I knew it was only a matter of time before the financial clusterfuck of the century would affect me. Last week I received a letter from Citibank stating that the APR on my Citi Mastercard would rise from 7.99% to 19.99% effective immediately.

The first thing that came to mind was: WTF??!!? If they were to jack up the rates to maybe 9.99% or even 10.99%, whatever, that’s understandable. But to raise them by twelve freakin’ points??? What are they thinking? Did I miss a payment or something? Am I over my limit? Nope.. none of the above… this is nothing more than highway robbery.

To clarify, I absolutely hate credit cards, and believe that they are the cause of much of the trouble modern society has experienced over the last 20 years. People live way beyond their means, and cheap and easy credit facilitates this facade. The current economic crisis is simply the pimple coming to a head, caused by people spending more than they make and kicking the can down the road. Out of sight, out of mind. I rarely use my credit card, mostly when using it makes the purchasing process easy — like for plane tickets or hotel rooms or online purchases. I’ve always payed off my balance right away, and very rarely carry a balance. I’ve worked hard to establish a great credit score and am what I consider would be an ‘ideal’ customer to any credit card company. I refuse to be a slave to a creditor… I don’t like to be owned by anybody.

Anyway, I knew what this letter was all about and why my rates were being jacked up, but I wanted to call and hear straight from the horses mouth. The nice customer service lady verified what I already knew: because of the increasing number of defaults of their customers, the card companies are having to raise rates and lower limits to the rest of their customers in order to offset their losses. This is regardless of the quality of those customers. I asked her if there was any way for me to keep my current rate, seeing how I’ve never been late making a payment and have been a customer of theirs for over 10 years. She replied by saying, “unfortunately, this is a financial decision that has been made by management and I am unable to reverse it.” I retorted, “can you please inform your management that punishing your good customers because of the actions of your bad customers is going to cause you to lose all of your good customers.” She replied that they have been keeping track of the complaints and will act accordingly, whatever that means. Apparently they’ve been getting a lot of angry calls from customers about this.

Can someone please answer this for me: in what business, any business, if you were to penalize your best customers, would you be able to stay in business? If you owned a bar, and someone skipped out on their tab, would you turn around and ask your regular bar patrons to pay more for their drinks? No, because if you did, they would no longer be regulars. Say goodbye to your bar.

At the end of the day, I don’t really care. I pay off my balance right away, so the APR doesn’t affect me, but it’s the principle of the matter that pisses me off. These companies make billions, yet they can’t even afford to hire some mathematicians to come up with an algorithm that determines which customers to punish and which to reward. Decisions like this make me say: no wonder they’re all going bankrupt.

Let them fail. Citibank lost a good customer today. The free market has spoken!

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
– Groucho Marx

For some reason, FCKEditor automatically wraps any content entered into the textbox with a <p> tag. This can cause for some problems in your layout when you’re actually displaying the content. Instead of trying to fix this in your layout with CSS, there is a quick and easy way to turn the auto-wrap off in FCKEditor: Change the FCKConfig.EnterMode setting from ‘p’ to ‘br’. There are a few ways to handle this:

• Edit fckconfig.js:
  Change FCKConfig.EnterMode = 'p'; to FCKConfig.EnterMode = 'br';
• Change the setting programatically when you instantiate the object, like so (in PHP):
  <?php
include_once('fckeditor/fckeditor.php');
$oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor('description');
$oFCKeditor->BasePath = '/fckeditor/';
$oFCKeditor->Value = 'some text';
$oFCKeditor->Config['EnterMode'] = 'br'; // turn off auto <p> tags wrapping content
$oFCKeditor->Create();
?>

I prefer the latter way because you can do it on a page by page basis, and there’s no messing with FCK’s core JavaScript files.

So it’s been about 5 days since McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, and the majority of pundits, bloggers, and even myself still aren’t quite sure what to think about it. This could be due to the fact that she is holed up in a bunker avoiding answering questions about her positions and beliefs, but that’s OK, there is plenty of red meat to drive speculation.

