Finally, after a week, I decided to stop being lazy and actually downgrade back to V2.1 of Wordpress. You’ll notice that my categories are finally back. Amazing. I was starting to get discouraged, but thankfully, it’s now fixed.

Also, if you use Wordpress, I highly recommend the Tiger Administration tool. I gotta’ give it to this guy, he has done a fantastic job of making the wp-admin interface a much, much nicer thing to navigate through. It’s very clean and well designed. I’m impressed.

Let’s see…in other news:

• Finished up Condemned 2: Bloodshot. The game was awesome, although in retrospect, it was a little restrictive in the way you approach how you play. It’s a very linear game, and there are a lot of sequences where you just hit a button and your character  does what he’s supposed to do in a sequence. For example, if you have to climb up something, you don’t actually have to figure out how to do it; rather, you just hit the spot where the sequence is triggered and hit ‘A’, and then he climbs.  However, the experience overall was pretty amazing. It was a great story and is truly one of the creepiest games I think I’ve ever played.
• Picked up Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 and have played through the first mission and a half or so. As with the last one, it’s really great. Not much has changed in the overall mechanic…and really…why should it? The first one was awesome. So far, I’m having fun with it, though I admit that it’s not a shooter for everyone. It’s far more difficult in that you really have to think and use your parters else you get quickly wasted when you go busting through doors. Your character can’t take much damage before he goes down.
•  Evil Andrew tried to open up a new credit card, but he was foiled by the fraud alert I put on my accounts. Stupid bastard. Some guy called me from Capital One and asked if I had tried to open up a credit card anytime recently. The only dissappointing thing is that when I called to update the Las Vegas PD, they didn’t seem to know what was going on (couldn’t find my case) and the guy who would have an idea was, of course, out for the day. That’s my luck though. Oh well; at least this idiot can’t open up any more cards under my name.
• The neighbors continue to get progressively worse…or it’s really just that since I decided to write about it, I’m now even more painfully aware of them. We’re thinking about purchasing scary masks, going down there in the middle of the night and banging on their windows…specifically the kids’ windows. Is that evil…?
• I am addicted to a place called ‘The Pita Pit”. Holy crapola, Batman…it’s so tasty.  Its about 3 blocks up from my new office, and they have some of the most ridiculously good wrap-style food I’ve ever had. I seem to have found a superior combination of flavors in mixing a little bit of wing sauce with tzatziki sauce, the ensuing tastebud effect being a spicy sensation mixed with the mellower cool cucumber taste of the tzatziki. Mmmm…I think I just like using that word…tzatziki…
• I’m gonna’ go see ‘Horton Hears a Who’.  It loos like it’s freakin’ awesome.
• Today I knew I was getting old when I was picking up coffee and the friendly counter girl asked me if I had any weekend plans. I thought for a moment, initially said no, thought more about it, and then decided to say that I had just gotten my “Planet Earth” HD-DVDs (for the bargain basement price of $25.00) and was really looking forward to watching that this weekend. She looked at me as if I had just sprouted a third eye and was getting ready to pour the hot coffee directly into it. I walked away…mildly ashamed…but still oddly excited about watching “Planet Earth”. Screw the Seattle’s Best counter girl. Hmph…
• In the house buying process…or rather…the loan acquiring process. Got a sweet huge packet of junk that we get to fill out so we can get a large sum of cash to fund aforementioned house purchcase. I’m excited about that.
• Deliberating whether or not it’s worth it to purchase an XM Radio subscription. It has been really nice having it since I got my new car, but I don’t know that it’s worth the $13.00 a month for it. There are quite a few awesome channels though…

That’s all I gots. I’m sooooo sweeeepy……..

Friday @ 11:55. Wow. I am  pathetic…

It’s time for a post filled with vitrol and gasoline fire scorching hatred…brought to you by me.

I happen to be fortunate enough to live in a very nice “apartment community”. Whatever the hell that means, I’ll never know because I certainly don’t feel any kind of urge to belong to “the community”. Especially when you have downstairs neighbors like we have.

