Cartoon Barry Blog - Barry Schwartz's Personal Blog

$29,264 In Fraud Credit Card Transactions

This morning I wanted to check my credit card activity on my Chase Continental credit card. To my surprise, I spotted almost $30,000 worth of fraud transactions.

Yea, I called, got them reversed and replaced the cards on the account with a new account.

But seriously? They didn't get picked up by a credit card fraud algorithm? This is the same credit card that declines me for filling up my car with gas or buying parking at a garage for a business trip.

There are a dozen or transactions from the same merchant, MLK. I won't say who it is, because I am not sure if they are to blame or if it is someone 'frauding' them. But, doesn't this look suspicious to you?

(Note: This is only a portion of the fraud transactions)

Again, how can an algorithm not pick these up?

The woman at the credit card company said, oh, we blocked about $5,000 worth of these charges from this merchant. I was thinking, oh, so you decided to let through $25,000 worth or so?

Anyway, no harm done to me but I feel bad for whomever got nailed with the $30,000 bill.

Posted at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Category: Just Weird | Comments (0) (0)

Add Fun Characters To Your iPhone Keyboard: emoji

I thought I knew everything about my iPhone, but one of the most basic things I had no clue about. It is the emoji keyboard, which gives you the ability to send funny faces, funny icons and representative icons.

You basically need to enable a new "international" keyboard on your iPhone to activate it. After you do that, you get these characters, plus a heck of a lot more, as options when sending text messages, emails and so on.

How do you add it?

(1) Tap Settings > General > Keyboard
(2) Tap International Keyboards
(3) Tap Add New Keyboard
(4) Locate and tap Emoji

Then when the keyboard is open, hit the globe on the botton, near the left of the space bar. You will be able to toggle through your various keyboards that way.

Posted at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Category: iPhone | Comments (0) (0)

Save 50% On Water Delivery But Terminating Your Contract

The couple weeks ago, Crystal Rock came into my office claiming they can do better than Deer Park on my water bottle prices. They did and I terminated my contract with Deer Park.

Today I got a notification from Poland Spring that my home delivery is coming up. So I decided to play the termination game with them and it worked.

I called, I said, Crystal Rock offered me X dollars per bottle and I pay you guys Y. I would like to terminate my water with you guys, unless you can match. I was then put on hold for maybe 30 seconds and was told they would match it for a year.

The price difference is a savings of 50%! Water isn't expensive but 50% isn't something to laugh at.

So if you have a water service, call and threaten to terminate - it will save you money!

Image credit: Scott Bartlett / ShutterStock.

Posted at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Category: Business | Comments (2) (0)

AT&T 3G Down On East Coast?

For the first time since switching over to AT&T almost 5 years ago, the data network has gone down completely. 3G is dead on AT&T in my area, which is the east coast. It has been since at least 6:20am from when I tried it off the WiFi network.

A tweet from california says AT&T's network is also down in California. He thinks it is a conspiracy against the Occupy Wall Street folks.

I guess the reason there are not too many tweets about it is because AT&T users cannot connect to the Internet?

Do you have an issue?

Posted at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Category: Computers | Comments (0) (0)

Red Eyes: Setting Myself Up For Disaster

I often take red eye flights when possible. My past experience is that email is just too much to fly 5-6 hours during the day. But now with Wifi on the flight, there is less of a reason to not fly during the day.

That be the case, I booked a flight for the Google Media Event happening on December 6th.

My flight leaves at 7am, which means I need to leave my house before 4am. I then take a red eye flight the same day back to New York. I will land 6am the following morning and then go directly to work. I'll probably stay up till 11am.

I figure, I'll be up for at least 44 hours between December 6th and December 7th.

I am asking for it.

Image credit: Lightspring / ShutterStock.

Posted at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Category: Travels | Comments (0) (0)

Moving Places On Foursquare With Checkins

I am a big foursquare user, I've written about it several times here.

But did you know you can move places found in foursquare by simply checking into the place?

There is a place about a mile or two from my house. I checked into it almost every single day for the past few months while I was a mile or two away. Eventually, foursquare changed the location of the place to be basically at my house.

I am not sure how that happened because the physical address is the same, but in terms of distance to my house, it is right there now.

It kind of makes you think of weird abstract reality perceptions on what is distance? Are things really far away or not? You know, stuff that people think about if they are a PhD or on some weird drugs.

Posted at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Category: Travels | Comments (3) (0)

Is It Immoral To Mark Charity Emails As Spam?

We have made a nice number of web sites and web software for charity and non profit organizations. Many of them have email solutions through us to raise awareness and money for the causes they serve.

Often when they send out emails to their lists of potential donors, several dozen will come back marking them as "spam" and many will also unsubscribe for the email list.

I am often upset when AOL postmaster notifies me of someone marking an email from a really good charity as spam. How can they morally feel good about marking the email as spam, especially when it is to feed starving children?

I mean, at least click the unsubscribe button - why mark it as spam?

But the bigger question to me is would you feel bad about unsubscribing for receiving emails from good non profit organizations? I am sure most of you would never mark their emails as spam, if they send out emails responsibly - but would you feel bad unsubscribing?

Let me know.

Image credit: mangostock / ShutterStock.

Posted at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Category: Rambling | Comments (1) (0)

Auto Accident: Car Flipped Over

On the way to the airport last week, Monday - to go to PubCon in Las Vegas, we hit a bit of traffic. As we approached we saw what happened. There were about three cars involved, all really badly damaged. In fact, they looked they were all charred from a huge fire.

Here is a picture of one on the cars that seemed the most damaged, flipped over and the wheels are missing. I suspect the outcome was really not good, which makes me pretty sad.

I didn't see the accident happen, although I have seen accidents happen in the past. And I have seen cars on fire and I've been in car fires (small one when I was a kid). I've also been in my share of accidents, even one where a cop hit me - I kid you not.

Here is the popular street on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

Anyway, it is sad to see accidents, especially ones like this.

Posted at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Category: Motor Vehicle | Comments (1) (0)

Comment Spam On My Dead Blog

I've been horrible at blogging on my personal blog recently. It is not like I don't have things to share or I've been very boring lately - I can write about borring stuff. So I apologize.

The thing is, the less I write and update this site, the more comment spam I get.

It is like spammers are smart or something. :) They look for blogs that are not update and spam those blogs more often than if they spammed a blog that is updated often.

Why? Pretty obvious, dead blogs are likely not scanned for comment spam. Blogs that are often updated are probably scanned for comment spam.

Spam a dead blog, you normally have more success.

So I suspect that is an incentive for me to keep this blog updated.

Image credit: alexmillos / ShutterStock.

Posted at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Category: Blogging | Comments (0) (0)