My credit card company (Citi) issued us new credit cards because they said someone had obtained the number fraudulently. Good job! The downside of course is that I had to go and update the credit card information with companies that take automatic payments from that account.
First, my company telephone: This is with Verizon, you cannot just update the information, you have to enroll in automatic payments all over again. This involves agreeing to conditions that are probably not the same as before. Its a cunning move to get out of any older agreement and get you into their latest agreement. OK, but then the surprise.. here is their confirmation text:
Your enrollment form has been successfully submitted. It will take up to 60 days for your credit card billing to start. You should continue to mail in your payment by the due date until you see "PLEASE DO NOT PAY THIS BILL." printed on the bill's Payment Page. That message is your confirmation that your bill is now being charged to your credit card.
Up to 60 days ! I entered all the data, so there is nothing for them to do. The computers can check the validity of the card in less than a second. I made a once off payment with the same card on the same website and the transaction was accepted right away. So why would anything take 60 days ?
Verizon is not alone... I went to the Comcast web site to make the changes too. The confirmation email states:
The enrollment process for recurring credit card payment can take between 30-45 days, therefore you will need to pay your current statement balance with a different method (i.e. one-time credit card payment). You also may need to pay your bill next month using an alternate method if enrollment is not complete prior to the start of your next billing cycle.
They seem a bit better 30 to 45 days.. wow! Welcome to the world of internet commerce !
Dale Schultz November 15th, 2007 09:36:36 AM
I think it is pretty well known that Karl Rove is a stop-at-nothing type of guy. Dirty tricks as needed. Are we to actually believe that he is leaving the Bush administration? Or is this just one of his strategic moves? Are we for a moment supposed to believe that he will not continue to advise George W Bush? Come on, let us not be so gullible...
I do not doubt for a moment that GW will pick up the phone and see what old buddy Karl thinks from time to time. Pretending that Rove has left his position as chief advisor could be a move to make people think that the bad-egg-Rove has finally left and its time for someone with more integrity to drive Bush policy, thus somehow making Bush look better. Anything that can be done to improve the party image now is likley to be attempted. Meantime Rove is still on the other end of the phone when not writing books aimed at ensuring a Republican success in 2008.
Wake up American electorate ! Wake up media!
Dale Schultz August 19th, 2007 05:37:37 PM
First a definition: BRA-B-QUE Women lining up to burn their bras
and a realization: Diarrhea is hereditary - It runs in the family.
Dale Schultz July 31st, 2007 12:38:14 PM
I have no doubt that those who say that guns should be outlawed will use the Virginia Tech massacre as evidence for their cause.
In fact, I think it underlies the fact that more people should be armed. If some of the other students had been armed I suspect that Cho Seung-Hui would have been killed a lot sooner. What is needed is more non-nut cases to be packing. If (say) every second person was armed, Cho Seung-Hui would not have been able to kill 32 others.
The fact is further underlined by the headlines that appear side by side today with those of the Virginia Tech massacre. The mayor of Nagasaki in Japan was shot dead by a gangster. It is illegal to own a handgun in Japan. They outlawed guns so in Japan it is the outlaws that have guns.
Dale Schultz April 17th, 2007 04:51:05 PM
Today I received some junk mail about a prescription disount service. The back of the envelope says:
51% of Americans take at least
1 prescription drug daily.
51%.. hmmm where did I hear that before...? Oh! yes 51% of Americans who voted, voted for Bush.
Perhaps there is an explanation in all this. Comments (0)
Dale Schultz March 19th, 2007 05:44:07 PM
In addition to masterminding the 911 attacks, beheading Daniel Pearl, the attack on the SS Cole and the Bali bombings, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said at a military hearing at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba that he also participated in the assassination of JFK, and Martin Luther King and was present at South Bundy Drive the night Nicole Brown Simpson was killed.
I am amazed that the alleged content of the hearings of a civilian, held outside a court of law, is getting so much publicity and press.
Dale Schultz March 17th, 2007 12:26:32 PM
We have a storage space below the stairs
in which there is a light bulb. This week the bulb got bumped and the glass
separated from the aluminum threaded socket. I crawled in there with some
small pliers with which to grab the threaded part and unscrew it. Before
I touched it I decided to test to see if the switch was on or off so I
applied my voltage tester to the socket and the metal housing - it had
110 Volts. I flipped the light switch and tested again - still 110 Volts
! Swicth - test, switch - test ,switch - test - no doubt
about it, the thing was live no matter how the switch was set. Wow! if
I had touched it with the pliers 110 Volts would have run through my body
to the concrete floor below.
