omgwtf!

So I finally broke through the barrier and got a new credit card! Not a secured one, an actual credit card with Credit One Bank. They’re not actually a bank, and the card itself is probably the shittiest card in credit card history, but it’s got MY name on it, and it’s got a tiny adorable little $200 credit limit, and it’s something I’ve been waiting for for many, many moons so that I can finally start putting some positives on what for over a decade has been a very negative credit rating.

I just spent about a half-hour staring at my account on their website and all the lovely $0.00 notations that appeared today under “balance due” - I paid the thing in full on Friday and spent an anxious weekend checking it roughly every 13 seconds to make sure that the payment posted. When I got the “preapproved” offer for the card in the mail a couple weeks ago I was extremely skeptical, but leapt at the chance to finally have a real live credit card again because for about three months now I’ve been trying to get a card again. My credit this summer finally went from “omfg no” to “no credit history” because all the bad stuff has finally dropped off. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said “well, okay…we’ll take a chance on you,” but had had no luck and didnt want a secured card.

Then this offer came in the mail and I checked them out and yeah, the company is horrible, but this is where you start over, and I’m okay with that. This is where you begin, reestablish, and then move on to better cards with better companies. And it was pretty funny reading up on them because Credit One has a terrible reputation. Shocking, I know. But I noticed as I was reading that the loudest complaints seem to be coming from the folks who were bad credit risks, got the card, and continued to fuck around by making payments either late or so close to the deadline that they were doomed to be late, or shit like that.

Now I’ve got no doubt that this company is awful and that any problems with them are bound to be magnified by a factor of about a million when compared to dealing with a far more reputable credit card company (if there are any - sounds like an oxymoron to me), but the thing that worried me was I saw a couple people had made payments online and didnt see them posted for 14 days, or so they said. So that kind of scared the shit out of me and that’s why I was camping the online statement for three days. I honestly didnt think it would post today, being Veteran’s Day and all, but it did, and I’m all about the YIPPIEEEE!

I paid it through my checking account so I’d not only have the Credit One confirmation numbers but my bank would have a record of the payment, too, and Credit One can’t turn around and tell me they never got it. Since I dont trust the company, I’m being super cautious, but really, now that I see they even posted on a holiday and I’ve already been through the process once now, I am going to go with the belief that as long as I make a payment the day I get the statement, it’ll be posted within a few days, never even go near the “due by” date, and I’ll be fine.

I monitor my credit reports carefully now, and I saw yesterday that Credit One has reported a new account to all three credit bureaus, just like they said they would. So that’s great, too. And in six or eight or 12 months from now, when I have months of unbroken, on time, more-than-minimum payments every single month, I’ll be able to tag one of the better companies and see if they’ll give me a better card, and get rid of this one and its four million percent APR, compounded six times daily and twice extra on Sunday.

Why am I telling you this? Because the day I got that card it was like a prison door opened in my life. It is my Next Chance at a Fresh Start. And I know that I’m going to do great with it because the only reason I got screwed in the first place was because I got laid off and couldn’t pay the bills and they wouldn’t allow me to enroll in the credit protection thingie even when I told the companies about the pending layoffs I was facing more than 90 days in advance. But up until the day I got laid off, I was paying about double the monthly minimum on all three credit cards I had at the time, and was doing extremely well with them and building a pretty good credit rating as a result. And that was on a significantly lower income than I have now. So I know that I can do extremely well with this thing, especially since it’s only a $200 limit, and I can’t really get into trouble with that. And even so, I enrolled in the credit protection thingie anyway. Never again will I be that fucking stupid and not enroll in the credit protection thingie.

So yeah, I got that card in the mail and actually had it out sitting on my desk, propped up against my monitor for about two days before I carefully and lovingly tucked it into my wallet. I couldnt stop staring at it. It is only a small rectangle of silver plastic, but for me, the incredibly significant meaning of this little card makes it completely transcend what it is to most people. I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop staring at it, I can’t stop checking that stupid account page on their website and grinning cheesily as I gaze at that lovely, lovely $0.00 balance. And I’m cogitating very, very carefully what I want to buy first with it.

I was thinking maybe this and this. They have a buy them both and get a deal thing going for them on Amazon.com. But then there’s also this, which is enormously tempting, as well. And then there’s this. And this is also awesome.

And then, of course, almost (but not quite) everything on this list here is extremely tempting, but I do have to go through and update it with the newer stuff that’s come out since I built that list.

This is all just so exciting.

