I’ve always found credit card activation through the phone system very insecure. I’m always afraid I might dial the wrong number by accident, so I always triple check the number I punch into my phone before I start entering any information. I mean consider the information they ask you during activation:
Full 16 digit credit card number
Last four digits of your social security number
3 or 4 digit credit card code
If you reach a customer service, they might even ask for more information, like name and birthday. I mean if I misdial the number even by 1 digit, think of the potential identity fraud I could land myself in.
Several credit cards have implemented an online system to activate new cards, such as American Express, which I prefer to use instead of the phone.
Something I think that should be implemented is a 2-way verification. Meaning, they prove to me who they are, before I provide any of my real information. Something like a system where they include two x-digit numbers in the letter that accompanies your card or even on the sticker of new credit cards. You punch in the 1st number and the telephone system tells you the 2nd number. That way you can confirm the other side is really the bank that issued your credit card.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent random companies from sending you fake credit cards and stealing your information. However, you should never activate random credit cards, especially ones you don’t remember applying for.
Originally wanted to tweet this, but had more than 140 characters of stuff to say.
I was rewatching the ending of Code Geass – Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 a few days ago a began wondering where did the word “Geass” is derived from or if it was completely made up word for this anime. Neither Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, nor Wiktionary had an entry for it.
I took a glance over Wikipedia’s entry on Code Geass and didn’t see anything that popped out.
I forgot what I did, but some how I ended up on Wiktionary’s page on Geas (probably by randomly removing characters):
1. (Gaelic mythology) A vow or obligation placed upon a person.
2. A curse.
And that had quite a resemblance to what Geass or at least what Lelouch’s Geass could do. Searching the term on Wikipedia resulted in:
In Irish mythology and folklore, a geis is an idiosyncratic taboo, whether of obligation or prohibition, similar to being under a vow or spell.
Turns out Geas is another word for Geis which is a curse/spell that forces someone to do something or prohibits someone from doing something, which sounds exactly like Lelouch’s power. However, in the anime, they’ve expanded Geass to represent different types of powers (known as Power of Kings).
Turns out the Wikipedia entry on Code Geass also explained this (guess I wasn’t looking hard enough):
Geass is a mysterious ability which certain people (witches) can bestow upon others; C.C. and V.V. are the immortal and eternally youthful witches who can grant the power of Geass; they are also immune to it. The form the Geass takes is different in each individual. C.C. calls Geass the Power of Kings. It is represented by a bird-shaped symbol which glows red when active.
Every Geass has its own unique set of restrictions, limitations, or idiosyncrasies. These factors allow a Geass to be defeated, or its power limited, by someone who is aware of its characteristics. All Geass abilities that have thus far appeared within the canon of the television series have been related to the mind, influencing such aspects as will, thought, memory, emotion, and perception. Geass abilities in the manga spin-off Knightmare of Nunnally have no such limitations.
Various characters in the series do or did possess the power of Geass. C.C. had the power to make others fall in love with her, but she lost it when she became immortal; Emperor Charles has the power to alter a person’s memories; Mao had the power to read minds; Lelouch has the power to issue commands that are always obeyed (only once per person); and Rolo has the power to freeze the perception of time for living beings near him. Jeremiah is remade into a nearly-immortal cyborg with the ability to cancel the effects of Geass on himself and others.
The power of Geass increases with use, usually starting in one eye. It can eventually spread to both eyes and become uncontrollable with repeated use. When a Geass is at full power, this person can now become a recipient of the “Code,” the power which gave the person Geass in the first place. The person who bestowed the Geass can relinquish his or her “Code” to this person, allowing the recipient to continue the cycle while the giver is allowed to die. In exchange for their original Geass power, a person who takes on the “Code” becomes both immortal and immune to other Geass and gains the ability to him/herself bestow the power of Geass on others. This transfer, however, does not necessarily require the consent of both parties involved; C.C. received her “Code” against her will, and V.V. has his taken against his will. A person with the “Code” bears a physical mark (a sigil resembling that of the Geass) somewhere on his or her body.
According to an English edition of Newtype, the power of Geass has something to do with the very existence of humankind, and it may be used to destroy or transform just about anything. “Geass” may be an intentional corruption of the word geas or geis, a term for a type of magical contract in Irish mythology.
I guess I never really did a review on Code Geass after it completed. So I guess I’ll do an informal review here.
The story was amazing! Graphics were stunning and I really like how devious and strategic Lelouch was. He reminded me of Light from Death Note (which you can watch on Hulu), another series I really enjoyed. The story was thought out well, though there were times I wanted to kill the producers for what they did to us by leaving such a big cliff hanger at the end of season 1.
