Well, today I saw a groundhog

Aug. 9th, 2025 01:08 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
And then tonight as I took out the trash I saw where it's evidently been burrowing, a big hole directly under the retaining wall to our yard.

Now what?

I think I just saw a groundhog

Aug. 8th, 2025 06:00 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Crossing the street right in front of my house!

I didn't see his shadow, so I have no idea if the current [insert whatever] will be long or short.

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Betrayed by Labi Siffre

Aug. 7th, 2025 09:44 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Betrayed

To despise your government
To distrust your government
To be unable to respect your government
To know the leader of your country has contempt
for the people of your country
To be angered
not because it’s “Not in my name”
but because it IS in my name
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
First we've got Bride of Chaotica!, in which Kate Mulgrew enthusiastically chews the scenery. Mmm! Part of a balanced breakfast!

Also, she's pretty judgey about Tom's extracurriculars. E remarked that her daily coinflip must've landed on "Mom", and I can't say she's wrong.

It's a fun breather episode so long as you forget the fact that dozens of photonic aliens died before anybody on Voyager even realized they were at war. Whoops! Also, they spend almost the entire episode mere inches away from a shipwide epidemic of some sort of gross gastrointestinal illness, but nobody seems to care about that either, it's all played for laughs.

Then this episode I completely forgot where Tuvok and Tom are crash-landed on a time displaced planet for several months or a year with a woman who is deeply crushing on Tuvok. Tom, for whatever weird reason of his own, is adamant that the correct course of action is for Tuvok to get in touch with his emotions and just go to bang city with this woman. E and I agreed that the actually correct and logical course of action was for Tuvok to give Tom that punch in the face that he is just begging for, but for some reason Tuvok refrained. Seriously, I have no idea what bug flew up Tom's butt this episode, but he was so fucking obnoxious for no reason at all. Maybe, Tom, you should get in touch with your emotions before you start lecturing the Vulcan about his. I genuinely have no idea what his deal was or was supposed to be.

On a very different note, I don't know if anybody can make it to London who cares, but Camlann is doing a live prequel episode in September. If you know a bit more about Arthuriana than I do you probably would like the audiodrama a lot. Or even if you only know as much as I do or a little less. The music is amazing.

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Happy Civil Holiday!

Aug. 4th, 2025 09:59 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Living as I do in Ontario, a province run for and by assholes, the Civic Holiday is an "optional" holiday that employers may either observe or spend beating their employees with a stick no thicker than Andre the Giant's thumb.

Clarke Award Finalists 2008

Aug. 4th, 2025 09:42 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2008: Norovirus is a smash hit with three million-plus Britons, an avoidable market collapse relieves boredom, and Boris Johnson’s election as mayor of London surely is not a harbinger of dark days to come.

Poll #33463 Clarke Award Finalists 2008
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19


Which 2008 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Black Man by Richard Morgan
8 (42.1%)

The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
7 (36.8%)

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
7 (36.8%)

The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter
0 (0.0%)

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
3 (15.8%)

The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua
1 (5.3%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2008 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Black Man by Richard Morgan
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua

Yesterday ended in a headache

Aug. 4th, 2025 09:10 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Lowkey enough that I felt bad complaining about it, but bad enough that I couldn't focus and had to go to bed early, and then I slept through half of today as well and only woke when I got hungry enough.

So, yeah.

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[personal profile] siderea
I finally got around to pursuing a replacement of what we in the Bostoniensis Household refer to as the Lorem Ipsum card, which was itself a fiasco.

(Recap: PayPal, an organization full of people who are not as smart as they think they are and blessed with perhaps the deepest marketing reach in the US into the small business market for financial services, decided to offer to its business customers the greatest credit card deal of their lifetimes, unlimited 2% cash back on all purchases, and the market responded with all the decorous restraint of a river full of pirhana given a whole cow. Apparently we collectively took PayPal for all they were worth – I heard of small tech companies running their cloud services bills to the tune of five figures a month across on the card – until sometime in Sept 2024, when the grown-ups at PayPal discovered they were hemorrhaging money, and very abruptly shut the party down and exit the business credit card market all together. The hard inquiry on my credit report lasted longer than the actual card did. At the time, it was pretty upsetting, but now it's just hilarious.)

A couple weeks ago I decided to apply for an American Express Blue Business Cash card, which has no fees and has a cash back offer. I have to say, absolutely all the customer service agents – five now – I've spoken to have been exemplary. Yeah, alas, that's foreshadowing.

Unfortunately their IT services are demented. First there was the fact they sent me a notification saying my application had been, and I quote, "DENIED", with a link to find out why, and when I followed the link, I discovered my application hadn't been denied: it said that they couldn't run a credit check on me because my credit reports were locked (true), so I need to go unlock the specified credit report and let them know so they could continue processing my application. So I called in and did it in real time with an agent on the line and was approved on the spot. Fabulous. "Okay, you will be getting your card at your home address in three to five business days." "Uh, it's a business card, could you send it to my business address?" "Oh, no, it won't let me send your initial card to any other than your home address." "*sigh* Very well."

My new Amex card arived at my home on like the 30th or 31st, while I had my nose to the grindstone writing. Friday the 1st, I opened the envelope to find my new card, and then to activate it at the website.

I couldn't get it off the paper.

Or rather: in attempting to get the card off the paper, I wound up with a layer of glue and paper stuck on the back of the card, such that I could not read any but the first five digits of the card number, and the CVV was completely covered. It was like the paper was superglued on. It was annealed.

