indiboi.com

On Sunday a situation arose that prompted an operating system restoration for the web server. Thankfully the technicians were available for immediate assistance and the restore was completed within about two hours of the request. It then took several more hours to restore all the websites. Monday was almost completely spent troubleshooting random difficulties, but thankfully by Tuesday things started to settle down. There are still a couple little things that need to be worked on, but they’re all fairly low priority. Most are things that I never, apparently, felt the need to backup, oops.

To make the situation a little worse, it had been oppressively warm up until the last couple of days, the very days that I was completely burdened with work. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to get out, do a bike ride, and relax a little.

About a month ago I received the letter from one of my credit card issuing banks that they were going to rate jack me and that there was nothing I could do about it; even if I rejected the terms they’d take effect. They also only provided about a week to before the new rate would take effect.

Interestingly enough the interest rate didn’t change on the next statement.

Today I received a post card reminding me that I could write to find out why they’d do such a thing, but additionally now gave me the option to call to request the letter of excuses. They also extended the deadline into the middle of next month. The best news of all though is that if I would reject the terms now I’d be able to keep my current terms.

The hilarious little post script on that card said “on a completely unrelated topic” and mentioned the Credit CARD Act, providing a link to more information. It’s hilarious because everything they had been doing thus far is in violation of the new law and the relevant portions (advanced notice and opt-out) conveniently just took effect this month. The CCARDA is related to every aspect of that little post card!

I called, of course, and closed the account to reject the terms. The representative asked me if I was aware of the benefits of card membership, I simply informed her that I was aware of the benefits of not paying 25% interest.

I have ~45GB of space left on my four drive RAID5. This makes me nervous. Funny though, since my first computer had a 200MB drive, oh how things change!

My array is four 250GB drives, originally having been three, but I grew it a bit more than a year ago. When I set the array up each of those drives cost more than a one terrabyte drive costs now, but it was 2005.

Upgrading my RAID is a nerve wracking sort of thing, you see, because purchasing four drives at once is a pretty huge expense, for me anyway, and that’s really the only way to do it right. It’ll also be nerve wracking in the regard to time consumption, as each of those four drives will need to be individually failed, replaced, and the array rebuilt between each drive replacement. Then the array will need to be grown! There’s also the issue of backing up should something heinous happen, which I didn’t do when I added the fourth drive. I’m not inclined to do it this next time either, simply because it’s even more added expense.

Of course, given the current spending “freeze” thanks to the need to zero out credit card balances, this sort of expenditure is going to have to wait quite a bit more time. I think I need to sort through the array and weed out things that have become deprecated and have no future utility.

Warning, the fullsize image is ~400KB.

I made the decision that having that reserve cash sitting in my checking account doing nothing for me, outside of an emergency, was worse than using it to significantly pay down debt that now has an absurd interest rate. I now half expect that decision to explode in my face, but it has the potential to save me gobs of money by slicing away a decently large chunk of balance subject to the new rate.

The next order of business, concurrent with continuing to pay down the high interest balance to zero, is to put a cushion on my other balance carrying card so that it looks better to them, if it matters, which is difficult to say anyway since as I mentioned, that didn’t seem to matter much this time.

I don’t like the credit rating game at all, especially now that maintaining perfect payment history everywhere and otherwise abiding by the terms everywhere still subjects you to what is essentially a default interest rate at the issuing banks whim.  It appears I have some work to do, apparently I’ve made mistakes without realizing it, and since not playing the silly credit score games is now costing me.

I checked all three of my credit reports using annualcreditreport.com, all three are clean as a whistle; nothing negative and my reported utilization is still at basically half. The fuckers at the issuing bank must just be getting in their jabs before they’re not allowed to anymore without showing justification, or afraid of what I’ll do since I have slightly more available credit than before. It’s disgusting how you’re screwed whether you use the credit or not.

Oh well, I’ll get this paid off as quickly as I can, don’t really have any other options at this point. I haven’t called them yet, but the final result after being on hold and talking to someone who has barely any grasp of English isn’t likely to be positive anyway. I won’t continue reward sleazy behavior with money paid via interest on additional debt and as such I’ll definitely never use the card again.

Now I just need to pray that my only other balance carrying card can also be paid down before they decide to put me at what is essentially default, too, just for the lulz. I keep a relatively large balance in relationship to my credit line on that card because the interest rate is attractive. I guess that’s the game, they lure you with low rates, and then at random double or triple it just because now that you’ve used the credit they’ve given you they’re now afraid you won’t pay it back. It’s very worrisome as apparently this particular bank has randomly pushed millions of their customers off their nice and low fixed rates (like mine) into the 20+ range, again, just for the lulz. To make matters potentially worse, because of that nice interest rate I have not maintained the sort of credit line cushion on that account, unlike all of my others, though it doesn’t appear to have helped much for the account currently giving me grief with the new 25%!

I thought I was being “responsible” with my credit!