Lightly put, these people are some of the most foul, putrid, rotten dirty and disgusting people I think I’ve ever encountered. I think their foulness is emphasized by the fact that this is indeed a nicer place. They seem badly out of place.

Now…I’m not trying to sound elitist or anything; I’ll befriend anybody just as long as they are cool, nice and considerate. And these people seem nice enough…but they are absolutely NOT not cool…and they are NOT considerate. At all. And…worst of all…they are simply…dirty. Like…the kind of dirty where if you were to potentially set foot in their house, you’d want to hold your breath because you’d be expecting a foul odor, or perhaps a cloud of acidic funk that would envelop your head and eat your skull.

But really, it’s the inconsiderate stuff they do/allow that makes this vision of them in my head seem more of a reality than it probably is. Here are a few examples of the things they do:

• They have two hellish children that…no kidding…scream at the top of their lungs approximately 96.4% of the time they are awake. We’re talking all.hours.of.the.effing.day. too. Morning (when I’m up around 6-ish AM, one of them is screaming), afternoon (Christy works from home, and I generally get an e-mail or two from her where I have to talk her down from tossing a grenade through the vents into their humble abode), and evening (well into around 11 or so on the weekends). Screaming children are understandable; it’s a part of life. However, parents that do nothing about it…ever…now that’s a different story. It has to get particularly bad in order for one of the parents to actually do something to stop them.
• They trounce around slamming doors, knocking shit around, and yelling at each other. Dad also seems to enjoy bad music and video games…which is fine…except for the fact that they have it all running through a sub-woofer’d stereo system. You can only hear “Brick House” and “Wind of Change” and tracks from “Guitar Hero III” so many times before you want to gouge your eardrums out with a spork. Football season was quite exciting in that household. You’d think that the sweet baby Jesus was being born everytime the Cowboys would score a touchdown. Likewise, it was almost as if Al-Quaeda had dared show masked faces in the McDirtyson household when the opposing team wold score. Dad wold get quite irate.
• They have a little stupid dog (a pug) named Beevo that barks at just about everything. I admit that I’m a little racist against the pug breed; I find most of them pretty gross (except my friend James’…they are actually kind of cool). So…needless to say…them owning a pug does not exactly enhance the image of these people I have formed in my head.
• Here’s the real kicker. Not only do they have a nasty, foul, fat little snorting barky dog…but they actually allow it to poop and pee on their porch. The two of them are too lazy to just take the damn thing out for a little walk, so they just let it out onto the porch to befoul it. What. The. F. Mate. And then, every couple of days or so, she sweeps the turds off of the porch and into the little quaint ‘bush’ area in front of it. When it gets warm and humid here….*wretch*…you can only imagine how wonderful it smells.
• She smokes. Note that I have absolutely nothing against smokers…but it doesn’t help when you have all of the above stacked against you. And she sometimes throws the butts onto the sidewalk out in front of their place.
• They don’t care for their stuff. For example, Mrs. McDirtyson drives a really beat Ford Taurus around. I’ve intentionally avoided parking next to her to avoid the potential door ding or a small disgusting hellspawn child running up against my car.

I tell you all of those things because I want you to understand where I’m coming from when I make the next statement (which is going to sound pretty mean). I don’t judge people on appearance…but having experienced all of the above, physical faults tend to be…enhanced. The imperfections I’m speaking of would happen to be those of the maxillary/mandibulary (I think I just made up a word) type. These people have THE WORST TEETH I think I’ve seen in a while. It makes me shudder to think of how bad they really are. We’re talking teeth of the decaying sort…brown, dirty, and looking as if perhaps bolweevils have decided to take sanctuary there. We’re talking hot looking receeding red gums that have small lumps of white nastiness on them. We’re talking about, when these people talk, they have little pockets of coagulated spit forming in the corners of their mouths because their grilles are so damn jacked. Oh god…I’m actually starting to feel a tiny bit vomitous just thinking about having to talk to them…

So…in summary…we dislike these people very, very much. They are inspiration for us to really start looking at buying a house. I don’t want to have to live with people like this anymore.

