cdrum

I am currently running 2.0.x, will upgrade to 2.2.x now. Using Dreamhost’s auto-upgrade feature. Hope it doesn’t break….

Update: No, I’m not.  I just realized I’ll have to reinstall the plug-ins and all that crap.   I’ll do that this weekend or sometime.

Thanks to those of you who wished me a Happy Birthday.

Those of you who didn’t, well…  That’s not very nice, is it? 

What did I do for my Birthday?  Well, it was on a Thursday, and I went home and pretty much played Guitar Hero II for several hours.  That game rocks. Literally!

Having a thingy tonight with some friends – I am sure it will be a long night.

Then tomorrow, I need to go to Tom’s 90′s party.  A 90′s party? He calls it “Enjoy the View”.  What the heck does that mean? In his invitation, he had a pretentious set of photos of a sunsetting.  Sunsets and 90′s?  Well, I guess there is some relation as I can remember some occasions in the 90′s where the sun did indeed set.

Any way…

I am in Singapore for the rest of the week to attend a regional BCP conference at Siemens.

Singapore is so nice

I return to Beijing Sunday afternoon.

IMG_1902

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum.

I took advantage of the week holiday to visit Melanie who is in New Delhi for a 6 month work assignment.

Stayed just about 7 days.

Interesting place, to say the least. Also went on a ~3 day road trip south-west to Jaipur, and then east to Agra. The Taj was the highlight.

I, like many visitors, got sick one of the days – no idea what I ate to cause it….

Here’s a link to the flickr photoset.

Amateurs.  They’re all a bunch on Amateurs!

Payment not being processed.

After receiving no response to 3 emails over the past week, and with a “window” quickly closing (the time my parents are in the U.S. [they would receive the package and then hand carry it to China]), I decided to cancel.

Let’s see if these guys respond to my cancellation email.

For your information, the eBay Seller I attempted to buy from goes by the name of johnnybarakat.

I suppose I’ll have to wait a bit longer to get a new phone. Ahem.

I am convinced the U.S. banking industry is garbage.

I am using my Bank of America credit card for this phone purchase on eBay.  It turns out, my little “clever” trick I pulled (described in my previous post) was flagged as potential fraud.  So, of course the purchase was put on hold.

I get an email from the eBay purchaser saying the payment didn’t go through.  I tried to log onto my BoA account, they sent me to this webpage to confirm my previous charges, the eBay purchase was flagged as suspicious.

ok, so I think I got around that, but i’m going to rant about BoA’s “security” procedures.  Their “SiteKey“.  Go on, click on the link before to read about this amateur show “security product”.  This is a stupid, essentially cookie-based “identity confirmation” feature which checks if you’re using an “authorized” computer, if not, then asks you a pre-defined question about your family or old school or something.  Rediculous.

If these guys were really serious about security, let’s join the rest of the world and use two-factor authentication, like our friends at HSBC (note: not their U.S. subsidiary – in fact, their China-subsidiary has it for crying out loud).  They can use a nice USB Key with certificate or a token (like RSA SecurID).  My China bank account, ICBC, uses a USB Key.  What is wrong with U.S. banks?  Bunch of cheapskate amateurs.

Any way, back to the eBay purchase.  I think I settled this, will check tomorrow to see if the order is going through…..