So I called Amex, and discovered that you can't get through the phone tree to a a customer service agent about an extant account unless you can prove you're the owner of the account with, yes, the CVV. Which I can't read. Because there's a half thickness of paper glued across it.

Also, you can't set up an account on their website without the full card number, which I also couldn't read, because there was a half thickness of paper glued across it.

So I called the number for applying for a card in the first place, and threw myself on the mercy of the sales agent, explaining why I was calling them instead of regular customer service: I can't get to customer service without knowing the CVV, and the problem I need help with is that I can't read the CVV. "I know I shouldn't be laughing," he said, "But this is kind of hilarious." He kindly set up a three-way call with customer service so I didn't wind up wandering unattended in a phone tree maze, and once I was talking to the nice people who could replace my card, he ducked out.

The customer service agent and I then discovered that Amex doesn't let you replace a card, for some reason, until an account is 10 days old. My account was, as of that moment, nine days old. She gave me a direct number to business card services in the hopes I could avoid the phone tree of doom; the agent also gave me some pointers about pressing zero to get through it, which trick I had tried on the other phone tree and it hadn't worked.

Saturday I was busy sleeping. Today, I called the phone number I had been given for business card services, and despite the phone tree trying to authenticate with the CVV, I managed to confuse the robot enough it finally found me a human. I got to explain all over again about the disfigured card, and they transferred me again to card replacement, who put the order right in.

I observed to the agent that the issue with the glue and the card might have something to do with them sending it to my home, where I have a black mailbox on a south-facing side of the building, and we had been having a heatwave, and maybe they would like to send my replacement card to my business address, where the mailboxes are indoors in air conditioned comfort? She agreed that would be a much better plan.

So now I await my new Amex. It's a 2% cash back on purchases offer, but only up to the first $50k of purchases, so companies can't use their AWS bill to bleed them dry, so maybe it will stick around a little longer than PayPal's Lorem Ipsum card.

Speaking of credit card offers possibly too good to last, for any of you sad you missed out on getting your own bite of the cow:

I recently discovered that AAA – yeah, the American Automotive Association, the roadside assistance people – has a really great credit card offer. (This may be region specific – I'm in their "Northeast" region.) Their Daily Advantage Visa Signature card has 5% cash back on groceries, no annual fee. Only the first $10k of grocery purchases per year, and then 1% thereafter – which is good, actually: it has a chance of sticking around. But that does mean up to $500/year in cash back on grocery purchases. Given what's happening to the price of food and paper goods, having a permanent 5% discount on groceries is freaking fantastic. It also has a bunch of other features (3% cash back on gasoline or electric car charging stations, e.g.) and 1% cash back on everything else (no limit).

The interest rate is usurious, so under no circumstances do you ever want to carry a balance on it. But if you are the sort of person who can reliably always pay off their balance every month on time: permanent 5% off groceries!

And, no, apparently you do not need to be a AAA member to get the card. (Though we are.)

We got one and I just finished reading the fine print. Seems reasonable. We don't know that our grocery delivery service will be recognized by the card company (it's Comenity Capital Bank under the hood) as a grocery store, but the service is run by a grocery store, and the charges have appeared on the previous card under the name of the grocery store, so here's hoping. We'll know later this week – our next grocery order is for Wednesday, and the charge typically shows up a day or two after that.

Also, we've never had a card with Comenity, so we don't really know how their IT and customer service are. The web interface for account management is very nice. We'll report back as we know more.

I'm not generally in the practice of recommending credit cards, and I can't wholly recommend this one, having not really exercised it yet to discover its landmines. But what's going on here in the Bostoniensis household is that we're cashing in on our good credit scores to take advantage of financial offers that pinch our pennies for us, as a form of hardening our household financially against inflation and other future economic vicissitudes. This has generally meant getting credit with better terms (either lower rates or higher rewards), and opening High-Yield Savings Accounts for our nest egg and my estimated tax payments as a self-employed person.

Given that eating food is a pretty universal custom and groceries are getting scary-expensive, I thought I would mention for anyone who wants to do likewise, and is in a position to do so.

The shooting was on Monday

Aug. 3rd, 2025 06:36 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
How're you gonna send your "thoughts-and-prayers" email on Friday? At this point, silence would've been better. (I have no idea how I got on the mayor's email list.)

Speaking of the shooting, my aunt texted me to check in. She, uh, she called me by the name I tried out for like five minutes in middle school. I have no idea how she remembered that. I barely remember that. But at least she didn't ask after Mommy's health this time.

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james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Poll #33455 Books Received, July 26 to July 31
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

The Laundry Roleplaying Game: Operative’s Handbook by by David F Chapman, Calum Collins, Christopher Colston, Alister Davison, Michael Duxbury, Warren Frey, Gareth Hanrahan, and Elaine Lithgow et al (Q4, 2025)
19 (40.4%)

The Laundry Roleplaying Game: Supervisor’s Guide by Anthony Boyd, Greg Buchanan, David F Chapman, Calum Collins, Christopher Colston, Alister Davison, Michael Duxbury, Warren Frey, Gareth Hanrahan, Derek Johnston, and Elaine Lithgow et al (Q4, 2025)
19 (40.4%)

You do know at least one person in the group needs both books, right?
24 (51.1%)

Some other option (see comments)
2 (4.3%)

Cats!
42 (89.4%)

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