Here we go again…another fine journey into the uknown.

I guess it’s probably OK now to talk about the fact that I’m moving along to another job. Again. Before I say that, though, I have to be silly and sentimental…

As I was leaving nFusion for the last time and driving back home, the levity of the situation hit me. I’ve been at nFusion for a year and five months…not exactly a really long time or anything…but it’s strange because it feels like I’m leaving my family here in Texas. That sounds a little bit cheeseball and stupid when I just leave it like that…

We came down to Texas, and it was the people at nFusion that suddenly became the people that I would spend every day with for the next year and five months. We knew absolutely no one coming down here except the guy who located our (rat infested) apartment for us and a friend of a friend who I went and grabbed dinner with with the night before I started working. I haven’t seen her since then.

Needless to say, spending a lot of time with people at work…and sometimes outside of work…you tend to get to know them pretty well.

Don’t get me wrong; I had friends I made at work at previous jobs too. But it was an easier entry because I usually knew someone there to begin with, and I had lots of friends outside of work. But here, nFusion-ites were the only people that we knew. And the amazing thing was that it took almost zero time for me/us to become pretty good friends with some. That made things so much easier…and that’s why it was so hard to decide to leave. When the only thing you’ve known from the start is suddenly not there everyday, it tends to be a little jarring.

I’ve said this several times to other people, but when it comes to work, there is a part of the overall ‘compensation package’ that isn’t talked about. That would be the ‘Quality of Co-workers’ part. I guess it’s implied when you have a successful company and people that appear to be happy. But I think it’s something that is often overlooked as a ‘benefit’ when you go to work. Think about it; you spend most of your life working. Therefore, it seems obvious that you’d want to surround yourself with great people. It makes your time at work much more pleasant.

I’ll miss that benefit of nFusion…

That’s not to say that the new place I’ve chosen to go won’t have that. I’m sure it will. It’s just hard to think about not seeing my nFusion people on a daily basis.

So where am I going? Well, as one part of me is a little sad, the other part is very excited to be a part of something huge happening here. On Monday, March 3rd, I’ll be starting with a new agency in Austin called Schematic. This is the agency that was selected by the WPP Group to handle all of Dell’s interactive work, and I’m going to begin working with the Project Management group. It’s going to be a huge challenge in being a part of building something this big from the ground up. There’s going to be a lot of, ‘We’ll figure it out as we go,’ happening. Afterall, what can you expect when a giant company like Dell decides to consolidate all of the work from 600-800 people/agencies from around the world into one place?!

Fortunately, there are a lot of smart people in the room, so the process won’t be as painful as one might think. But it’s still going to be very interesting to see how it pans out and actually have a hand in shaping that path.

Wish me luck…I think I’m going to need it…

First, I have to take a moment to say that, sometimes, I really appreciate people. If I’ve learned anything in life, it is that it pays to be nice, gracious and patient when dealing with things like this because you never know who you really might be dealing with.

As you know, ‘Evil Andrew’ went ahead and opened up a checking account with USAA in my name. In order to do that, you have to be in the military, so apparently I am a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force…

But that’s besides the point…

I’ve been in contact with a guy named Damon who is a Fraud Investigator there. After chatting several times, it turns out that Damon is a really cool guy, and seems very interested in helping me out. I mean, sure…it’s in his best interest to do so, seeing that his employer got fraudified (note to self: copyright this word), but really, he has probably gone above and beyond what he normally should be doing. He has given me quite a bit of information and really done a great job of keeping in contact.

For example, in continuing his own investigation, he found out that ‘Evil Andrew’ opened up yet another credit card, this one a Chase business credit card, and has racked up a whopping $23,155.79 on it. I wouldn’t have known this by looking at my credit report because all of these things are not showing up there. Which brings me to a little digression and word of warning to you all…

The way I understand it, you have two different credit reports attached to your name; your personal credit and your business credit. When you go to check your personal credit report, you never see any of the other stuff and (I think) vice versa. In other words, this could have kept going on for quite some time and I would have never known about it until a bunch of debt collectors came knocking at my door. And I would most likely have a very hard time in the future doing anything entreprenuerial that required credit. This is apparently how these guys fly under the radar.

