Walk-All-Ova-Ya

"Walk-All-Ova-Ya" is what a friend of mine used to call Wachovia. Always thought that was kinda funny and it stuck in my mind. Anyway, seems they've had some serious security problems lately.

My wife got a call from their security department and somebody managed to withdraw $800 from her account from an ATM. We both had our ATM cards, so nobody stole them from us. Which means, not only did somebody have to figure out the PIN number, they also somehow had to have a duplicate ATM card. Hackers? Inside job? Who knows?

One of the reps my wife spoke with said they were investigating several similar incidents. Fortunately, they had put the money back into my wife's account within 24 hours. It was also nice that their own security department caught it the same day the incident happened, instead of us finding out about it days or weeks after the fact.

Interestingly, a co-worker who just returned from a 3-week vacation shared her own unpleasant Wachovia experience. I'm not sure if it's related or not, but its quite a coincidence. While they were out of town, an unknown perpetrator called the bank, gave them her husband's social security number, and fed them a story that they had just moved to New York and wanted a replacement ATM card overnighted to them. The bank not only processed the request, but sent them a PIN # as well. They managed to make several withdrawals, totalling up to about $2500. Scary!

The withdrawals on our account occurred locally, so I don't know if they used the same scheme or not (the bank didn't mention anything like that scenario to us). My co-worker was told that a bunch of Wachovia customer information recently leaked out. So, if you happen to have a Wachovia account, I suggest you keep a watchful eye on it!

Well Isn't That Special?

Well Isn't That Special?
Originally uploaded by ericasberry.

Toyota Tercel is how I rollz. My hooptie is a big ole' land yacht. I NEED two parking spaces.

Jerk.

Maybe I need to get some of these.

Or, perhaps just a mild sedative.

Fedex Sucks

Fedex sucks ... or blows ... or something. Check out this tracking status. They have not actually made a single delivery attempt, despite what some of the entries say. Customer service can't tell me where the package is (although they assured me yesterday that it would definitely be delivered today ... it wasn't). They are "putting a tracer" on it and will update me "as more information is available". Unfortunately, this is not the first time I've had this same thing happen with them. Since they seem to have trouble with extraordinary tasks like, for instance, actually delivering a package, I volunteered to pick the thing up at one of their facilities. I was told "pickup at our local facility is not an available option" which is strange because I've done it before. Oh, well, hopefully they'll get around to delivering it eventually. This concludes my rant. :)

Having Fun Slogging my TiddlyWiki

Just wanted to take a minute to talk about a couple of tools that I find indispensable: TiddlyWiki and Slogger.

I'm a big fan of wikis in general. We use TWiki at my office. Like most Wikis, its a server based solution that lends itself well to collaborative contributions by multiple users.

Awhile back I thought it might be nice to have my own Wiki, for storing random bits of information that I know I will need in the future. I considered various alternatives. I could run a Wiki server through my web hosting account, and it would be accessible from pretty much anywhere. The downside to that is that I'd be worried about somebody being able to snoop the contents. Another possibility would be to set up a Wiki server on one of my boxes on my home network. It would still be accessible to me pretty much anywhere I have Internet access, thanks to OpenVPN. But as ocassionally happens, inertia kept me from going to the trouble of setting that up.

Then one day, I stumbled across TiddlyWiki. In addition to being a fun word to say, this is a clever little app that provides a lot of Wiki goodness, while consisting of merely HTML and Javascript. That's right -- no application to install! No server to connect to, thus no network connection required! You just add your topics, make your edits, and save the page. It's all contained in a single file. I keep the master copy on my laptop and only do edits on it, but have a script that I kick off periodically that will rsync the latest revisions to all my machines.

I use it to keep track of all kinds of info: todo lists, bookmarks, work-related tidbits of info, short "how-tos" on all kinds of topics (since my memory sucks -- curse old age!), all sorts of random bits of information.

I also use a Firefox extension called Slogger to further enhance my personal wiki. Slogger lets you save the contents of every web page you visit, if you want. Instead, I have a button on my Firefox toolbar that, with a single click, saves a copy of the current page (including graphics, etc) to a directory underneath the one I have my TiddlyWiki file in. Then I can create an external link which points to the contents. Really handy if you find a web page with some useful info that you think you might need to refer to in the future - and you don't have to worry about that page disappearing.

This solution works great for me, and I use it far more than I originally anticipated I would. At this point, it would be a catastrophe to somehow lose the contents. Thus, I make frequent backups. :)

The only complaint I have is that the text formatting rules are a little different from the ones TWiki uses, so I occasionally find myself getting tripped up by the subtle differences. I don't know who the oddball is here, or if there even is a set standard for text formatting - TWiki and TiddlyWiki are the only Wikis I've used for any real length of time.

Read Full Post