Posts Tagged ‘Money’

Welcome to the real world

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

$24.68

That’s what we have to live on until next week Thursday.

Why is it everytime I feel like I can relax, the world comes crashing down again? I feel really guilty about taking the summer off now. I have the feeling I should have kept the pressure up through the summer, no matter how I felt.

The mortage is going to be very late; hopefully not to the point we default on it. Mom’s going to have to call monday and beg for forgiveness. I wasn’t expecting them to cash our lot rent check so fast; so fast we ended up with a $66 overdraft fee coming out of mom’s check.

I’m nearly out of test strips, but I can’t afford to buy any more. I spotted a worm in Luna’s poop, but we can’t do anything about it right now. “We can’t do anything about it” seems to be the key phrase.

*sigh* Welcome to the real world, I guess.

My summer so far

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

So far, my summer seems to be going well. I’m partipating in the eFiction Project actively for the first time in a long while, though probably not as much as I could be. (Actually, I’m probably being downright annoying.)

One of the large sites must have pissed people off again, my site has had a massive surge in visits and new authors. I keep checking my stats, but I can’t tell what site is referring them. I’m actually very glad I brought in all those extra moderators. I’m used to the sudden hush the RL/AR used to get; all this activity is a tab unnerving. ^^;

eFiction 3.0 is going to be very very cool, but I’m dreading switching us over. I’ve added so many extras there is going no easy way to upgrade. ^^;; But… ooh, it is awesome. There’s just so many new things in this release, it’s just going to be pure awesomeness. (Is that even a word??)

My Kiwi layout has hit a bump, since I don’t remember what I wanted to do with it anymore. I can’t find my original design sketch either, so I can check my plan. XD I might just trash it and work on Green tea instead.

While I’m thinking about it, I need up re-do my blog. I’ve begun posting my eFiction junk to it, which is kind of cluttering it. I also want it to have a more professional look, since I’m going to put a portfolio and my resume on it. (I probably should clean up the language too *grimace, laugh*)

For the first time in years, we have a garden. It’s nothing special, just some tomatos, strawberries, and some flowering plants that I’ve planted in pots so if I need to move again they can come with me.

Local news has me feeling a little more optimistic:

Google to bring 1000 jobs to Michigan

LANSING — High tech – and high-tech jobs — hits Michigan with Tuesday’s announcement that Google will open a facility in Ann Arbor.

At a morning press conference, Governor Granholm officially unveiled the project that will add 1,000 jobs to Michigan’s workforce.

The new facility involves Google’s AdWords unit, which handles “pay-per-click” advertising to Google’s users. To sweeten the deal, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation gave Google a high-tech business tax credit worth more than $38 million over 20 years. (more…)

I sincerely don’t want to move to Ann Arbor, that’s way too close to one of my mom’s aunts… who is just way too much like Sheba for my tastes. BUT if it means I can get a good job doing what I enjoy doing, then by the Gods of warfare — I’ll do it! (What Karla doesn’t know won’t hurt her me.)

Other than that, we’re holding on. Mom blew a tire last night on her way to work and had to get a ride from our neighbor, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The local tire shop quoted her about $80 for a new tire plus installation, but then the owner decuded ti only charge her $50. ^___^

DTE Energy keeps calling, demanding their money. Maryann still wants her $600 back, plus we keep getting letters from collection agencies for some of the bills we incured trying to get out of Alpine Medows… so we’re not out of the woods yet. The pressure has just been let up a bit.

I’m trying to work with a lady who bought one of my books off from Amazon.com. There were 4 audio chapter review CDs that came with the book and I said they were included in my post. I remember putting them in the envelope with the book and so does mom and Jasson, but apparently the CDs didn’t make it there. The envelope was apparently intact, so they didn’t fall out. *sighs* Being good, I retraced my steps to see if I lost them on the way to the post office. Nothing in lost and found. I called the publisher and distribution center to see if could buy new copies, they’re only part of a bundle deal.

I’m more than a little dubious about the whole thing. First of all, she waited a month to e-mail me and is now taking anywhere from 5 days to weeks to write me back each time. She says she absolutely has to have those CDs for her class. I’ll admit that they were helpful in allowing me to study during the eviction and while moving, but they weren’t that helpful nor essential. I have no idea what’s going on. I finally offered her a refund and it’s going on about two weeks since I last heard from her.

