The Boschmans Account

If you have been following the news, you’ve probably heard or read about CardSystems, the payment processing company that’s been amiss in following procedures after processing online payments. Instead of discarding the confirmation codes (on the back of your credit card) and expiry dates for each credit card transaction, they kept them on file. In a text file, that was accessible from the web. At first glance, 40 million cardholders may have been affected.

It seems that it is even worse now : CardSystems seems to have had troubles since last year instead of only the last month !

Sometimes I wonder how companies that do stupid things like this are able to survive.

What I am wondering about is when the shit will hit the fan. I mean : here is a clear case of company mismanagement that has affected millions users worldwide, and they get off with a slap on the wrist to do better next time ? EXCUSE ME ?

According to the Standaard, about 16,000 Belgian card users are affected. What are we, the affected masses of consumption users, waiting for ? Let’s start a lawsuit or 100 or so and sue these suckers out of existence ! It’s not because American data privacy laws are lax that we should let them get away with it – heck, our European privacy laws are way more stringent than theirs, we should be able to get them to appear before the European justice !!

It just makes my blood boil.

We’re actually doing better than I thought we would be doing – as pointed out by the fact that I can start up my pc and can write blog entries and even -Caramba!- play Guild Wars for half an hour sometimes.

Sam can definitely cry, but he seems to be a lot calmer than Tom. Perhaps calmer is not the right word, he just seems to be able to sleep better. Tom was a very notorious bad sleeper when he was that age. Sam seems to sleep rather better and longer! Last night he slept more than 6 hours, which helped Dolores to recover from the brink of sleep-deprivation.

He does have a lot of trouble with cramps, though, after feeding. Takes a while for those to dissipate (usually by dissipating in his pampers).

Tonight I was watching the telly with Sam in the crook of my arm and suddenly I felt ‘watched’. It was Sam who was looking at me very intensely.

Probably checking me out, already.

Sam and Mom have now arrived back home. I volunteered to stay with Sam downstairs so that Dolores could sleep for a few hours.
Phew – the boy can cry ! Luckely he also slept a bit, and Mom came back feeling much rested.

My eyes are a bit ‘sandy’ though. And this is only the beginning…

Today at 11:20 am our son Sam was born, brother to Tom. Weighing in at 3,360 kg and measuring 51 cm, our new-born is already actively seeking his food, aka mom’s nipple.

It was a normal but very long – almost 13 hours – delivery ! Mom is doing fine, after an enormous effort like that she is doing ok !!!!

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Everything fine. Nothing to tell. Nothing Happening…

Dolores is doing well. So well in fact that she will deliver normally. So we’re waiting.

Waiting can be damn frustrating sometimes.

Waiting…

Tonight, after backupping all of my data, I upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5.1 – I unzipped the new files over the old ones, and immediately got a crash of my site.

Luckely, it was just BAStats (a very good plugin that generates statistics on your site visitors) that needed to be upgraded – same deal, unzip over existing plugin files, and hops – all ok.

The upgrade took me all of 10 minutes. Cool, even with the unexpected crash thrown in.

Guild Wars is really neat. To succesfully complete the bigger quests, you are forced to group together with other players. This promotes a group feeling.

For example, in pre-sear Ascalon (before the invasion), to open the north gate, you need another player – one player needs to position himself in front of the gate while the other one goes to the top and pull the lever. It is timed to be impossible to pull the lever and run down to enter the gate. Clever !

A week ago I quested with a Greek guy whose LineAge 2 clan was preparing to move to Guild Wars – he was the advance party. Two days ago I played with a Dutchman, today with someone from Sweden. Diverse nationalities with divers ages ! The youngest I played with was 16, the oldest 30.

It’s fun virtually meeting and chatting to different people from different countries. And since you’re playing the game, you have the same interest, you can always talk about the game itself as a conversation breaker.

Most of the people I’ve met are nice, and in return I try to help out where I can, answering question on quests and dispensing advice, but of course there are some annoying people as well. Especially those that shout : SELLING AXE DMG 9-12 ! and repeating that shout every .34 seconds (they get around the excessive spamming rule by tacking on an exclamation mark every time).

But if you can’t stand them, just change your district or go do a quest. Chances are you won’t meet that particular person again. If worse comes to worst, add them to your ‘ignore’ list.

However, Guild Wars could do with some extra features for this area :
– you need to add your friends to a friends list by typing in the name; you can’t just right-click and select from a little menu : ‘add this person to my friend list’.
– they could use the same menu for ignoring people !

It IS functional, but it seems curiously unfinished. I suppose that gives them room for improvement, the game itself is swell.