Online billpay - a cautionary note

I am rather perturbed right now.

I've just had the unpleasant experience of having a credit company collection person call my house to ask for the money I owe them.

Huh?

Considering that I've never, ever in my life missed a payment of anything - not just credit cards - I was stunned. Shellshocked. I mean, what the fuck? How could I miss a payment anyway? I have all my credit cards registered in my bank's online billpay system, and the bank gets the statements and pays them automagically. As long as I have enough money in the account to cover the payments I don't need to worry about it, and since having enough money for running expenses has never been an issue, THIS SIMPLY COULD NOT HAPPEN. Seriously, in the past four years I haven't had to ever LOOK at my credit card statements. It all goes on in the background, all I need to take care of is the making enough money portion (if you can even call it that; when you think about it, the "money" I make is basically some entry in my bank's database that then gets some other entry from a creditor against it and the database subtracts the latter from the former without my involvement. The whole concept of "money" in this process is a little loose)

Well, something DID happen, obviously.

So I log into my bank account and look it up - and lo and behold, for whatever reason the statements from my two credit cards from this one credit company - Citibank - never arrived last month. So my bank's system didn't have the information needed to issue a payment, so the payment wasn't issued, and it became past due. This particular snag has not ever happened in the four plus years I've been using this system, and I was quite unprepared for it.

I called Citi and had to go through the humilation of trying to explain my situation. I'll spare you the details. For a company that promotes electornic bill paying as heavily as they do, Citi really doesn't give a shit when the system of electronic bill paying breaks down somewhere. The only lucky thing for me is that because I get billed on different dates, only one of the cards got hit, and I quickly issued a manual payment on both. I will be closing the account that got hit presently, because I find it ludicrous to have an account in my name anywhere with any negative entries considering my payment history and credit score. Let's say it offends my sensibilities. Their loss really, as most financial institutions salivate over customers like me.

Anyway, I just dug deeper into the issue and tried to find out the source of the problem. I finally did. It WAS actually my fault. Two months ago, I was subject to an attempt at identity theft. Someone stole some credit card checks out of our mailbox and was trying to cash them. Now, it took a while to understand what exactly happened and in the process, just out of good habit, I changed my login information to the Citi website. Well, what I didn't think about was my online billpay settings, and when my bank tried to retrieve the bill, it no longer could do so. Hence the missed payment.

The reason this didn't get triggered last month was that I had made manual additional payments to all my credit cards as part of my 2005 tax year last month. Most of my cards got two payments - the auto one and the manual one - but the two Citi accounts only got one (the manual one). Of course, that was enough to not trigger the missed payment in December and there you go.

So my cautionary note - if you do use online billpay, always keep in mind that it relies on your various login settings with your creditors to function. When you change your login information (like your password) in one it needs to be matched in the other.

Kids are amazing

We just put our son to sleep, and as usual I went in first then my wife went in second. We have certain night-time rituals, and because of his age, he is now in the stage of "using pullups for accidents".

Anyhow, his grandma happened to buy a pack of pullups the other day, and they were not the usual ones we buy, instead of bunnies they have Dragon Tales characters in them. He has adamantly refused to wear them, and we were getting a little sick with him about this issue.

Well tonight he had to wear one because we had run out of the other kind. But he was still refusing to, and my wife ended up having to force it upon him, crying and all. Then we had the breakthrough. When he was fully dressed, she tried to start singing the Dragontales theme song to him and he immediately stopped her, clung to her really hard and started forming a sentence between the sobs. It went something like this: "mommy... mommy I don't want Dragon Tales pullups... I don't want to go to Dragonland".

Aha!

So wife hugs him and says that the pullups won't send him to Dragonland, that the TV show was just pretend like in the books we read, and that there is no real Dragonland. And he says "Dragonland is on TV and just pretend... but I don't want other kids mommies and daddies and little sisters in Dragonland, I want MY mommy and MY daddy and MY little sister".

Melts my heart. What a sweetie. Gosh, how much I love this kid!

My, err, personal Pat Robertson story

Yeah.

I have a personal Pat Robertson story.

Well, I think it was Pat Robertson - I'm almost certain of it - but judge for yourselves.

This post was prompted by a conversation I had with a friend today who suggested I should post it to the blog. He's probably the only person who even knows I have a blog, but hey, maybe some day someone else will and then they will see this post and... oh, I don't know, chuckle?

It involves D&D. Dungeons and Dragons to the uninitiated. To the even less initiated, D&D is a game developed in the 70's that started a whole new genre of gaming, role playing games. It launched several successful, if short-lived, companies, and created a mini revolution of its own. The game is played in the player's imagination, around a table, with funny looking dice, pen and paper. Players create fictional characters that try to solve challenges posed to them by the game master, relying on game mechanics detailed in the rulebooks in order to resolve the consequences of certain actions (such as, say, trying to hit someone with a sword). The setting for D&D is generally Tolkienesque (after Tolkien, the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings), mixed in with elements from the earth's medieval period - and magic.

