Credit Score

I had ordered my free credit reports before, but I had never actually gotten to see my credit score. I’ve never worried about it because I figured it was probably pretty good. I know people with bad credit worry a lot about their scores and things they can do to bring up the score a few points in order to qualify for a better loan or whatever.

Yesterday I got a notice from my mortgage company, Countrywide, that there had been a security breach of their customer info. They were advising me to take precautions, monitor for unusual activity, etc. They also said they would give me a credit monitoring service for two years for free. At first I thought it was a scam, but this wasn’t just a month trial, it was two years. So I figured I would try it out.

The program is called Triple Advantage Credit Monitoring, offered by consumerinfo.com, a subsidiary of Experian. The “triple” advantage I think is that it monitors all three credit reporting agencies.

Once I finished signing up, it generated a report and showed me all of this information they know about my borrowing (and things they have wrong). But it also gave me a credit score. Experian does theirs on an 830-point scale and I got 805. They said this put me in the 99.7 percentile. That’s a pretty good place to be.

Washington Mutual

I had some cash I wanted to put somewhere and get a good interest rate. I thought about getting another Series I Savings Bond since they currently pay 4.8%, but they penalize you 3 months of interest if you sell them before 5 years. Washington Mutual was advertising 1-year CD’s at 5% last week. I think they are trying to raise cash since they are one of the banks in trouble. I was able to sign up online, but they made me verify my checking account by electronically depositing two small payments (then I report back to them the amounts and they would know everything worked). ING, PayPal, and Google AdSense do the same thing, but it does take a couple of days for the deposits to show up (both less than a dollar, usually less than 20 cents each).

So I waited. Within a day or two I checked my bank account and they had deposited 72 and 94 cents. But I also noticed there was a *third* transaction taking those two deposits back ($1.66). They really are short of money.

The nice thing about it was I don’t have to make an entry in my checkbook register.

New iPods

Apple introduced a new lineup of iPods yesterday. Once again, Apple failed to deliver what I wanted: a high capacity widescreen iPod. The Touch dropped a little in price, but with 32 GB for $399, it is still pretty high. Plus I’m not sure it has all of the functionality of the Palm TX yet that I would like to be able to replace with it (still need a database program that can sync with Access, a spreadsheet that syncs with Excel, and cut and paste; offline browsing would be good too).

The nanos, however, are pretty neat. They doubled the capacity to 16 GB, returned the old shape, and added portrait or landscape viewing. I think the screen is probably still too small for movies (it is the same screen as the 3G nano, just turned sideways, as suggested last year in one of my comments). One neat thing is that to shuffle the songs, you shake it. That’s just hilarious. It comes in some great colors too. I’m leaning towards purple, blue, or red, but the yellow is kind of neat looking too. Someone on iLounge pointed out that the yellow ones are already being called bananos, so it’s almost worth it to get yellow just for that. Suggestions?

Mom said she’d like to borrow my fatty 3G nano I got last year.

nano4g.jpg

Bulletin Board Maintenance

Last year, I wrote about installing a bulletin board on the Engineer’s Association website. One of the advantages of the A Small Orange web hosting plan was that it supported MySQL and PHP, allowing me to install a bulletin board.

Over the last year, the board hasn’t exactly caught fire. About 5 people have signed up and nobody has posted anything substantial. It was free and it is a good tool potentially, so I think it is worth the trouble for now.

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Domain Registration

Last year I wrote about getting a new web host and domain registrar for the Engineer’s Association website. It was time for the host and one of the domain names to expire. Because I didn’t want the accounts to be locked in to my e-mail account like they had been with the previous webmaster’s personal e-mail account (causing a lot of problems with last year’s transfer), they sent the expiration notices to a Yahoo e-mail account that I created and never use. So by the time I realized what was going on, my domain at NameCheap for gdotea.org had expired for a couple of days. I went ahead and tried to renew at NameCheap and after it took my credit card information I got a message that said it had failed “for some reason”. Don’t know why. I tried a couple of more times and got error messages again, including ones that said I couldn’t renew a domain I had already put in an order to renew.

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