So I switched off the power at the main
distribution box and tested again, now it was dead and I could unscrew
the remains of the light bulb. Screwed in a new light bulb and swithed
the circuit on again. The light worked and the switch operated it fine
again.
So why was there current when the switch
was off? Well the switch only switches one of the wires that run to the
light. After switching the electricty off at the main panel again I unscrewed
the light fitting to ensure it was proplery grounded. Looked fine. Then
I opened up the switch and found that it was also was grounded OK,
but... the white wire was being switched. The white wire is the USA represents
the neutral wire. So the live (black) wire was always live at the light
socket!
It seemed illogical to me that the outer
threaded contact that is easily touched was always live so I did some web
searches on the subject. Sure enough there are two errors in the wiring.
1. The live (black) wire is the one
that should be switched, not the white neutral.
2. The live (black) wire should be wired
to the center contact of the light socket.
I will be rewiring both the switch and
the light socket. In fact I will replace the light fitting with one that
has a protective cage around the light bulb. i also plan on testing all
the other sockets in the house for incorrect wiring! You might want to
have your lights checked also.
Most importantly, do
not assume that because the
switch is off, there is no power at the light socket!
Dale Schultz October 16th, 2006 08:25:51 PM
I want to meet the fools who design residential
toilets. I suspect they are all long dead though.
25 years after men walked on the moon
the USA still has toilets that must have been designed in the dark ages
before simple engineering principles were adopted.
Here is why I have come to this conclusion.
For some months we have been woken at night when a toilet cistern decided
it need to top up, so the filler mechanism open the water valve and for
about 3 seconds the night silence is punctured by the sound of water filling
the tank and then it slams shut again when the water level is high enough.
This symptom is a result of a slow trickle of water past the flapper into
the bowl. Eventually the water level in the cistern is low enough to trigger
the refilling. Apart from the wasted water, the noise during the night
is annoying. (Of course it also happens during the day but it goes unnoticed
because of other noises.)
I replaced the flapper. A couple of
times. Within a few weeks or months we were back to hearing night time
fill ups.
Let me explain a bit how it all works.
The cistern (or tank above the toilet) holds water ready for use. There
is a rubber or plastic flapper in the tank that covers large hole in the
bottom of the cistern. When you push the flush lever, it pulls a chain
which lifts the flapper and the water rushes out and into the bowl. Then
the flapper returns and the water is refilled by the filling mechanism
which is usually some sort of float connected to an inlet valve. When the
water rises to the desired level, the float pushes a lever which in turn
shuts off the valve.
Sounds simple enough, but there are
way too many moving parts and points of failure and the whole system essentially
cannot be properly maintained.
Instead of using the water pressure
of the water supply to hold the flapper valve closed, the design relies
on the weight of the flapper itself plus the pressure of the water above
it to make a seal against the hole in the bottom of the tank. Any wear
or deterioration of either side of the seal calls for replacing a part.
I expect rubber or plastic seals to need periodic replacement (say every
5 years). I furthermore expect that replacing such a part should be achieved
with a minimum of tools (if any) and the operation should be possible in
about 10 minutes. I also expect any adjustments to be able to be performed
in a positive way. By positive I mean that adjustments should be done by
means of a threaded (or equivalent) part that will not corrode in a wet
environment. It simply is not so, and it gets worse...
Since replacing the flapper did not
solve the problem, I decided that the part onto which the flapper has to
seal needed replacing.
In order to replace the lower part of
the flapper seat you have to remove the entire cistern from the toilet!
This is because the think is fastened on from below. In order to remove
the cistern it has to be unbolted from the toilet itself and guess what...
the bolts go through the bottom of the tank, below the water line.
This means that you have to disturb 2 or 3 water tight seals to remove
the cistern. not only that, after some years of being in place the bolts
corrode and get cemented together with lime deposits etc. The lower end
of the bolts are down behind the toilet where they sometimes cannot even
be seen, you have to feel about to find to the lower end.
In my case I could get one of the bolts
undone but the second one simply would not budge. I got vice grips onto
the wing-nut below and held the other end with a large screwdriver from
above. No amount of straining would turn the wing-nut. I was forced to
insert a hack saw blade between the tank and the toilet and cut through
the bolt that I was not even able to see.
In addition to these bolts, there is
also the issue of the water inlet. The water supply comes out of the wall
to a shut off valve and then up into the bottom of the tank. Yes, the underside,
below the water line! The underside of the tank has 4 or 5 holes that are
below the water line when at maximum, only one should be there. To remove
the tank, the water supply also has to be disconnected. The hose that goes
from the shut-off valve to the connection on the underside of the tank
was in my case also cemented up with lime so much that the top could not
be unscrewed from the fill mechanism that is inside the cistern. To disconnect
it I had to unthread the filler inside the tank while the hose connection
below remained stationery. This breaks the last of all the seals on the
underside of the tank.
