The CBC reported that Bob Chiarelli released a letter from the Province about Ottawa’s light rail project.

Larry O’Brien responded with “I am disappointed but not surprised that the current Mayor would get his good friend Premier McGunity [sic] to send this letter 72 hours before the municipal election.”

You’ve taken hypocrisy to a new level, Larry.

I’d love to ask him it is ok for him to get his friend, John Baird, to interfere in municipal affairs by ignoring the wishes of the current council and the federal government’s funding agreements, and force the incoming council to hold another vote on the matter, but when Chiarelli releases a letter confirming the province’s support for the project, it’s not.

Given this behaviour, I wouldn’t put it past Larry to use similar tactics to bypass council were he to be elected mayor and find himself at loggerheads with the will of council.

November 11th is the day that we stop to remember the sacrifices made by so many people in order that we might enjoy the peace and freedom we have today.

Thank you doesn’t say enough.

I caught the tail end of a segment on The Weather Network that made me do a double take, so I checked the aviation weather observations for Buffalo, NY:

KBUF 130154Z 25008KT 1/4SM +TSSN FG OVC001 01/M01 A2973 RMK OCNL LTGIC OHD TS OHD MOV NE SNINCR 2/4
KBUF 130054Z 27010G19KT 1/2SM TSSN BR OVC003 01/M01 A2971 RMK OCNL LTGIC OHD TS OHD MOV NE TSB51
KBUF 130045Z 28014G19KT 3/4SM -SN BR BKN003 OVC007 01/M01 A2970

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As you probably read a few days ago, my bank card was skimmed. My bank made the necessary arrangements so that I could access my money while they completed their investigation, which was very much appreciated. I had a call on Friday from the security officer at the bank that she’d submitted her recommendation to her management that they absorb the fraud, so now my balances reflect reality. She also said that she was working on this very late Thursday evening and something made her go dig through her database of frauds and lo and behold she found another one from a while back that was a very similar pattern of transactions. One of the odd things about my incident is that it wasn’t part of a larger bunch of fraudulent transactions, so that made it harder to figure out what happened.

Hopefully, now that she has two seemingly similar incidents, she’ll be able to find a common link somewhere and the police will be able to arrest them and extract vengence.

I couldn’t find my cheque book this morning, so at lunch I popped into the bank branch in the lobby of my building at work to have them code a temporary cheque for me so I could pay for my dentist appointment later in the afternoon. I gave the teller my account number, which she punched into her computer. Reading some popup on the screen, she said “hm” and then “if you’ll take a seat over here, someone will be out to talk to you momentarily”.

“Uh oh,” thought I, “this doesn’t sound good at all.” I sat down.

Shortly, someone else came out and asked me to step into her office.

In her office, she told me that there were several recent transactions on my chequing account that were “suspicious” and would I mind answering some questions. After reviewing the transactions in question, it became clear that my bank card had been cloned and someone had basically drained as much money out of my account.

I highlighted all of the fraudulent transactions and started filling out the necessary paperwork.

At the end of an hour or so, I had a shiny new bank card, an empty bank account, copies of the paperwork and a new loathing for the scumbags who cloned my bank card.

From the bank, I headed to the dentist to have a small chip filled, which fortunately was uneventful and didn’t even require freezing. Once home, I called the police to report the bank card fraud.

So, where did it happen? Well, I have two suspicions: one being a convenience store and the other being a computer store. It doesn’t take long to swipe a card through a second reader, particularly if the debit card machine is below the counter top. I’ve even heard that some debit card cloners have little readers hooked on their belts that they can quickly and discretely pass a bank card through. Getting the PIN number was likely accomplished by either a hidden video camera or a shoulder surfer. Creating a fake bank card is fairly simple once you have that information.

Oh well. At least I should get the money back after the bank’s finished their initial investigation.

Debit card fraud was a huge problem in the UK, so large that they were forced to implement new technology. Gone are magnetic stripes. In their place is a system called “chip-and-pin”. Basically, when you go to make a purchase, you insert a smart card in a reader and enter your pin. The chip in the card can’t be copied. The result is that within a couple of months debit card fraud dropped by 90%.

Hopefully, we’ll get something like this in Canada in the near future.

And, hopefully the bastards will get what’s coming to them. Soon.

If you think back, you’ll recall that some scientists were trying to bring back space dust collected by a probe. Well, they’ve taken lots of pictures of the aerogel they were collecting the dust in and now everyone can get involved helping them find dust particles. If you visit the Stardust@home website, you too can participate! Unlike SETI@home, Stardust@home has people actually looking at pictures rather than running a screensaver that crunches numbers when you’re not otherwise using your computer. There’s more information on the Planetary Society’s website, too.
It just launched yesterday, and it appears that their servers are a tad overloaded right now, so I haven’t been able to get into the website to register and try looking for space dust, yet.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!