I wanted to find a trailer to share, but couldn’t find a decent one. Here’s a collage of scenes with some decent music in the background:
The music/soundtrack wasn’t out of the world, but it was still spectacular. My favorite track is Madder Sky (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS):
Code Geass is definitely one of my top 10 anime series of all times. I’ve said that for quite a few animes. I wonder what’s still on that list. Off the top of my head in no particular order:
Rurouni Kenshin
Trigun
Monster
Hikaru no Go
Code Geass
Cowboy Bebop
Death Note
12 Kingdoms (Juuni Kokki)
Berserk
That’s 9. If you give me some time, I can probably think of 1 more or maybe even more to push down some of them. There were other series I’ve seen, which I really enjoyed but with favorites, there must be great emotional attachment, which I found in all of the above. Other series I really enjoyed, but not top 10 quality, include Full Metal Panic, Azumanga Daioh, Full Metal Alchemist, Detective Conan, Hellsing, and tons more.
Code Geass (season 2) is actually currently playing on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim. Unfortunately, these are dubbed. They’re not bad, but the original Japanese dubs are a lot better in my opinion.
For people who know me and are a frequent patron of my snacks, you know I sometimes bring in chocolate chip cookies. They are of course no other than the Otis Spunkmeyer ones I get from Costco. I’ve been a big fan of the Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, not only because they taste great, but they’re easily to make. They already come in little balls where I just dump onto my baking tray. I’ve tried the Nestle Toll House ones twice and was disappointed in the fact that I had to wait for it to defrost before I could start scooping out the cookie dough, which made baking them a lot less fun, especially if I wanted cookies immediately.
Anyway, I got a new batch of Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookies several weeks ago and baked the 1st batch from it this weekend and the cookies came out weird. They were still delicious, but they were flat:
I’ve baked tons of their cookies before and they’re typically quite plump coming out of the oven and then they flatten a bit. However, these came out flat shown in the above picture and were flatter than normal. I thought maybe they forgot to add yeast.
So I went to to their website http://www.otisspunkmeyer.com/ and tried to find an email to contact them. Unfortunately, I was only able a mailing address and phone/fax numbers. So I shot an email to the email address listed in the whois info:
Hi,
I apologize if this isn’t the correct email address to forward my concerns. I wasn’t able to find any customer service email address on your website (www.otispunkmeyer.com). If there’s a customer service department you can forward this email to, please do so.
I recently purchased some Otis Spunkmeyer Chocolate Chip cookies from Costco. I’ve been a long customer of Otis Spunkmeyer Chocolate Chip cookies and this was the 1st time I noticed the cookies were flat and didn’t rise. See attached image.
I’ve baked Otis Spunkmeyer cookies before and they typically rise after baking and slowly flatten a bit afterwards. However, these cookies were fresh from the oven after baking for 20 minutes at 325F and were flatter than even cooled down cookies.
They were still delicious, but I was wondering if it could possibly be a batch that yeast was forgotten to be added.
And the next morning I get this reply:
Hi Tom
This was forwarded to me by our distribution department. First, let me clarify our website, which is www.spunkmeyer.com. There is a link for customer service questions/concerns on the site.
Addressing the cookie issues, after looking at the picture, it appears the cookies may have too much butter in them, which will cause them to bake up flat and thin. This would be caused by the dough not being mixed enough for all ingredients to be fully incorporated.
Please provide to us the stamped number printed on the bag inside the Costco box. That number will tell us which plant and what day the product was made on (ex. 8S250). Also, please provide us with your mailing address so that we can issue you a refund.
Thank you for allowing us to correct this issue for you.
I’ve already sent a reply back thanking for the clarification and the awesome customer service.
But I have to ask you guys, do you see a difference between: www.spunkmeyer.com and www.otisspunkmeyer.com? And if anyone’s able to find a link for customer service questions/concerns? Update: As Xyon pointed out, I misspelled the domain in my original email, and that may have caused the confusion. However, I’m still not able to find the customer service link.
And I feel really stupid with my yeast remark. Haha, who knew that cookies didn’t need yeast to make them rise and be plump. I guess most people besides me. According to Ungsunghero, cookie dough doesn’t actually “rise”. And from now on folks, you know too much butter makes cookies flat.
Side Note: This has been the 3rd or 4th time someone’s referred to me as Tom/Thomas in an email reply. Does my name really map to Tom? I’ve checked my emails and it lists my first/last name correctly as well as my signature. Oh well.
As you may have noticed, I haven’t blogged much recently. In fact, the only blog posts in the past 2 weeks were my twitter aggregations.
Earlier today, a friend tells me he doesn’t fully understand why people use twitter and he really doesn’t understand why people post tweets on their blog.