After some back breaking hours I was
able to remove the cistern. Of course every seal on the underside now has
to be replaced because the old seals (rubber) are now hardened and will
never go back in exactly the same place and so will never make a water
tight seal again. In addition the connection line from the shut-off to
the tank inlet will also no longer make a good seal ever again so that
also has to be replaced. Another trip to the hardware store.
I had bough the Fluidmaster replacement
kit from Home Depot for the flush mechanism It consists of a new flapper,
flapper seat, new bolts and seals for the tank and also a large seal to
seal the underside of the tank to the toilet.
Since the filler mechanism was working
just fine, I had not bought a replacement for that, but now since I had
removed it from the tank (to undo the supply line) I needed a new seal
where the filler penetrates the bottom of the tank, and guess what, you
have to buy the whole filler mechanism to get the seal. So a third trip
to a hardware store was made to get a new filler kit.
So in order to replace a single part
that one expects needs periodic replacement, I had to remove the entire
tank and replace everything inside it plus the supply line. You
cannot find a better example of something that is not maintainable. It
seems that people no longer care about maintenance, everything simply gets
replaced if anything needs attention. How many thousands of plumbers do
this job every week? I suspect most customers never know what is going
on.
And for crying out loud, what are these
confounded things made out of china? China is fragile. It is nice and smooth
which aids cleaning but we have mastered numerous types of materials (plastic,
stainless steel, etc) that would be way better.
Have you noticed that nonresidential
toilets do not have these ridiculous mechanisms that are so prone to failure?
They have a decent water main that delivers water as needed. No tank, no
connections, no floats, no stupid flappers.
One may argue that residential homes
do not have a big enough water main supply, but all new buildings could
simply insist on having a 2" water main and thus be able to install
better toilets. For existing installations, much of this nonsense could
be solved by intelligent design of the system....
Tips for toilet designers
For one thing, make the tank and toilet
out of a single piece of material. This would remove the need to bolt one
part onto the other. It would also remove the need to create water tight
seals between the two parts. If people insist on having a separate tank,
then do one of two things: (1) attach the tank to the wall up high, where
they used to be - it provides a much better head of water (pressure) when
flushing, or (2) make the attachment system external to the tank, so that
the attachment system does not breach the tank. Bolting a water tank down
through the bottom is one of the most stupid designs I have seen in a long
time.
Next, bring the water into the tank
above the fill water line. This is so damn obvious. There is absolutely
no sane reason to bring this up through the tank below the water line.
Doing so simply creates another point of failure (leak). When we lived
in the third world (South Africa) the water supply came in from above.
It seems that while the USA was putting men on the moon, Africa was forging
way ahead on toilet design.
Use the water line pressure to hold
the flush valve closed instead of relying on a few inches of water pressure.
Finally ensure that all seals that are
non static can be replaced without replacing or removing anything significant.
Even better design a maintenance free system.
Dale Schultz August 20th, 2006 06:06:52 PM
The announcement that Skype users can call
any US or Canadian phones for free until the end of 2006 is not only a
knock for the competition such as Vonage (I am a happy Vonage customer),
but also a wake up call for the traditional phone companies.
I am also wondering if its a poke in
the eye of the US Government which has been trying to track all phone calls
in the country - moving more calls to VoIP probably makes it a bit more
difficult to track calls...
Dale Schultz May 16th, 2006 10:59:57 AM
On the way home from an errand today I
had to stop to let some fire trucks out of the fire station. After they
had gone, through the lights went green and I continued on my way home.
When I got to our street, I found a house was on fire and I decided to
go home and get my camera. Then the fire truck I had waited for earlier
arrived! I wonder what took them so long !
After going home and running up the road with the kids and my camera we
watched the proceedings...
Turns out the owner had parked his hot garden tractor in his garage and
that ignited the fire...
At that stage it was limited to the garage only..
The house was filling with smoke and the smoke alarms were chirping away...
The fire department went up and cut a hole in the garage roof... This
is known as 'venting' and used in limited situations to expell hot gases
allowing use of stairwells, rescue of people and fast advance with hose
lines.
this let the air flow nicely and soon there was a huge blaze...
Not much water was being put on the fire
there was lots of shouting and yelling
There was sporadic use of the fire hoses. In my opinion venting
this fire was not the best tactic and simply accelearted the fire.
Looks like the house is a complete loss.
I counted 10 fire department vehicles and two hoses. Plus about 4 Police
cruisers, paramedics (nobody hurt) and the electricity company.
Dale Schultz April 28th, 2006 03:17:17 PM