so that you can reset the combination when you forget it.
So I wondered if the same trick would apply to the new luggage locks I bought on Amazon from Tarriss. The trick worked quite well, and I can now break into my own locked items in as little as 12 seconds. That means a real thug could probably break in much faster. And that means there’s no way I’m trusting these locks on my luggage.
I made a little video showing how easy it is to “pick” these locks with your bare hands.
This past week, the first bad decision of my planning for our big trip became apparent. And it has to do with my phone. A few months ago, I read a bunch of articles, including this one from Nomadic Matt, this one from Forbes, and a few others. For years, I had been using an iPhone with AT&T’s standard family plan. But neither is well suited for doing lots of international travel, for a couple reasons.
First, lots of the advice I read was to get a global, unlocked, dual-SIM phone, and Apple doesn’t make such a thing. Second, AT&T doesn’t have competitive pricing when traveling overseas. My plan was this:
After some shopping, I settled on the BLU Studio Energy phone. It’s not the fastest around, and it’s definitely not a premiere brand, but it’s got a great feature that nobody else has, and that’s battery life. The thing has such a huge battery built in that you can use it to recharge your other devices (iPad, for instance). I knew that transitioning from iOS to Android would be a challenge, based on what I’ve heard from friends. But since Android is now the dominant player in the market I assumed the software must be pretty well ironed out these days. This past week, I learned my assumptions were wrong. The OS is bad in a way that I forgot was even possible. The design of the core OS, the vendor-specific extensions, and third party apps is all totally different. There’s no consistency to help you figure out what’s wrong when there’s a problem.
The next problem I ran into was Google Voice. It also is poorly designed. There’s a global set of rules that govern how calls are routed, but then there’s a hidden set of screens that also govern rules for specific groups of users, including users who aren’t in a group. The set of screens that are mostly hidden apparently take precedence over the configuration screen that’s right there in your face. But even after I figured that out, Google Voice drops about half the calls it routes to my phone. That’s just not acceptable.
Lastly, I’ve gotten very frustrated with Telestial / Ekit / JT. I’m not sure why this phone carrier has three names, but they do. Some web pages refer to one of the names, but then you’ll run into a different web page that uses another name. Weird. But whatever…
One of the biggest irritants is with making domestic calls in the US. Normally, we use 10-digit dialing and don’t have to use the international format of +1 before the 10-digit number. For whatever reason, when I dial a 10 digit number, it usually doesn’t complete. And when it does, it charges me a much higher price than if I dial the “+1” before. The irritating part is that caller ID of inbound calls just show the 10-digit number, so you can’t just hit the button to call back the person who just called you. Instead, you have to manually dial their number with the +1 prefix. How dumb.
The other problem is data. At first, I struggled with the phone a couple days to figure out why I couldn’t get any data access. That’s when I realized I didn’t buy a data plan, and the voice plan didn’t include any data. OK, that’s my fault, I guess. So I bought their cheapest data plan. In the course of 4 days just doing normal stuff like Google Maps and email, I burned through $63 worth of data. That is not sustainable. Their data rates are just too ridiculous, especially for the US.
So, I came up with a new plan:
And that’s what I did today. Now text messages work, I can use Google Maps for free, and phone calls go through every time.
I got a bunch of nice gifts for Christmas 2014, including some strange surprises like a rubber green alien mask. But I want to talk about one gift that is so much cooler than expected. It’s the Amazon Fire TV Stick. I read about it a month or two ago, and thought it would be a fun little toy to have and not too expensive. But Beth thought it was a frivolous purchase we didn’t really need, so I just put it on my Amazon wishlist and didn’t order one for myself. Fortunately, my parents gave me one as a gift.
Beth was right in that it’s something of a frivolous purchase. It doesn’t do anything that I don’t already have a way of doing. The main thing I wanted was just a way to easily stream movies from Amazon Prime Instant Video (a service where you can watch some movies or TV shows for “free” if you have Amazon’s “Prime” shipping service) or Netflix. I was able to watch Netflix movies from our TiVo HD, but if I wanted to watch stuff from Amazon I had to plug my laptop into our TV, change the settings around, and play the video on my laptop. It was possible, but it made watching any TV show or movie into a 10 minute affair just to set things up, and another 10 minutes to take it all back down later. For a 50 minute TV show, that’s a pain.
Anyhow, the Fire TV Stick arrived earlier this week and I spent some time after work setting it up on Monday night. It does way more than I originally realized, and brings a bunch of entertainment and news into our living room that we didn’t have. The Stick is just a tiny gizmo that plugs into a power supply and into the HDMI input on the TV. It’s very similar to a thing called Google Chromecast that came out a year or so ago. But Amazon’s seems to do more. Here are all the things I’ve set it up to do:
I’ve seen a few other things that this thing will do that I haven’t tried yet:
I’m tempted to just ditch the old TiVo HD, but there are still a few things I use it for that aren’t replaced by the Amazon Fire TV Stick.
So for the time being, I’m using the Stick as a replacement for a laptop for watching movies and as a replacement for a radio. It’s so much more convenient than how I was doing things. But I’m not ready to get rid of the TiVo and over-the-air antenna yet.