First and foremost, I’d like to point out there are many different reasons why people use Twitter. Initially, I thought it was rather stupid too. Who in the right mind would want to tweet about what they’re doing all the time? See Penny Arcade!’s Le Twittre. And who in their right mind would care about knowing every mundane detail of what’s going on in your life? Unless of course you’re a stalker, but then you wouldn’t be in your right mind anyway. However, I found a very different use for Twitter. I’ve only been using it for about 2 months, and I’ve been slowly adapting on how I would like to use it.
My current twitter usage pattern is something similar to my Random Crap posts, in what I like to call mini-blog posts. I hear about something I want to share or I see a link I want to share. I used to aggregate this into 1 giant random crap post and then post it. Otherwise, I would create a draft in hopes one day when I have time, I would expand on it. Looking at my drafts count of 46, I don’t think it’s likely most of them will ever be published.
Initially, I kept my blog and Twitter separate, however I soon realized that people who come to read my blog are people who want to see what I’m up to or what I find interesting, basically the same stuff I’ve been posting on Twitter, but in short bursts of 140 characters or less. Therefore, my new weekly Twitter digest posts are akin to my Random Crap posts, containing links and whatever else I wanted to share during the week.
I understand that my twitter also includes response/replies that readers may not care about. Then again, probably half the stuff I ever post here you wouldn’t care about, so I don’t think that would make much a difference. It’s also not uncommon for me or others to respond to someone specifically in a blog post. In fact, this blog post by itself can be considered a response to the statement posed to me earlier today. Besides, most of the response/replies included are stuff I do want to share, or else I would’ve used the Direct Message feature in Twitter.
Of course, there’s also nothing stopping you from skipping/ignoring my twitter posts if you don’t fancy them.
@hungtruong Besides the logos, I don’t really see any major difference. Is that what you liked? I have to agree it looks like generic OJ. in reply to hungtruong#
@hungtruong Ahh. I personally don’t care much about the packaging and the leaf + orange cap is neat, but it’s easily missed when browsing. in reply to hungtruong#
gets more depressed each time he looks at his stock portfolio. #
is checking out this new cute animation of vocaloid: smooooch･∀･ × VOCALOID http://tinyurl.com/bacdnn – TONS of chibi cuteness #
It’s only been a few days since I’ve installed Windows 7 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet, but so far it’s been GREAT! The version I had installed was the beta (build 7000).
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Windows 7, and it’s not like I didn’t want to install Windows 7, but things had been working fine for now, and I saw no reason to chance destabilizing any of my critical machines. However, I had Vista SP1 running on my Thinkpad and generally it does okay, but once in awhile, after I haven’t rebooted the laptop for a few days, I get into a state where the laptop just becomes unresponsive and slow and has problems connecting to the wireless network.
Jan Lyk had shown me Windows 7 running on his Dell mini laptop and I decided I’d give it a shot. It was pretty much an impulse decision. The same day after I saw Jan Lyk’s laptop, I grabbed the beta, and installed it that night. I decided to do an upgrade instead of fresh install since I didn’t want to bother reinstalling all the applications and backing up the data.
The upgrade actually went pretty well. It did take longer than I expected. In fact, there were certain points in time during the upgrade which I thought it was stuck, especially when it was migrating files, settings, and programs.
The “fun” part came when it prompted me to log in. I swiped my finger and it logged me in.
I started typing on the keyboard. No response. I started moving the mouse. No response. Thinking to myself, I’m !@#$%^. I could use the fingerprint scanner to login, but I needed some other way to actually install drivers if they’re missing. Suddenly I remembered I still had a tablet pen to try out. Amazing, the tablet pen WORKED! Typing using the tablet pen wasn’t that fun though, but I managed to get to the device manager and noticed that the keyboard and trackpoint devices had the little yellow alert sign. I opened both of them and told it to automatically update the driver and amazingly, it found the driver and I was able to use the keyboard. The trackpoint/mouse actually needed a reboot before it started working.
The only other issue was I also needed to update the GEM smartcard reader driver (which was also done automatically). Things were starting to look good.
Moving on, it complained that my antivirus software was not turned on. I use AVG 8.0 and it was turned on from what I could tell. Someone on the AVG forums mentioned that if you disable resident shield and re-enabled it, Windows 7 would stop warning you about it. I tried that, but didn’t seem to work. I thought I’d try reinstalling, but in the end, decided to just switch back to eTrust, since AVG doesn’t officially support Windows 7 yet. This thing also warned me that Windows Defender was turned off, but I think that’s because it was set to delayed start, and the warning would disappear after awhile.
I love the fact that the tablet feature and fingerprint scanner just worked out of the box. It definitely boots up a lot faster than Windows Vista and definitely more responsive. I haven’t had much time to tinker or play around with it much, but it looks like most of the Lenovo applications also work out of the box.