Mom has come right out and wondered if she isn’t trying to weasel copies of the CDs out of me so she can have two. She’s also wondered if they CDs aren’t/weren’t in the bottom of the envelope. *shrugs* Her guess is as good as mine.

I swear, if I sell anything else on Amazon — they only thing I’m writing is the book’s condition. No information on infotrac or anything extra that comes with it. And then I’m going to mummify the damned thing so nothing falls out.

Anyroad, that’s my summer so far. Much love to everyone.

Sigh

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

*hugs* Thanks everyone for your support.

Well, my fight with Netbunch is getting me nowhere. They finally canceled my account after I wrote them and informed them that I would be reporting them to the BBB.

I am apparently reached the end of what I can do with them. In my first letter, I informed them that I had written and specifically requested that my account be canceled. Three e-mails later, I’m told that they’re “sorry” (bullshit) that my account was auto-billed. Did I tell them to cancel my account? *head-desk* YES, you idiot! I told you three months ago to cancel my account! I wrote them back and informed them that yes, it had, gave the support ticket number, and the person’s name who responded.

And that is it. They stopped responding. I swear, this is shades of AOL.

I suppose it’s officially time to begin my dialogue with the BBB and my credit card. yay. really. i’m really, super excited. …*sigh* I hate phone menus…

I probably should just buckle down and get an account with Paypal so I can begin accepting donations.

I suppose I should expect this, if you do a web search on Netbunch or Webhostplus and you get tons of results from people like me who have been burned by them. That’s probably one of the reasons they keep changing names every year or so. (My first suspicion being that they’re doing it to try and hide from the BBB/Attourney General due to the number of complaints they keep getting.)

Either way, avoid Netbunch / Webhostplus / Mesopia like the plague. If they buy out your hosting company, find a new one QUICK. They aren’t a good (or particularly safe) company to go with.

The hell!?

Monday, June 19th, 2006

*growls* Remember three months ago when I moved my server? Remember how I said I canceled my services with that old host?

Guess what? I just checked my old Jinxandjedi yahoo account where I used for my old domain’s contact e-mail. I was thinking I could safely let it die. When they answered my cancelation e-mail, I removed all my credit card and contact information. They didn’t need it anymore.

Instead, I checked it this afternoon and guess what I discovered?

Note the date that I indicate with the blue arrow; they’ve been charging our credit card for three months. What’s more, they charged me $12 for renewing my domain which they don’t even have anymore! All my credit card information was back on the account, even though I deleted it. But for some strange reason they had my address mostly correct too and I didn’t even give it to them!!! (They had me listed as #17; I’m at #47)

As soon as I calm down I’m writing a complaint to the BBB and seeing if the bank can refuse any and all future charges from those assholes. Originally, I wasn’t even going to bother, but now I’m absolutely livid!

Life and all

Sunday, December 4th, 2005

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I'll be glad when this semester is over, but I'm not looking forward to next semester either. I'm going to have about $400 - $500 worth of books I'll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I'd really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I'm probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.

Just Breathe

Friday, April 29th, 2005

Okay, I did a stupid thing just now… for the first time in months, I looked at the checking account. It holds a grand balance of $34.55 until mom’s paycheck registers.

So, I’m feeling a bit panicked right now. -_-;; I keep telling myself that we’re fine, but the panic is still there. Once mom’s paycheck registers, we have $50 going out to the power company, $56 for cable, and then $405 going out for rent. Yeah… so no more looking at our account balance until I get through college.

In happier news, Theresa had her baby. ^_^ So lots of Congrats and hugs go out to Theresa, Dan, and Jeremy.

Also, yes – I got into college. Good news, full funding. Bad news, extra money for the new computer won’t come until June or July. But everything else looks covered. So hopefully by next year, I should have my degree.

So anyway, I’m going to go try to calm down and think of ways for me to get my domain renewed and transferred.

2 out of 3

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005

I have a job! ^____^ Walmart hired me! I have to go for a Drug Test tomorrow morning, but that should be no problem. Though I do feel kind of bad for making Poppa drive me out there… but Mom has to be to work at 7am and doesn’t get out until it’s too late for me to go. -_-;;

But I have a job!! *happy dances!* $7.45 / hour in the Housewares Dept. ^___^

Thanks Theresa, France, and Nette! *SUPER HUGS!* ^____^ Thanks for the layout comment, France!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way… I shall commence with a rant that’s kind of distracting me right now. lol ^^;; Don’t mind me – seriously! – I’m just venting. (more…)