Comments(4)

Update - 21 August 2007

Well, I’m going to cancel my BlueHost account and possibly move over to Lunarpages instead. BlueHost has a weird no-nudity-even-for-art policy that really rankles me that I didnt know about until I forked over a C-note, and also they seem to be having a lot of trouble with their CPU limit being set so low that some people can’t even run a WordPress installation on it. Apparently if you use any scripts and the script code is sloppy you trip the CPU load limit and your site gets blacked out for a little while. You also can’t do any backups of any size without tripping it, either. And also there are rumblings of email problems with BlueHost customers as well. These things have made me leery!

And finally, though their tech support is highly available and very responsive, their forums are nowhere near as awesome as the Lunarpages forums are - and one of the mods at the BlueHost forums is actually breathtakingly rude.

So this combination of factors has led to my calling BlueHost to get my money back and then I’ll go over to Lunarpages - $30 less for more features and what looks like better support, though BlueHost was very, very good. If they turn out to suck they also have a 30-day full refund guarantee, like BlueHost - and then I’ll just stick with the host I have now until I can find something better.

Also, Lunarpages accepts adult content - you can host an adult site with Lunarpages - and I heartily approve of this.

Because fuck censorship.

***************************

So I went and registered a new domain today so I can use it strictly for business purposes, and went looking for a new host. The guys I’ve been with for years now, Rackhost.net, are really awesome. I have no complaints at all about their service and I will say right now that their tech support is amazing. John Q is the best. I hate to leave them.

But I did a quick search ’round the ‘tubes and found BlueHost.com, who are apparently one of the best host providers anywhere. Their tech support is rumoured to be excellent and they have a ton of features and services with each account, not to mention a shitload of bandwidth and disk storage. Plus, I can host unlimited domains with them - so that means I no longer have to have separate hosting accounts for my domains.

It costs me $21 a month to host two domains with Rackhost and I only get a total of 12 gigs of storage and a few hundred gigs of bandwidth a month. For $8 a month with BlueHost, I got more features and a 350 gigs of storage / 3500 gigs of bandwidth. Clearly, though I have no complaints about Rackhost’s service at all, the clear winner here is BlueHost.

I’m a little nervous switching hosts because you just never know if the new guy is gonna suck, and boy, bad hosts are a real pain in the ass. But I couldnt find a single bad review about BlueHost and so I figured what the hell - it saves a lot of money, and I need to be saving a lot of money. Once I’m sure that BlueHost is reliable and trustworthy I’ll be able to launch my business-related domain too, and get my work stuff off sithly.com forever, which is good, because screw these friggin’ corporate Nazi web-surfing snoops. I want my work stuff totally separate from everything else.

This was triggered by just such a super-corporate, anal-retentive twat that bitched about my email yesterday. Turns out she was a dumb shit when it came to configuring her email client and when she went to see who I was by surfing over to my totally awesome home page, I guess she was scandalized.

Another victim Hoffed! I have the best homepage on the internets, man. I still get hate mail about it after all this time, people demanding I pay for the bleach with which they had to scrub out their eyeballs. I love my homepage. Sheer brilliance.

Anyway, in the next few weeks I’ll be switching this blawg over to the new host. Things should go smoothly (heh) but if the site blacks out for a day or two that’s probably what the deal is. It’s a good opportunity to try to tidy things up and put up a couple pages I’ve been sitting around not doing for like probably 10 years.

And, of course, my homepage is coming with me, intact.

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i’m still seething.

this is a test post. i’m trying to figure some of this shit out by myself right now because that wordpress bullshit got me so unbelievably angry that i’m not fit for human company.

this is a new little thing i’m trying to include on the site but as you can see, it renders bizarrely. i’ll leave this post here in case someone from the site comes over here to take a look at what i’m talking about - i’m about to email them for some support.

hopefully they’ll be a lot nicer than the wordpress goons.

Edit: Saturday, 13 Jan 07

Well, I just heard back from Brad at indieKarma, and yeah, not only did he respond to me on a Saturday, which is very cool to begin with, but he was actually a very nice guy and explained what the problem probably was (snarky CSS), and asked for a week to try to sort it out on their side. He was totally casual penis. I approve highly, and because he was a nice guy I’m totally a fan of indieKarma. Plus they gave me a free dollar to start off with! Sweet!

It’s so much easier to be a decent human being than it is to be a raging, foaming cock, you know? And, I might add, better for business. Nobody in Bedford Falls liked Mr. Potter, but everyone just loved George Bailey.

Good luck, indieKarma guys! Let me know if I can help out somehow. And thank you for not being a dick to me, Brad. I’ve had a bad couple of days. Your being a decent guy, not treating me like an idiot, and giving me such a helpful reply to my support request really helped me feel a little bit better.

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AAAAAnnnd right in keeping with my firm belief that the WordPress “support” community is the worst fucking community on the Internets, my theory is proven soundly once again by its own members.

