Moral-Flexibility.Net

Last night as I sat on the couch playing Rainbow Six: Las Vegas II with Mike a large crash shook my humble little abode. I’ll admit that my first thought was that the house had been struck by a rather solid object. Peering out my window I noticed that a rather solid object had struck the concrete telephone pole at the end of my driveway instead.

A minivan had seemingly done it’s level best to absorb the telephone pole, a few citizens had already gathered around the minivan so I figured a call to 911 was probably going to be the extent of my involvement.

I spent a few minutes watching the crowd growing, but soon tired of things and went back inside, when Lisa pointed out that the impact may have been captured on our surveillance system. As I played back the events recorded I found she was right, and while the action takes place at the very edge of the image (obstructed by the time stamp) you can clearly see that the two pedestrians were luckier than they likely imagined when they started their walk.

In the end I flagged down one of the Constables and advised them that one of my cameras had captured the impact, offering them the footage should they need it. They collected the footage (burned onto a CD for them, now that’s service) just before I called it quits with Mike for the night.

Lesson learned? Motor vehicle accidents are no substitute for terrorist hunting mayhem.

(The officers advised me that the driver was ok, seems everyone involved was just lucky enough)

I’m starting to feel better. My throat has been bothering me for the past eight days (Yes, on day 6 I caved and went to see a doctor getting the predicted prescription for anti-biotics). Now two days later things seem to be clearing up nicely although I’m still not certain as to whether the problem was viral and if the antibiotics had any effect at all.

But I digress.

This morning I found myself sitting in a striped car watching a bank machine for the majority of my day. It’s not a new hobby, but rather standard procedure when there is the slightest inclination of the potential for a possible problem with the alarm system. So I sat, and sat, and depleted the lunch and snack supplies I typically keep in my work bag. Worse, with the weather warming I drank my entire bottle of water. Pretty soon my throat was starting that irritating dull throb thing, and the only thing I had to mix the neo-citran into was my newly arrived coffee.

Don’t ever even think that mixing cherry neo-citran with a medium double-double is a good idea. It’s slightly more disgusting than you would think, and can’t be choked down no matter how desperate the situation has become.

Some of you may have figured this was just common sense, but it’s for those of you that don’t know any better that I post this warning.

I’ve never really been any sort of firearms elitist (ok, I’m a little anti-Glock, but that’s really just a side effect of the fanboy non-gunny following - truthfully I just find the grips uncomfortable, and pulling the trigger to disassemble it seems counter-intuitive). I like firearms for their function, their history and their asthetics (I do own some fugly firearms however, the sort that only a mother could love).

More than once I’ve come across gun owners who believed that their firearm of choice was the ultimate in shooty goodness, failing to own one of their chosen firearms was not merely an example of personal bad judgement but an affront to right minded firearms owners everywhere.

This has to make you laugh, even if just a little.

I mean a piece of metal comes out one end really, really fast. Forcing that piece of metal to strike a required point time after time is a function of the reliability and consistency of the firearm, and the skill of the shooter. As far as I’m concerned the best firearm is ALWAYS the one that you are sufficiently proficient with, I’m just assuming you’re not developing proficiency with a lemon.

For the record, I own no lemons. Do you?

Piet has made some significant changes to his blog and naturally I’ve started tampering with mine.

Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

[Edited to add: I’m going to try and break this theme, please let me know if you encounter any problems or errors]

We’re all still here.

At present the entire household is sick, again, knocking the pace of things down a few notches. There have been a few minor developments, the replacement of my 17″ CRT with a 15″ LCD I picked up for $85, the upgrade of our internet from highspeed “light” to normal highspeed and the accompanying upgrade of the modem and so forth. I’ve gutted our install of XP trying to remove some of the clutter, but may have to finally admit that it’s a lost cause and just format and reinstall everything. It needs to be done, as using the computer is a pain in the posterior right now, and makes even my limited blogging a serious nuisance.

As far as the projects go, we’ve a collection of wire, connectors and plans but no energy to combine them at this point.

Sound about right?

Who does, honestly?

Up until a few years ago I had a bank account with a fairly large bank. I was routinely stung for fees each month, and despite my complaints I entirely failed to close my account and move elsewhere. I had, in fact, gone so far as to review my statements and verify that in some instances I was paying $30 a month in assorted fees.

Truthfully I am not sure how much longer I would have put up with that, but fate intervened two years ago and forced me to act. You see late one night some techno-savvy minor criminal walked up to a bank machine, inserted a cloned copy of my bank card and deposited an empty envelope with $2,000 in invisible money and then withdrew $600 in cash.

