Rocky Road

On Monday I took out my "rock collection" to re-photograph, since I was not pleased with the last two attempts, and had a sudden flash of inspiration. And I want to sell some of them on eBay, which means having good photos.

It took a couple of hours to shoot all 165 stones, and they looked okay in the little preview window, but when I slurped them into the PC they were unacceptable. Some were out of focus, some blurred by motion (the tray table I was using was not solid enough). The lighting was better than the last time, but still not good enough.

So I will try again this weekend. Last night I took a few minutes to see if I could tape a flashlight to the lens to give me the light I needed, but that didn't work, since the light pointed above the focus point of the lens. I would have to rig some sort of cage to make that work, and a cage would probably get in the way of focusing.

If I'm lucky, the sun will come out Saturday or Sunday afternoon - that would be the ideal lighting. I'm on call this weekend, so it's a good time to do something which keeps me at home. Bummer, because Saturday night is the annual NorCal Peace Corps Association meeting in SF, and I really wanted to go.

Boo B of A!

I tried to use my Bank of America ATM card at Safeway tonight, and it said "Invalid Account".  Three times. So I used a credit card instead, which I didn't really want to do since it was only $5.

Got home, phoned the number to check balances, punched in my account and it told me all was well, there was plenty of $$ in there.

But then I fired up Quicken to download my transactions, and B of A gave an error on both checking and savings. Next, I tried online banking, and it too said the account was invalid, and gave a number for me to call.

The canned voice at the end of the line said there was a 14-minute wait for a human. Which is when I remembered a letter I got in the mail from B of A yesterday, which said there was some possibility someone had sniffed some B of A account information, but I stopped reading at the line which said
    
"Having Thoroughly reviewed your accounts, we see no evidence that your accounts or personal information have been misused in any way."

I dug the letter out of the garbage and read the rest of the paragraph. It said that they were canceling my card anyway "as an additional precaution" -- as of yesterday. A new card will be in the mail in 5 days. The block on online banking should only last one day, the letter said.

Now, this makes no sense at all. I don't use my ATM card for online banking, I use the account number and routing number. The only thing I can think of is someone is making counterfeit ATM cards, so they are un-linking the ATM card numbers from the actual account numbers.

Slightly inconvenient, but if online banking is working tomorrow, then I don't have to worry about any bills not getting paid, or transferring $$ from savings to cover the rent.

Edit follow-up: Online banking worked this morning (2/23), as advertised. And following the instructions of the letter I changed all my auto-bill accounts to use my AAA Visa card or the direct checking account number instead of the check card number. Except PG&E which wouldn't show me the page for changing my billing info.