Anyway…back to my original point, which was being nice and gracious to people pays off. So Damon warned me about this card. Then we started talking, and I learn that Damon was in the FBI for 13 years. He then lets me know that the agent who is currently on the case in Nevada is a friend of his, and that he should be able to get information as it comes in pretty quickly. And most importantly, he said his friend feels pretty confident that they’re going to catch this guy.

Now…I could’ve been mad or short or pissy with this guy or any number of the other people I’ve dealt with. In my own humble opinion, I think I probably have every right to be, seeing that everyone was initially expecting me to account for what now amounts to well iver $45K in losses. I’ve also been dealing with more phone calls than you could imagine. I think my cell bill is going to go through the roof. Everytime I’ve had to remind myself that these are people are just doing their jobs…and if I’m just cool and patient and show some appreciation, they’ll be more inclined to believe what I’m telling them. And so far, that policy has paid off. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating, but it has netted me quicker responses and extra information.

Another example was this guy John at the UPS Store in Nevada. Because I treated him with respect and didn’t flip the ‘ef out when he told me that there was nothing he could do about letting me know more information on ‘Evil Andrew’, he ended up being extremely cooperative with an administrative lead rather than an investigator at the Austin Police Department. They told me you’d normally have to get a subpoena to get the information he had on record. He ended up just faxing it over without any questions. Out of all of the people involved in this, John just happened to have the most valuable information, that being a copy of the driver’s license with ‘Evil Andrew’s’ picture on it and a copy of a school ID.

So…in summary…just be nice. Except when the person is ‘Evil Andrew’, and then you can just cap him for me.

.:the plot thickens:.

the ‘wtf, mate’ factor has increased exponentially since my first post.

part of me is pretty fascinated with this in the sense of the process. there are a lot of moving pieces to this whole thing, and so i think the project manager in me is interested in making sure that everything lines up right and the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. for example, the credit collector…who now seems to be on my side/my friend…has to know what USAA bank is doing because ‘evil andrew’ went ahead and opened up a checking account in my name and was trying to pay american express with bad checks from it. ‘evil andrew’ also has a mailbox at a UPS store in las vegas, so in order to get information from the manager there, i had to call a detective at the austin police department who will then pass along everything she finds out to the FBI because, since this is across state lines and involves so much money, it has now become a federal case.

the other part of me is really annoyed that my life has been disturbed in such a way. it’s one thing to have your car broken into or even just a credit card stolen and used…but it’s a whole different ballgame when someone manages to get ahold of your social security number (and i have no idea how this guy did that). it’s bizarre to think that your entire life and everything you are in the system that is the united states of america is based on one 9-digit number.

the good news is that i’m extremely, extremely close to finding out who this guy is. a guy named john at the UPS store in las vegas, NV. has ALL kinds of stuff from ‘evil andrew’, including a copy of his driver’s license…which was an oregon driver’s license and has my name on it. john faxed all of that information over to the austin police department today.

i don’t know why, but i really want to see who this person is. i don’t feel like this is really happening to me, and maybe if i see who is doing this it’ll become more real. it’s something you see and hear about all the time, but…as the cliche goes…you never expect it to happen to you. and when it does, it’s so hard to reconcile in your own head. it becomes even more unreal when you hear someone tells you that they can’t give you information on something that is in your name because you can’t provide them with the correct identifying information. for example, i called up dell financial services because ‘evil andrew’ apparently went ahead and opened up an account with them in december of ‘07. i wanted to make sure that the account could not be accessed, but because i couldn’t tell the guy ‘my mother’s maiden name’ and my ‘correct address’, there wasn’t anything he could do. i had to beg him to put a block on the account so that it couldn’t be accessed. if i wouldn’t have begged him to do this, the account would still be open and at risk…even after i had warned him the account was fraudulent. i still don’t think he believed that it was really me…

so the crazines continues. at least i know now that the case is going to be handled by the FBI. for some reason that makes me think that stuff is gonna’ get done…