Credit Card Services

Calls that make you madYou’ve probably gotten phone calls from one of these scammers. The ones where you get a recording telling you it’s an important message about your credit card and they want to lower your interest rate. Maybe you never listen that long, I know I never did.

When one number called so often and for so long that I started to recognize it on the called ID, I starter to pay attention. I Googled the number and found dozens of web sites about these phone scams and that many people are receiving the same calls. What are they all about?

The consensus is that they are bottom-feeding scammers out to get your personal financial information for illicit purposes. At the very least they provide a worthless service that they charge either your credit card or phone bill for. Not one poster had any information that could be construed as a legitimate purpose for the calls. In fact, it is all but impossible to reach a real representative of any of these companies.

Here’s what I found out through repeated searches on many of these numbers that called me and sorting through the online complaints sites. Continue Reading…

I made a new friend yesterday

We were on the way home from NYC, my son Frank, his Girlfriend Beth and I and we decided to stop to see the Delaware Water Gap. We weren’t real clear what a Water Gap was, so it seemed like it might be fun to find out.

We got off Route 80 and went onto the local roads. We went through a small town and saw some Trolley Tours. That might be a way to see this Gap thing. We looked around and decided not to take the tour, but were told of several overlooks up the road where we could see the sites. We went off to the scenic overlooks.

Continue Reading…

First impressons of Spotify

We’ve heard a lot of buzz about Spotify, the Swedish music-subscription service that’s just become available here in the US. They are rolling it out gradually, in a Google-like way. You can short-cut the process if you want to jump right up to any of the pay versions, they’ll take your money right away.

I requested an invitation only a few days ago and received it last night. I’ve been playing with it today. I’m sure there is a lot I haven’t discovered about it yet, but I thought I might mention what I have learned so far. Continue Reading…

Snow in April

Snow in AprilWelcome to Spring in WNY. It snowed today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon looked like this.

Try as it might, it couldn’t stick and didn’t accumulate except on the furniture. It made an interesting day, had it been just rain, it would have been depressing. But snow made it a bit interesting.

It wasn’t really cold, either. I went outside several times with just a sweatshirt and worked in my garage for a few minutes in my shirtsleeves.

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