Halloween Horror 2023… 710,000 Citi ThankYou Points Stolen

Halloween is conventionally associated with all sorts of scary stuff – spiders, vampires, and horror movies. This year I was hit with something far worse… over $10k worth of financial theft via cyber crime. Warning #1 On Tuesday, October 24, I got a vague text informing me of suspicious activities on my Citi Prestige and

Blog Hacked

After not touching this for almost 3 years, I suddenly had the urge to return to this blog.  What welcomed me back was an AVG intrusion alert and some Cialis ads.  Funny. I was confronted with how little web-technical skills I had left, when I tried to follow the anti-hacking instructions on sites like these:

Earth Hour 2009

Last Saturday night, people around the world turned their lights off to conserve energy, in celebration of the Earth Hour 2009.  Click to see some amazing city skyline transitions from light to dark. I did not hear about this event until Sean and Alice brought it up, when I took them sightseeing and they questioned

Windows Update Crashes

Okay.  Within 7 months, I’ve had two Windows-Update-related computer crashes.  Kinda stinks. The first time it fatally corrupted some important system file in my XP and required a complete (nasty) reinstall of the system, which indirectly sped up my purchase of this new computer and upgrade to Vista. This time around, I started seeing the

TV In the House

For three years, coworkers have made fun of me for not having a TV… and using that to explain why I (have time to study and) pass my exams like nobody else. Well, that’s changing as I got myself an HD digital antenna to hook up to the HDTV card in my new computer. This is

Google Chrome

Google has released its own Web browser today (at noon PDT), and I installed it on both my work and home computers within 15 minutes.  I had not been so eager to try a newly released software since Internet Explorer 4, and I actually didn’t learn about this one until a few hours before its

New Computer Update

Put my computer together and now it’s up and running… AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ BioStar motherboard with GeForce 8200 HDMI 4 x 1GB DDR2 800 Some cheap video card with 256MB RAM AverMedia HDTV tuner card WD Caviar 500GB SATA hard drive 20x DVD+-R burner with LightScribe 20x Dual Layer DVD burner Rosewill 550W

New Computer

I got a new computer. It’s amazing how fast NewEgg sends out its orders.  Even with the cheapest shipping method, the stuff arrived at my door after only one full business day.  Maybe it helps to live one hour away from their warehouse in Edison, NJ. So this was the first time in over four years that