As a junkie of both politics and hockey, I couldn’t have been happier coming across this post at the wonderful Five Thirty Eight blog that really ties everything together about the current state of the election by using a brilliant hockey analogy:

In the hockey analogy, Palin wouldn’t get within a thousand miles of an NHL All-Star Game because she’s not a scoring talent. She’s a role player, an emotion-rouser. Emotion messes with the chalkboard-drawn game plan and thus achieves a specific strategic objective. She can make game-changing agitation plays that rouse her home team and provoke the other side into counterattacks that – 100% of the time – end up punishing the team who hits back. Democrats would be smart to understand her as such, and I see a lot of reaction that doesn’t seem to grasp what Palin is doing and the value she’s providing. I see a lot of Democrats taking a lot of bait.

So what mold of hockey agitator does she fit into? Is she Esa Tikkanen, the Oiler’s agitator who trash-talked in three languages and opened up the ice for Gretzky and Kurri to dominate the opponent? Or is she Sean Avery, the annoying, victim-card playing, whiny little bitch who does nothing but piss off the opponent and bring glee to the home team? Will she drop the gloves and back up her trash talk with her fists, or will she simply wave her stick in the goalie’s face in a annoying fit of desperation? (Remember, though, that the Rangers scored after Avery got on Brodeur’s nerves – mission accomplished). Will the fracas stay between the enforcers, or will we see a bench clearing brawl? Only time will tell, but so far she’s acting like a Sean Avery — starting some shit, then turtling and hiding behind her teammates when it comes time to pay the piper.

What role does McCain play in this analogy? 538 says:

In the end a great hockey agitator who rouses both sides emotionally (and successfully gets the other team to lose focus) still needs the home team scoring talent to come through. Successful agitator Kris Draper of the Detroit Red Wings had the clutch Steve Yzerman for a lot of years. That worked. Detroit won Cups. They had parades.

So is McCain the Yzerman to Palin’s Draper? I doubt it. To me, McCain seems like the past-his-prime 45-year-old veteran hanging on to his legacy while attempting one last time to raise the Cup before retiring. Think Chris Chelios without the Cups. Or maybe he is Ray Bourque, traded to the other team in order to give him a chance at the Cup before retirement. I only hope that the Bourque analogy doesn’t play out,

There is plenty more political hockey goodness in the post at 538.com, so make sure to read it if you are a fan of either hockey, politics, or both.

Or maybe this is just an excuse for me to post some YouTube hockey videos. 🙂

Testing 123. Seems pretty cool. I can take photos with my phone while out and about and post them to my blog. Whhooooaaaa… The future is now!

So I finally finished up my stash of 40-cent stamps, but I still had a shitload of 1 and 2 cent stamps left over. Rather than let them go to waste, I decided to use them up, and here is the result:

Stamps - Click for Full-size Pic

(10) 1-cent stamps and (16) 2-cent stamps for a total of 42 cents. And the best part is, it actually arrived at the destination! I was a little worried that the USPS would reject it, but then again, I think that would be against the law.

The newly released AIM client for the iPhone is pretty cool, but it still needs some improvements to be a killer app. One issue I’ve come across is how to switch between various accounts. There doesn’t seem to be a way to store multiple AIM logins and switch between them quickly. The only way this seems possible to is edit your login infomation. The hardest part was figuring out where to edit the settings. This is because your AIM settings are stored inthe iPhone’s Settings page rather than within the AIM app. So here is how to switch accounts using the iPhone AIM App:

1. Click the “Home” button
2. Tap the “Settings” icon
3. Scroll down to the “AIM” section and tap it
4. Edit the “Screenname” and “Password” to match the account you want to log in
5. Tap “Settings” at the top to return to the Settings screen
6. Click the “Home” button to return to your Home Screen
7. Tap the “AIM” account to launch the app

That’s the only way I’ve found to switch accounts in the iPhone AIM App. Hopefully AIM will update their app to facilitate this process, and hopefully they will keep it within the AIM App. It seems silly to me that you have to quit the AIM App to edit your settings. It would be better if all AIM settings could be edited directly within the app.