weird [spugbrap’s blog]

May 15th, 2007

FIA Card Services can share your info even after you close your account?!?

From the FIA Card Services (aka Evil Spawn of the Bank of America+Fleet and Bank of America+MBNA mergers) Privacy Policy (emphasis added by me):

This notice describes the privacy practices of FIA Card Services for consumer financial products and services governed by the laws of the United States of America and applies to open, closed and inactive accounts with FIA Card Services.

For some reason, this concerns me a little bit.

I have two open accounts with them right now, and am going to go ahead and opt out of their information sharing options for both accounts. But it’s not people like me that I’m concerned about.

I’m concerned about people who may have ever had an account with Bank of America, MBNA, or any of the other credit card companies that they have collectively gobbled up over the years. People who may have canceled their cards long ago, cut them up, and forgotten all about them. People who may have even thrown away all of their bills/terms/etc., because it’s been so long.

According to the paragraph quoted above, FIA Card Services may share their information with other companies, even if their accounts are closed! Maybe I’m just naïve, but I never would have imagined that after I closed a credit card account, and stopped doing business with a company, they might still share my personal data with arbitrary third parties.

I’ll bet they don’t still mail annual Privacy Policy notices to everyone who has closed accounts. But, all of this may be a moot point. The wording is ambiguous enough that even though they *might* do something with that data, they probably don’t, and I have no positive proof that they actually do engage in this unethical practice. So, they get the benefit of the doubt, for now. But it’s still creepy, and they’re still evil for other reasons.

February 19th, 2007

mixed signals on ebay home page

On one page, ebay both recognizes/greets me:

Hello, spugbrap! (Sign out)

and also snubs me:

Sign in to view your Favorite Searches.

It’s struck me as odd to see both “Sign in” and “Sign out” links on the same page.

December 29th, 2006

WTF? I got up 4 hours too early this morning!

My alarm was set for 5:00am, but I got up at 1:00am, took my morning wake-up medicines, and hopped in the shower. It wasn’t until half-way through the shower that I noticed what time it was. Ugh! So, I finished my shower, and went back to bed.

The weirder thing is, I specifically remember that when I woke up, I went into the bathroom and put my glasses on, then went back into the bedroom… The only reason I can think of that I would have done that is to check the time, and make sure my alarms were turned off before taking my shower. But, as it turns out, my alarms were still set for 5:00am. So I’m not sure what I was thinking.

This is not the first time this has happened. It happened at least once before, sometime in the past year and a half. Weirdness. I’m guessing there was some dream<–>reality mixup involved, kind of like what used to happen to me in high school and college, but with opposite results…

I used to turn off my alarm clock without waking up, and then proceeded to dream that I took a shower and got ready for school. Then, my mom would wake me up when it was nearing time to catch the bus, and I would be all sorts of pissed off and confused, because I truly believed that I had gotten up with my alarm, taken a shower, got dressed, etc. This happened way too often.

This time, maybe I was dreaming that my alarm was going off, and that I was shutting it off, and then heading to the bathroom to take a shower… and my body physically did go through some of the motions, and ended up in the bathroom, where I proceeded to actually wake up for real. Since there is no clock prominently posted in the bathroom (I only noticed the time in the shower because of the little tiny clock on my shaving mirror in the shower), I did not question that it was time to be awake, because I still remembered turning off my alarm (which happened to be in a dream).

Oh, the joys of narcolepsy!

Consequently, when my alarm really went off at 5am, and I got up (and triple-checked that the alarms were turned off, and that it was really the right time), I took my meds again (unorthodox to take an extra dose, but I think the situation warrants it!), and took another (slightly shorter) shower, for medicinal purposes (can’t function well without my morning shower, especially when I’m sick [I’ve got a cold and/or sinus infection right now]).

I’ll definitely be checking the clock *before* taking my showers, from now on. I hope the rest of the day goes smoother!

September 27th, 2006

Does Michael Jackson like Irish midgets?

From a post [last week] on the Dilbert Blog:

Today I heard on the news that Michael Jackson is going to open a leprechaun themed amusement park in Ireland. Seriously. If you don’t believe me, go Google yourself.
[…]
I won’t accuse Michael Jackson of being a child molester. You can never fully rule out “disturbed weirdo of galactic proportions with astonishingly bad judgment.” However, the question I wonder about is what would happen if someone such as Michael who enjoyed sleeping with children (as friends) suddenly couldn’t do it anymore. What would he do?Well, he might start a business that has a perfectly good reason for hiring hordes of midgets. They’d all be over 18-years old so there are no legal problems. As far as I know, you can hump the living crap out of a midget all day long and it’s totally legal, assuming the midget is onboard with the plan. Or you can just share your bed with midgets as friends. That’s legal too.

I flagged this in my feed reader last week, because it’s one of the first things I’ve read recently that actually made me laugh out loud at work. I was sick, so I was trying extra hard NOT to laugh, because I knew it would hurt my throat and make me cough, but every time I read one particular line of that post, “As far as I know, you can hump the living crap out of a midget all day long and it’s totally legal, assuming the midget is onboard with the plan”, I just couldn’t help it!

August 27th, 2006

Multiple keys for rental cars

It’s nice that they give you more than one key for your rental car, kind of like having multiple key[cards] for hotel rooms. But what’s the point, if the keys are attached via a permanently-closed keyring?

spugbrap’s blog