The pinned programs on the task bar is like a merge of quick launch + task bar, which is pretty neat. Usually I have a vertical task bar, because when horizontally, the names of the tasks just take up too much space. Now that they’ve gotten rid of the name and only show an icon, I no longer really need to have a vertical task bar. However, I still dislike the fact that they group same tasks together. There’s probably a way to disable it, or make it more responsive so the moment I hover over the icon, the windows thumbnails would appear immediately instead of waiting a few seconds.
Another cool thing I noticed is that they have a dim screen feature. Usually you have 2 options for your screen: On or Off. I usually set mine to turn off after 5 minutes of idleness, but now there’s an intermediate step where it dims it after 2 minutes of idleness and turns it off after 5 minutes.
I’m going to enjoy playing with Windows 7 on my laptop.
Banking giant UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, agreed to pay $780 million to settle accusations that it helped U.S. customers hide money from the IRS. And in what the Justice Department described as an “unprecedented move,” UBS agreed to provide the names of up to 20,000 Americans who sought to avoid paying income taxes by keeping secret accounts.
This got me thinking… If the IRS were smart, they should make the following announcement:
————— Attention Tax Evaders:
Before UBS gives us the report, we would like to give all of you a chance to come clean. If you come clean now and admit to tax evasion, we’ll forgo any charges, fines, fees, interest, and penalties associated with the tax evasion. You’ll still have to pay off the taxes you owe us, but we’re going to give you a clean state afterwards. We’re also willing to work with you and/or your accountants to come up with a repayment plan if you’re unable to pay off all the back taxes immediately.
After we receive our report from UBS, the offer above will no longer be valid. We’ll be filing criminal charges for tax evasion on all remaining individuals who have not come forward. We’ll pursue every case to the fullest extent and request for maximum penalty and fines. Not only will you owe us the back tax, you’ll also owe us the accumulated interest, penalty fees and fines, legal fees, and anything else our lawyers can come up with to tack onto the list.
You thought you could fool us. Is it worth the risk to continue trying? Your call.
—————
So this ordeal all started Friday evening at 5pm, when I received a call from the escrow agent. He said he needed me to sign and notarize some documents by today (Saturday) and mail it back to him. I’ll talk more about the whole refinance ordeal at a later time. Anyway, I was given 2 options:
I could pay about $100-150 and he’ll send a notary agent to my house and get the documents signed, notarized, and delivered back to the escrow company.
He could overnight me the documents, I could get them signed and notarized, and mail them back on Saturday.
Neither of those 2 options sounded great. I asked if it was possible for him to email me the documentation, I’ll get them signed and notarized myself, and then mail them back. He said that would be great, but he warned me there was going to be about 100 pages. I said that should be fine.
I get the documentations awhile later, so I start looking for places to get it notarize. I thought I might even be able to mail it out tonight.
Turns out I was so wrong. Apparently places that provide notary services have a very fixed working schedule, Monday to Friday till 4 or 5pm. I found out that Microsoft has some people who does notary for us, but all of them were off work by then. One replied saying if I still needed the documents notarized, to contact her on Monday. I tried calling a few places (i.e. Kinkos and The UPS Store). Both are open on Saturday, but both their notary services are only available Monday to Friday. I thought, “I’m screwed…”
The last suggested place were banks, and I had a gut feeling that I was going to get shot down like the others. I mean… they’re BANKS. When they have the worst possible hours for someone like me, how can I expect them to be better than all the others I’ve tried. Plus the fact by the time I decided to start looking at banks, it was past 6pm already (their “closing” time).
Anyway, I decided to give calling them a shot. I called the Bank of America in Issaquah, since the FedEx Service Center was just 5 minutes away and I was given an FedEx account to ship with. After a few rings, someone actually picked up. I asked if they provided notary services, and they said they did, but were now closed. I said I understood and was wondering if they provided notary services on Saturday, and she said they indeed did. I’m like, JACKPOT!
So given that banks close at 1pm on Saturday, which is before the usual time I even get up, I set my alarm clock for 10am to give myself some buffer time just in case. Turns out I was pretty much awake by 9:30am without the alarm going off.
I drive over there and the receptionist greets me and I tell her I’m here to get some documents notarized and she smiles and asks if I was a Bank of America customer. I said I was and she directed me to sit and wait for a bit. Moments later, I was greeted by the notary agent and he asked if I was a Bank of America customer, and I repeated that I was. I asked if he wanted to see my Bank of America ATM card, and he said he just needed my drivers license.
We go over the documents that needed to be notarized and everything went pretty smoothly. I thanked him for his time and asked if there was any fees I had to pay, and he goes “nope, it’s a free service for Bank of America customers”. And to think that they didn’t even need to verify that I was one. That’s the type of trust I don’t expect to ever see in Los Angeles.
You hear bad customer stories about Bank of America all the time, but this was one of those times that Bank of America came through and made the experience that much better!