While I was not immediately aware of the act itself, the consequences became readily evident. My bank card ceased to work, and the 24hour call center could give me NO explanation (except to contact my branch, thanks guys - note to Major-Mega Bank, just put a recording on that phone line and save yourself the expense of hiring drones to repeat a phrase). Checking my balance online showed a deposit and the subsequent withdrawls (interesting because I had a $100 withdrawl limit on my card, and yet the bad guys were able to take out $500 and then $100).

I contact my bank who told me my account would be locked until I provided a sworn affidavit attesting to the fact that I had nothing to do with the fraud and that I had not given my card and/or PIN to some other person (this affidavit to be sworn at my own expense and inconvenience). I got that done right quick, but it turns out they had misrepresented the speed with which they would conduct their own investigation. My account would have to remain frozen for a few more weeks.

Now, in this world of “pre-authorized payments” and ‘direct deposit” having a frozen bank account causes all sorts of problems, and I strove to explain this to the banking representative using progressively smaller words as I entirely failed to make any sort of impression on her.

Fine.

I had another bank account. My credit union account that hadn’t been used since it was opened. I fixed that right quick, moving my payments and payroll from the old account to new with a few phone calls. The credit union staff were extremely helpful, human even. There are NO service fees (or at least I haven’t paid any) and they appear to have a “no-drone” policy when it comes to staff (they deny this, but I’m sure it’s posted somewhere in the back).

I’ve stopped using my bank card for purchases, despite Interacs assertions it isn’t just like cash (unless you’ve even found that spending some cash could result in a stranger reaching into your wallet and taking more cash without your knowledge). I have two other accounts, both virtual, in which I divert a small amount of savings automatically (and for which I pay no fees either).

Do you deal with Mega-Uber-Bank or a smaller Credit Union (or is the mattress stuffed to overflowing)?

For the last few weeks since I bought my PS3 my sweetie Lisa has been made a widow. As I wile away the hours killing terrorists and exchanging witty remarks with both Mike and Piet, gettting dead in a variety of suitably stupid ways and generally having a great time.

Into this mix Ubisoft releases “Rainbow Six: Las Vegas 2″ offering improvements in all the right areas. I bought a copy as soon as it was released, and discovered that it was some sort of conspiracy between my sweety and the developers to seperate me from my alternate reality.

You see, the game sucks.

The graphics are improved, the online chat feature no longer befuddles my bluetooth into submission with each mission change, the single player play modes are vastly superior and experience points are accumulated in a manner that rewards participation rather than attendance.

There is only really one problem. The online play is almost entirely unplayable. Over the last 5 days I have successfully played online with Mike and Piet for less than an hour. Alternately I have spent around 5 or 6 hours TRYING to play with them and instead have repeated read informative error messages like “Failed to connect” and “Game session lost”, which has done little to salve my bloodlust.

Others have said it better than me, and I hope that Ubisoft are listening. To describe myself as supremely disappointed is perhaps understating things a shade.

Now, you regular visitor types have noticed my slacking off with these posters, and the only defence I can offer is that the last batch was so-so, and I don’t want to feel like I’m obligated to crank these out as they lack the quality of the early ones. So we’ll leave the posters on hold until I get a chance to sit down and crank some proper ones out.

My zombie movie watching has decreased significantly as I’ve been acquiring materials for my home wiring/cctv/intercom upgrade and haven’t been picking up movies as regularly as I used to.

On the plus side, on Piets advice I’ll be writing a bit about the zombocalypse precautions here at Casa Flexibility. Nothing major, our wee generator, the cameras, the wiring project as it progresses and so forth. I feel certain that my three readers will be positively glued to their monitors with anticipation.

-GRIN-

Hang in there. I am.

We own a house, we have a daughter and our finances are still almost entirely separated.

Sure, we have some of each others credit cards programmed into our accounts for ease of payment, but we don’t have direct access to each others money, and there is no joint account. We manage our own money, split the bills and maintain our own accounts.

Why is this?

Some of it’s habit, a good portion is expedience, but truth be told the bulk of it is adherence to the principle “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.“. The arrangement we have at present works fine. We looked into a joint account, but hit some stumbling blocks early on. Lisa deals with one of the “big” banks I despise, and I deal with a small credit union. Neither of our employers payroll departments can direct a percentage of our paycheques to a joint account and the remainder to our personal accounts (which would have been optimal), and finally it was just too much effort to implement any of the “compromise” options when, as I said before, the present arrangment works fine.

What sort of arrangements do you have with your spouse/partner/hamster/imaginary friend?