12.31.08

FreeCreditReport.com scam

Posted in personal, web at 7:16 pm by danvk

I was looking over my checking account transactions for the past year and saw a mysterious $12.95 charge from “CIC*Triple Advantage 877-48168″ appearing once a month. A search quickly showed that I’d been had by FreeCreditReport.com.

Turns out I’d used this site to get a credit check when I moved in to my old apartment last August. Everyone is entitled to one free credit check per year, and I thought that this was what I was getting. I’d failed to notice the fine print on their main page (helpfully displayed in blue-on-blue text):

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple AdvantageSM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership within the 7-day trial period†, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership.
ConsumerInfo.com, Inc. and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com.

That’s right, they sign you up for a free trial of a monthly service which you must opt-out of after 30 days. They do their best not to tell you that they’ve signed you up.

Looking back in my checking account, I found 16 months * $12.95/month = $207.20 in charges. Thanks to help from this discussion, I was eventually able to get this refunded in its entirety. Read more for details.

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08.20.08

Another move!

Posted in personal, san francisco at 9:16 pm by danvk

A year after making my last move, I’m doing it again! This is less of a dramatic shift. Whereas the last one was a 35-mile move from Mountain View to San Francisco, this is a 2 mile move between neighborhoods in the city (Russian Hill to Lower Haight).

I’ll post pictures when the move happens after September 1. For now, you’ll have to settle for maps. Here are the places that are twice as close to my new place as my old:
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08.18.08

Faded Photos of San Francisco

Posted in personal, san francisco at 10:29 am by danvk

Richard over at Sparkletack recently wrote about the Charles Cushman Photograph Collection, which includes hundreds of pictures of San Francisco from the 1930′s to the 1960′s.

The images offer a fascinating tour of San Francisco history, from Chinatown in 1952

to hippies on Haight street in 1967:

The real coup, though, is to find an image of your own block or apartment from the photographic past. To that end, I’ve put the Cushman images which include a street address on a Google map. There aren’t any pictures here from my block, but maybe you’ll be luckier! Here’s the map:
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06.21.08

Onion Crossword Puzzle

Posted in personal at 5:07 pm by danvk

I’ve become a big fan of The Onion’s crossword puzzle recently. Here’s a few reasons to love it:

  • It’s free. Unlike some other papers.
  • It’s convenient: there’s an Onion distribution box within 100 feet of my apartment.
  • It’s online (w/ answers!). Here’s a link to the June 17 puzzle.

Now some spoilers… don’t read these if you plan on doing that puzzle I linked to!

  • I rarely learn new words from a crossword puzzle. If an answer looks strange, it’s more likely to be because I’m not parsing it right than because it’s a word I don’t know. But the last two weeks, we’ve had:
  • The cultural references are more up-to-date. Unlike the NYT puzzle, I have a chance with these. Case in point, last week’s 23 Across, “Trent Reznor’s band, for short”: NIN.
  • It’s more irreverent than the Times. Take this week’s 7 Across, “Not worth doing?”: BADINBED. It took me a long time to get since an answer like that would never be in the NYT. I thought the joke might be “worth” referring to “net worth”. I’m glad I was wrong!
  • The themes are hilarious. This week’s was inventors killed by their inventions:
    • 17A: Invention by tailor Franz Reichelt in which he fell to his death (as seen on YouTube)
    • 24A: Invention by Otto Lilienthal in which he crashed to his death
    • 27A: Invention modernized by William Bullock that mangled his leg and led to his death
    • 50A: With 50-Across, invention of bedridden engineer Thomas Midgely, Jr. that strangled him to death
    • 62A: Procedure improved by physician Alexander Bogdanov that left him dead of TB and malaria

    The fun is that, as you fill in the answers, you have to think of bizarre inventions that could kill a man.

05.27.08

When You Miss out on the News

Posted in news, personal, tv at 8:35 pm by danvk

Last we spoke, I swore to not pay attention to the news for a few months. How quickly the world changes when you’re not paying attention! I walked by a TV this afternoon and heard a general saying this:

We want to capture R. Kelly, the world’s most notorious terrorist.

I know R. Kelly is bad, but the world’s most notorious terrorist? It took me a minute to realize what the quote really was:

We want to capture or kill the world’s most notorious terrorist.

What does this say about me!?

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