Now that last bit is where it gets interesting for people like Robertson. See, when you deal with fictional magic you deal with all sorts of things arcane - spells, witches, devils and demons. Hey, the game wouldn't by fun if there weren't some opponents around, would it? Well, D&D is so open ended that a group of players can decide to "play" evil characters, essentially siding with said demons and using some pretty nasty spells. Remember, this is all imaginary.

Well, mix religious idealogy, ignorance, personal charm, a maniacal ego and a serious knack for cynically and continually extorting vast sums money for personal gain from helpless sheep - sorry, believers of a faith - and you get Pat Robertson and his determined attack on role playing games, D&D in particular. After all, it has some seriously evil elements.

Patience, my audience, patience. We're getting there.

I grew up in Israel. Now Israel in the early 80's had one TV channel - a national channel run by the government. We had no cable or anything remotely similar. Many Israelies had TV antennas that would allow them to watch TV stations from neighboring countries. One of our favorite channels was Middle-East TV, out of Beirut (Lebanon). It was a semi-christian channel, but it had a number of fun TV shows as well like Inspector Gadget. Well, being religios in nature it also featured, twice a day, a run of 700 Club, Pat's show for the religious fanatic.

Don't go, I'm getting to the point.

When I was 11 or so I was introduced to D&D for the first time, by a boy (incidentally called "Guy", which in Hebrew means "valley" but is funny in the English context) in my class whose dad was a senior IBM employee who thus got to travel out of Israel quite a bit and bring home things that were virtually unknown in the country. D&D books were one of them. Well, I didn't get into it that much, although I still remember our first - and at that time only - adventure. Typical dungeon crawl. Heck, what could you expect from 11 year olds? I stopped playing after 3 sessions.

A year or two later, I was alone at home, and the TV was on in the background, tuned to Mid-East TV, as usual. I was passing through the living room to the kitchen when something caught my eye. It was Pat in one of his fanatic speeches. The guy can be pretty eye-catching when he gets into one of his little acts. Well, my English being reasonably good already, and being the curious sort, I stopped and watched for a few seconds just to see what all the fuss was about.

It was about D&D.

He was spewing a constant stream of vitriol against the game, hovering over a table covered in game books, dice and miniatures. It must have been a great performance, because I watched it for over 10 minutes until it was done. And I remember distinctly saying to myself: "well, I know I've tried it once and didn't like it too much, but if this crazy guy thinks it's that bad, well, I guess I'll have to give it another go". Typical teenager attitude you might say, but I had already developed an acute sense of mistrust for anything and anyone devout at that age, and so it was no surprise that I turned back to my classmate and asked to photocopy the books so I could read them.

I was hooked.

I have been playing D&D, and other role playing games, ever since then. In fact, I had just completed running for our group (as Dungeon Master) an excellent adventure module, The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, after 3 1/2 years of playtime. I had branched off into many other role playing games since then, and my collection continues to grow every year. I have taught the game to countless people, and have converted many of them to the hobby. Role Playing games led me into boardgames as well, after a visit to the 1992 Gencon in Milwaukee. Boardgames are my biggest hobby by far these days.

I daresay that without Pat's tremendous performance on that show, none of my gaming hobby would have materialized. I therefore am very thankful for that show. It has enriched my life by an enormous degree, allowed me to meet with many people around the world sharing the same hobby, and generally opened my eyes and contributed much to my personal growth through positively influencing my interest in history, mathematics, and critical thinking. Pat, I know it was an unintended consequence, but thank you anyway. Thank you for re-introducing me to D&D. I truly appreciate it.

Fun and games

Wow, two posts in one day. Now all I need is for someone to actually read the damn thing, and my life will be complete. So, if you do happen to stumble upon this here little corner of my world, say hi!

I wanted to share the amazing fun I had yesterday in one of my favorite online locations, Brettspielwelt (BSW). To the uninitiated, BSW is a site where boardgame geeks - such as myself - congergate to play online versions of their favorite boardgames. I won't go much into the discussion of the type of games these are. They are called Eurogames, they are finally becoming a trend in America (after many years of being popular on the other side of the Atlantic), and they are absolutely nothing like the tripe that the american consumer is continually exposed to, namely so-called games such as Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. If you want to learn about the hobby, I urge you to visit boardgamegeek.

Anyhow, yesterday I had a serious itch to scratch - I needed my gaming fix, and I couldn't find people on short notice to play. Wife didn't feel like gaming at all, and so I turned to BSW. Logged in and within 10 minutes was playing one of my favorite games, Funkenschlag (or Power Grid in its US iteration). This is a really phenomenal game, very easy to get into (especially if you've ever played Monopoly, as the theme becomes somewhat similar) and tons of fun. It's about running an energy company and trying to enter as many possible energy markets as possible while turning as much of a profit as possible.

