The CynicalBlog | Musings of a CynicalDoctor

Credit Card Fraud

Filed under Personal

Yesterday morning I attempted to pay for some purchase with my Mastercard and to my surprise the card was declined. I tried again, same result. This was surprising as I had enough funds in the account and was well below my limit. Got into work and logged into my bank account to confirm – nothing untoward on the credit card statement.

I then called my bank – Lloyds TSB – who transferred me through their credit card fraud division.

I was informed that my card had been blocked because they had picked up “suspicious” activity on it on the 13th of October. Someone had attempted to make two large value purchases online – one of these being at the Misco website – totalling about £1000. When I confirmed that I hadn’t made these purchases, my card was cancelled and a new one requested. The bastard who ordered using my card will never get his stuff delivered.

I was quite shocked. Being very security conscious this came as a big surprise to me.

I still do not know how my credit card details got into the hands of the fraudulent criminals.

The evening on the 12th I had purchased 3 software program licenses – all three transactions had gone through fine. The fraudulent transaction was attempted the next day, so I suspect that the breach of my credit card details occurred during one of these three transactions.

I have emailed all three merchants and informed them, however, no replies have really be reassuring.

Waiting for the replacement card now then changing all on-line payments to the new card number – a necessary pain!!

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Oct18

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Steve Jobs

Filed under Personal , Computers

It isn’t news anymore that Steve Jobs died yesterday. It was a sad loss for the world of computing.

I have never been an Apple user and don’t envisage being one anytime in the future. I don’t agree with the tie-in between hardware and software that using an Apple product entails. I also hate iTunes with a passion!! I write code for the Microsoft stack and am therefore tied to the PC platform.

However, there is no denying the genius of Jobs. His uncanny ability to give us products that were beautiful and functional. Products that were trendsetters rather than followers – with other companies chasing to catch up and never quite succeeding.

Every time I pass an Apple store, I always walk in and admire the products that I don’t use! I hope that Apple after Steve Jobs will continue to be a leader in innovation and in bringing us the future.

I grew up admiring Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – it’s sad to loose one of my teenage idols.

Who knows, I might even end up buying a Macbook Pro one day!

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Oct07

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GTD with Tracks

Filed under Computers

I have been using GTD since the “first” book by David Allen.

Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity

There are numerous web based and desktop systems to implement GTD. I have used the following personally.

Desktop (Windows)

Tudumo – Simple, but almost too simple. Useful and very fast if tracking a small number of tasks.

MyLifeOrganized – Complex, takes too much time to set up. Great for active project management.

Web-Based

Remember the Milk – I stuck with this the longest and found it most useful. However, it was also too complex. I was spending more time in the system than doing stuff. Someone else has your data!

Nozbe – Pretty good and links well with other services. I found it too complex for my needs. Someone else has your data!

Enter Tracks

I had used Tracks earlier (v1.7.2) running it on InstantRails on my Windows Vista laptop. However I tried unsuccessfully to run v2.0 on my Win7 (64 bit) machine. Although, Bitnami provided a desktop stack to run Tracks 2.0 on Windows, it involved a resource heavy installation.

The simplicity and responsiveness of the Tracks interface appeals to me. I can also make the system as complex/simple as I want it to be.

Although you can find hosted versions of Tracks, I am a was a bit reticent to have my data hosted online without any control.

Running Tracks in the cloud

The solution I use now is a Bitnami Tracks stack running on AWS as a micro-instance. Cost effective (about $10/month), secure and accessible from anywhere – including mobile browsers.

Configuration is simple and AWS offers ample help to get your instance up and running and getting your domain pointing to it. One gotcha is that you have to open the http port in your instance firewall before you can browse to it. Took me 10 minutes to figure this one out!