What’s funny is how I get called a troll and insulted for bitching about how fucking rude these assholes are, but if, for instance, you have a look at whoami’s past posts, you will see that he is pretty much regularly an asshole to other people all the fucking time. He’ll post in a thread just to do nothing more than insult you for not doing something the way he thinks it should be done. And then in his profile he describes himself thusly: “im not rude, im succinct. Dont want a straight answer, dont ask me. and while we are at, learn how to ask a question.”

lrn 2 rite nub. Jesus Christ.

He doesnt need to learn how to keep a civil fucking tongue in his head and shut his fucking mouth when he doesnt have an actual answer to a question, but you need to learn how to ask questions according to his specific guidelines nonetheless. Heh. He’s been on the site a while and he is absolutely typical of the type of “volunteer” that hangs out there to provide “support” to hapless users who go there honestly believing that theyll receive assistance.

Well, as I said in my posts there on that thread, I’m done with that fucking website and with that community. I’ll track down my answers amongst people who actually know enough of what theyre talking about to be able to give you some assistance if you have a question, instead of insulting you to make themselves feel better about being so ignorant and pathetic.

These guys are everything I despise about geeks wrapped up in a neat package. Arrogant, pretentious, condescending assholes who feel so lame and useless that all they can do is attack other people. I hate those fucking guys.

And for anyone who happens to be coming here from the link in that thread to either mock my website or myself, you are free to do so but remember two things:

- You dont mean fuck-all to me, because youre too stupid to live and I wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire, so your time would probably be better spent kicking puppies or whatever else it is that you get up to when youre not jerking off into a Dixie cup and drinking it because it’s the closest youll ever get to an actual blowjob; and

- Just because you volunteer your time does NOT GIVE YOU LICENSE TO BE A COCK. I know you think it does, but you’re fucking stupid, and you should save yourself all the effort of trying to think for yourself, ’cause you suck at it. Youre just wrong, and that’s all. Thinking youve got a right to treat other people like shit because you volunteer your time on the internet is like thinking you’ve got a right to stab someone because they took the seat you wanted on the bus. Do the human race a favour and kill yourself.

And whoami? Eat a bag of cocks, you rude, knuckle-dragging fuckwit. Calling you a Neanderthal would be an insult to Neanderthals.

I didnt get out of IT because of the users. I got out of IT because of the geeks.

I asked for a mod to contact me regarding all this bullshit but I dont expect them to. The only thing the WordPress “support” community is good for is taking potshots at other people from behind the safety shield of anonymity. When you actually stand up to them and demand responses and action, they fire insults at you from behind their barricades and then write you off as a troll. What makes me laugh is apparently they’ve got this new “Kvetch” system going in now. If these people actually cared at all about the users, they’d have responded to these complaints a long, long, long time ago now. This has been going on forever. Who the hell are they kidding? The people I feel most sorry for are the sorry bastards who are going to go there thinking that theyre actually going to get help.

MAN I’m SO PISSED right now!

Calendar links broken. « WordPress Support

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So! I knew it’d only take about a minute before I got tired of that orange thing this new theme had going. So I’ve made a few changes, primarily to the main page, to make it more palatable to the old peepers.

I’ve made it so that you no longer absolutely need to be registered and have a previously approved post to comment. Those measures were only in place because of the spam I’ve been getting hit with. However, since I’ve updated this theme and activated the Akismet plug-in, it’s caught almost 50 pieces of spam in just the past couple days and not one has gotten by. So I’m going to relax the restrictions for a while to see if anything gets through. Right now, the way I have it is that you need only supply a name and email addy to post; I’d like to keep it this way, and that’s what I’ll do provided Akismet keeps up the good work.

In the meantime, I kind of like the changes so far. If anyone notices anything heinously broken, drop me a line, would you? There’s still lots of stuff I want to do to this site, and since I have a new, working theme that doesnt have any insane code in it I’m able to make more changes and learn as I go along. I have pause here to say thanks and give a shout out to Kaushal Sheth, who is the guy who made the modified Fluidity 3C 1.0 theme that I used for this new layout. He took a lot of care to comment a bunch of stuff in the code and the CSS and that’s helped make it worlds easier to mess with this thing and learn as I go along. So that’s pretty awesome. Thanks, Kaushal!

Which reminds me - the calendar over to the left is broken in that it adds a trailing / to the end of the permalinks for each date. That breaks the link and sends you to a 403 page. I’ve made a post on the never-helpful WordPress forums regarding this, but of course I havent even received a reply, although this is a problem a lot of people have. As I’ve said before, I hate those motherfuckers over there. Theyre the rudest bastards on the Internet and they think their shit doesnt stink.

