Chris Moody’s Blog

I was woken up a little after 4:30 this morning to an earthquake.  Except I didn’t know it was an earthquake at the time.  All I knew is that my bed was shaking back and forth, and I couldn’t figure out why.

RRUMg-HgI38

This past week has been a trying one for the St. Louis area. It started with near 100º temps, and was then peppered with rain and the occasional hurricane force winds. The winds did the most. Trees and powerlines are down all over the metro area, the roof at Lambert Airport was uncerimoniously deposited onto Inerstate 70, some were injured at the new Busch Stadium (check the video above), and semi-trucks were blown over like toys.

Estimates vary, but AmerenUE thinks that more than half a million people were without power in the area. Mine went out Friday morning during the second round of scary weather, and just came back today (Sunday) around 8:15am. Since then I’ve been going around resetting clocks, pitching food, closing windows, and resetting the A/C.

Read more from Yahoo News:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060721/us_nm/utilities_ameren_outages_dc_4

For those of you interested, my birthday is fast approaching. If you’d like gift ideas, check out my wish list on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/1218XX9O9URR3

If you want to pick something on your own but need a push in the right direction, I just bought a house and can use some “house stuff”. I’d like new storage for my DVDs. A bookshelf design would be best. I have plenty DVD double packs that don’t fit into the slots of my tower. Plus with over 100 discs now, I’m out of room.

My current hobby is learning about Linux (Fedora Core 5) and associated apps and services (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Gnome & and maybe later KDE). Reference books where I can look up commands are good… or step by step books that show you how to do something.

Well I’m going to be singing the praises of Craigslist for a while now. I just put my older car up for sale, and in less than an hour, it sold. You gotta love the internet!

Of course maybe I should have waited til tomorrow before actually selling. At last check there were emails from 5 more people wanting it. Oh well. At least I have a little more money for moving expenses.

Got a really odd phone call just a little while ago. Made me think about how easy it is to confuse someone on the phone and get them to give away too much personal information. I’m usually good about trying to protect my privacy (well somewhat). But she got a bit out of me. I think it was a collection agency looking for a different Chris Moody, but then again, it could have been a very well thought out phishing attempt. I decided to document this in case something happens and I suddenly start getting someone else’s credit card bills. Here it is.

I received a phone call from what appeared to be a collection agency at or around 20:15 CST on the evening of Jan 24, 2006. The caller asked if I was Christopher Moody. I verified this and the caller then asked me to verify my address. At this point I stated that I was not comfortable giving the caller any further information unless I knew what the call was in regards to. The caller stated that she had information that I was going to want to know. She then asked me what the middle 2 digits of my social security number were. I reluctantly gave her that information. She said they matched and then began to explain something to the effect of an account at Commerce Bank with a balance of over $400, that it had been turned over to them for collection and asked how much I could pay now. I stated that I had never banked at Commerce in my life. She attempted to verify more information with me and it appeared she let slip that she was looking for a Christopher W Moody. She asked for the last 2 digits of my social security number which i gave (stupid me). This through her off some because my last 2 digits matched the 2nd to last two digits of her number. She then asked if I lived in Kansas City. I told her no, and she seemed to decide she had the wrong person. She informed me that my number would be taken off their list.

After hanging up, I was immediately concerned about the call. While I had not given my full social security number, I had given my partial number. I looked in my phone book to see how to activate the “call trace” feature with SBC, though I couldn’t find it. After finding instructions on SBC.com and attempting it, it seemed that feature was no longer available. Wanting some kind of record of this event, I created this text file to document what occured.

Yeah, okay… I haven’t updated this in forever. I’m still alive. Been to a couple Cardinals games. Been to Colorado. Been to Hogwarts. Getting ready to be a best man in a wedding.