Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

So I decided I would go out jogging this evening, right? It was about 11:40 PM when I left, and after about a 3/4 mile of running I passed by a car with four young black dudes in it sitting on the side of the street doing nothing. For some reason they thought it would be amusing to make as much noise as possible at me as I passed by, which I took in stride. After 1.5 miles on my way back, these guys were still sitting in the same spot… making the same noises at me. So, I keep running and throw the usual NY shut up signage at them, which incites them to follow me. Four dudes. In a car.

I’m thinking, “Yay what a lovely day for a drive by” as one of them waves something shiny, but not a knife and way to small to be a gun in the air, and I duck down an alley and wait for about five minutes in someone’s backyard until they disappear. While holding a firm grip on a borrowed but heavy shovel. Better safe than sorry, right?

I carefully scout out the alley and surrounding area and slowly emerge, finding them quite gone. I see quite a few patrol cars in the area, and a special tactical unit mobile base truck (it sorta looks like a firetruck) zipping around, so I feel a bit safer. When I get within a half mile of my house, the tac unit pulls over and the cop says, “Hey, were those guys in the car chasing you?” So I gave him the story, couldn’t tell him who they were, but that there were “four cats” as he put it in the vehicle, told him one of them flashed something at me, but I didn’t see it clearly enough to tell what it was.

Turns out the cops saw me getting pursued and duck down the alley and lost me! I guess if waiting five minutes without moving is good enough to lose cops its good enough to lose thugs, heh. Scary day. I don’t think I can sleep tonight!

Wendy, hugs plz!!

Snapped this in HDR, it came out pretty nicely:

After late night fun with hydrogen peroxide bleaching kits, I ended up looking like this:

No laughing, please!

A few “interesting” transactions showed up on my debit card in the last few days, but they’re not mine:

Pending POS DEBIT OXFORD INDUSTRIES INC SAN DIEGO CA $12.21
04/03/2007 LOWE’S #464 WINCHESTER K 04/01LOWE’S #4 $759.15
04/02/2007 WAL-MART #0702 WINCHESTE 03/31WAL-MART $1,232.59

Yes, for a grand total of $2,012.95 there were a series of transactions over the last two days on my checking account. I didn’t notice at first because I was in the middle of paying bills, which is a $2,000 to $4,000 process (rent, utilities, credit card over the last month, student loans, etc), but then I thought the account balance appeared lower than normal so I logged on and found these.

The kind of debit card fraud is interesting. This isn’t a “got your number” somewhere fraud, it’s credit card cloning. Someone actually walked into a store with some kind of copy of my card and pin, and bought stuff. POS (Point of sale) debit indicates that.

Update: I received my refund today (4/11/2007) just one week later. That’s fast!

Update 2: There are all kinds of credit card schemes every day, but it might have been this NYC restaurant scam which snared me. I’ll never know.

I’ve got taxes to do, and I’m not exactly sure what the difference is between H&R’s Taxcut and Intuit’s Turbotax. As far as I can tell, they’re both roughly the same price, and allow you to electronically turn in your 2006 federal and state income taxes:

The confusion becomes worse when you realize that there are a number of “free filing” sites, as well:

• Tax ACT: Your totally FREE tax software
• eSmart Tax: Online tax filing software

All of this is confused by the large numbers of SEO spammers cluttering up search results in Google. I’ve done taxes before, but tax software should exist to make my life easier, not more difficult. Buying tax software should be like buying an operating system. Clearly, buying Vista is a bad idea. Buying Taxcut? We can’t be so sure.