Anyway, it’s a matter of actually finding the bit of code in the php that runs the calendar that’s giving me the headache - once I can find out where it is, I can make it so that end / doesnt appear in there, and that will fix the whole situation. If you think you can help with that, I’d love to hear from you! Otherwise, you can use the calendar by just clicking any date you wish to peruse, then when you get to your inevitable 403 page, you just go up and manually delete that last / from the URI. Hit enter, and the page will load properly. I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can; trust me, it’s making me nuts and I am on a mission to find where it’s hidden!

Okay, I’m late for some incredibly boring work that’s due insanely early.

*sigh*!

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Okay, now I really do have to get to work. But I installed some widgets just now, for the first time - having an updated theme and all - and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with them! They seem like fun. I’m going to do some hunting around for more.

Also, I have to say that the documentation for WordPress seems to have gotten friendlier to use, with more information, as well. So maybe things this time around won’t be as infuriating trying to figure out. At any rate, I’m looking forward to it!

Huzzah!

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YAY!

I finally went ahead and backed up this whole blog (I’m usually much better at keeping backups; I’ve just been really extra-economy-sized blah blah lately about doing anything at all), database and all, finally upgrading WordPress (long overdue, but done at last), and finding and installing a new theme!

I’ve checked the couple of things that were egregiously broken, the most extreme of which was the total inability to actually see any of the posts anywhere except the main page - like when you click RSS feed links, for example, and come up with a blank entry (just the title and no post or anything). Just FYI, the same thing would happen when I’d be editing a post; the WP admin write window has at the bottom a WYSIWIG post preview that also returned a blank entry, just like what you would get when you click the RSS feed links. Apparently there was something in the previous theme I was using that was either missing or not coded correctly (maybe I screwed it up in my tinkering) that caused that to happen.

ANYway, this new theme appears to have remedied that unbelievably annoying bug and so all is well there, the posts can be seen on their own individual pages when you click ‘em, and my frazzled soul has been soothed - at least in that quarter.

Now that the thing is installed and appears to be working, I’m going to tart it up and mod it for my own tastes. I like the orange thing that the author has going here, but since it’s not one of my favourite colours, it’s going to get old pretty quickly. But that’s okay; I’ll have fun tweaking the thing to my preferences. I want to add some little widgets here that I’ve been looking into. I’ve found a whole SLEW of interesting little things that I want to shoehorn in here eventually.

Exciting!

Well, I’m off to do some scheming before work. If anyone notices anything broken or annoying (other than the content, in which case, piss off), please let me know!

YAY for new, unbroken themes!

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Some people like to bitch and moan that you have to register with this site in order to comment. Here’s a friendly little reminder of why that’s so, with some helpful advice:

Suck it up, dawg.

(wait, I can explain…)

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So yeah, I downloaded and installed Firefox 2.0 today! It went very smoothly and so far I’m having no real problems of any kind. Each iteration of the browser seems to get a wee bit more sluggish, but to be fair I use about 3,200 add-ons and those slow Fx down considerably. Especially since one or two of the add-ons I use are memory leaky. But I’ve done eight or nine hard drive reformats since April (the result of my old motherboard and new video card refusing to speak to each other - I hate hardware catfights, especially when I lose) and had the opportunity to use Fx a good deal without any add-ons. It’s a little sluggish on launch and with page renders. That’s all there is to it, no matter how many names the Firefox fanbois call you for daring to suggest such a thing.

(wait, I can explain…)

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I hate these fucking guys!

Look!

Thanks to Lilmoo for pointing this out yesterday in his away message. BoingBoing has it, too. I’m not into a lot of the shit that Lik-Sang sold but if I needed anything like that, Lik-Sang is probably where I’d have gotten it. I’m a gamer, though, and hardcore about it even if I’m not a twitch player, and I feel this loss as sharply as anyone who actually relied on the site for their own preferred gamestyle does.

Sony needs to be taught a lesson. Their willful global rampage in the china shop of consumer rights must stop.

I’ve been boycotting these peckerwoods since I quit SWG. I relapsed briefly to EQ2 for a couple months due to the urging of a guy I know who is pretty much in need of a dick sandwich himself - but who is more foolish, etc - but I quit and I won’t be going back. If there is any way I can avoid making a purchase that brings business to this behemoth abuser of consumers the world over, then I will do so. Maybe I’m just one person, but we’re all one person, aren’t we? And I am by far not the only person out here boycotting them.

I just can’t see how anyone would want to support a company that pulls this kind of chicanery, no matter how neat their toys might be.

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No, it’s not a porn site, Scott. Keep your sporran on.

Check it out. It’s really quite amazingly cool.

Thanks to Mingis for turning me on to this.

the electric sheep screen-saver

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