So we were playing a 3-player game, and it ended up as a nailbiter right up to the end. The game ends when a player connects 17 or more cities to his grid, and then the winner is the one who connects and provides power to as many cities as possible simultaneously. Usually games end with a clear winner - one person who can power up more than anyone else. Normally the difference between first and last place is a few cities. In cases of ties, the person who has the most money wins. Well, this game ended with a tie; third place connected and powered up 17 cities, and first and second got 18. So the tie was resolved. The difference? a single money unit. That's 1 gold, 1 dollar, 1 whathave you; the game is generally assumed to be played on the scale of millions, so the smallest unit available is 1 million. That was the margin for the winner. Err, that is, me.

That was exciting enough. Then I went and played a game of Puerto Rico (PR). PR is literally considered the best boardgame in the world by consensus (again I refer you to boardgamegeek), and for good reason. It really is a terrific game, although I do recommend trying something a bit lighter like the aforementioned Power Grid before taking on Puerto Rico, mostly because some of the game mechanics in PR would seem quite foreign otherwise.

I haven't played PR for a year or so. I was very very rusty. Even worse, I couldn't remember a lot of how the BSW interface worked. So in the first few rounds I made some critical mechanical errors (for those in the know, they were as stupid as choosing the trader and failing to trade because I forgot that you had to drag the resource to the trading house). Now, Puerto Rico is a game where such errors generally get punished severely. Knowing that, I went on an extreme "builder strategy", just optimizing my building choices and not caring much about other VP sources, taking them as they come. The game ended with me expecting to be dead last. Instead I won - by 1 point again.

Crazy.

I played a couple games of Can't Stop - won them also, for no other reason than getting insanely lucky. Then I asked someone to teach me Lost Cities, a game I've been wanting to learn for ages.

So they did, and we played 3 games. Now, this was an experienced player, with over 700 games of Lost Cities logged. I won every single time...

And to prove how crazy the night was, then I got introduced to another player of lost Cities, and we ended up playing 8 games. We started just after midnight - and I lost those games 6 to 2. It was as if once the day ended my streak was over.

But it was great fun. And oh, by the way, Lost Cities is an absolutely tremendous game. I am totally addicted to it now, and will be buying it on my next trip to the game store. One of the best 2-player games I've ever experienced. Can't recommend it enough. Good job, herr Knizia (the game's german designer).

And now for something completely different...

Meatloaf.

The guy has gone off his rocker, I hear you say. Probably true, but certainly something that happened long before this post.

No, the reason I bring up meatloaf is because I have just been re-introduced to the concept... and I am obssessed.

As background, my wife is in the process of opening a restaurant, or rather, a restaurant chain. At least that's the stated goal. In any case, she has been developing the menu for the past couple of months, with me as the chief food taster for a while (and gaining a few pounds in the process - not all of it on good stuff either, as she is experimenting and not everything come out right).

Anyway, this morning, after finalizing a portion of the menu, she decided to make a kitchensink meatloaf with all the recent leftovers. I went to the city to pick up a friend of ours who is staying with us tonight, and by the time we came back the meatloaf had just come out of the oven.

Now, I know what you're thinking. It's just meatloaf, right? No matter how good it is, it's still a pretty plain dish. That's what I thought, and what our friend thought, too.

Then we tasted it.

Oh... my... goodness.

This... thing... elevates the concept of meatloaf to a whole new level. I have never in my life tasted anything quite like it. It is so good that myself, said friend, my 19 months old daughter, and my 3 1/2 year old son were standing around the plate taking turns slicing off pieces and stuffing our mouths - and none of us were even particularly hungry. We polished off close to a pound of the thing before we were forcibly made to stop. There are no words to describe it, except that I have two more trays in the fridge. Our friend described it between bites as something that combines traces of his mother's turkey stuffing (they're Italian) with some excellent stew. It has a "jewish cooking" element to it, if you've ever had really terrific Cholent you'll know what I mean. It hit all of us somewhere in a really big way. It has instantly become one of my top ten dishes I have ever had.

I'm just astounded. I will never be able to think about or really enjoy another meatloaf again. Or actually, because this just doesn't play in the same playground. I'll just stop thinking of it as meatloaf and put it in its own category.

I mean, wow. Wowwowwow.

Mmm.

I am in awe

I just left my son's room after night-night and... as almost always, I am overflowing with emotion. Any of you that are parents must know just how rewarding, how amazingly fulfilling kids really are. It's completely inexplicable. We read a book, and then we "read just a little one" more, and then "daddy can we do one last one?" so we did. And then he grabbed my hand and looked at me and said "you can't go". And he was right, I couldn't. It was just so sweet...

So we played a bit and giggled a bit and then he got out of bed and put imaginary "sticky tape" across the door so I can't open it. And I looked at him, and I said "Joshi, daddy's tummy is rumbling because I am hungry and I want to eat dinner and go to sleep". And he tought about this for a second, then clipped open all the sticky tape, and said "OK, daddy, you can go, your tummy needs to be full". And he gave me a hug and a kiss and let me out.

So instead of going to eat I am writing this. Any wonder?