I bought the domain desertorganics.com a few years ago, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I had thought of perhaps a organic nursery in the possible future. But work often keeps me at home. Which has been the case for the last 8 years where I run the billing operations for a webhosting company and make sure all other depts are running. All of our orders are manually approved, something which is rare in the industry where software is often used to determine rather an order is fraud or not. Often this results in strict guidelines the software is to follow to minimize fraud. In my opinion its no where near as effective as a human screener in combination of software prevention, ultimately it should be up to a human screener to determine if an order is fraud. I have seen a lot of times where software applications ban good orders which results in the lost of a sale and reoccurring income without human intervention. Since the company I work for offers service to the world at large I am screening orders every hour I am awake. I have a lot of friends that think that working at home is a great thing. But I have too disagree since I can spend very little time away from home. Because of such I don’t have a lot of time too look for a house to buy and I am stuck at the house that I have been renting for the last 8 years. Staying indoors most of the time can make you go stir crazy. This is also my first time living in a home owners association neighborhood. Its not something I like because all the houses look alike and there are guidelines to how everyone has too be like everyone else. The same people that cry about socialism embrace the idea of the homeowners association as a wonderful idea.

World of Warcraft ofers me some distraction / leasuire.   Last year I got tired of having a back yard I could not do a lot with and I started container garden on my back patio. I had been inspired to by a friend that worked at Arizona Health (now lamely named Fresh Vitamins) to grow my own tomatoes as she was able to keep her tomatoes alive for 9 months of the year and have tomatoes during the point most people in the area consider the first growing season over. I can’t say saving money was the first reason that came to mine, never mind that there is a lot of cost involved in just starting, and even more cost going organic. But looking at a back yard that is mostly gravel and cinderblock don’t exactly stand out as my idea of a back yard. Considering when I lived in Louisiana I had the swamp in my backyard and in Michigan I had a lake. Both were teaming with wildlife. Something I try to encourage in my back yard. While

In general I do it because of a general love of nature and I find biology fascinating. I am also a vegan. For those who don’t know what a vegan is, its what true vegetarians call themselves. It means we don’t eat animal protein, be it chicken, beef, eggs, cheese, milk, shrimp, oysters or anything else animal related. Our diet is plant matter, though I also eat mushrooms, which I do not consider a plant. Most people seem to have missed the section in biology about what is an animal and what is a plant as I often get these rather bizarre questions like “do vegans eat fish?”. I also have people that think I don’t eat anything that can not smile, which there are a lot of animals that can not smile. I have never understood the confusion. Its not uncommon for those that embrace the vegan life style to make it a point to consume organic foods.

The first year had not been successful but neither was it a big disaster. I had started a bit late in April, and I realized around mid-June that I needed a sun screen. On top of that I had bought a organic soil, that was intended for in the ground gardening, where as I was growing in pots. Which means the soil was probable consternated with fertilizer. Perhaps my biggest failure was these heat wave tomatoes from Bonnie, which were the first to die, while my other tomatoes were still growing in the July/August heat. 

Photos have been relocated to http://desertorganics.com/

This time around:

- I moved my herbs to deeper containers

- Started seeds in January (however come too find the light I had built for growing herbs was not bright enough). Also seems I should have started a month earlier.

- I have the sun screen from last year

- It appears here in Arizona we have an earlier then usual growing season. I was able to put plants out mid-February. Normally you don’t do that till mid-March (and we have nuts saying global warming is a myth).

- This year I have released around 20,000 lady bugs, and preying mantis egg cases which have about 400 mantis.

I plan to add a new blog desertorganics.com to keep track of the growth of my garden this year.

 The 2^nd half of December has always been a slow month for my company, if there is ever a time to take a vacation now is the time. I choose to go to Biosphere 2. What is Biosphere 2? In the simplest of terms it’s a green house. It’s a combination of several eco systems that can be completely locked out from everything but the sun. Its located in the lower part of Arizona north of Tucson. I won’t bore you with the details, for that you can go to these two links:

This is also the first time that I have actualy got to test out my gps device.  For being cheap it did the job rather effectivly. 

This is an old video from a trip I took back in April 2001. Back then native ants were running rampant through the glass enclosure. But when I went there in December 29, 2008 the ants were not there in the numbers they were when I had first visited. The tour guild claims they ran out of food and the population stabilized. I tend to wonder if the food did run out and if it was not disease.

I have always been a tech nut, yet for some reason I never got around to building a media machine.  After all I have over 2000 CD albums ripped and playing on one computer or another.   I am hoping someday to get a large enough hard drive to rip all of my DVD’s to the system.  What lead me to building media machine was a low end pc that I purchased from Dell that I was going to use as a work machine.  This was a rather poor choice considering how many windows I can have open at any time, running PhotoShop and Dreamweaver did not help matters either.  In December I choose to replace this machine with a more powerful machine.  The first thing that came to mind was taking the tv card out of my play machine.  Generally while playing wow, performance was ok but not great.  But if I choose to play a dvd both the game and dvd would be rather choppy.  From everything I had read, Media computers do not have to be powerful machines.  I forget the stats on this machine but it has:

Intel Pentium 4 2.80 GHz
Main Drive 80 gigs
Secondary Drive 320 gigs (though I wish I had gotten a bigger drive)
2 gigs ram
256 meg video card

I am storing all video and music on the secondary drive.  Considering how fast the secondary drive fills up with recorded tv I wish I had gone for 700 gig drive.  1 trig are still a bit on the expensive side, and I feel there will be a big price drop in the near future.   Another  motivator for setting up a media machine was to stop paying DIRECTV per receiver.   Its my intention to eventually to get every TV in the house networked.  My first device which Dell wrongly informed me was not an extender.  Which was the DSM-510 High-Definition Wireless G Media Player.  Even thought it was hooked up to a wired connection it was extremely slow.  It took 2 minutes to cycle through 3 Doors down to Avril Lavigne; which is 30 albums.  It would take for ever to get something in the middle of my list like Future Sound of London or Information Society.  Even if you want just a media server I recommend avoiding this device at all costs.  It may be cheap, but you pay in the end with its rather slow performance.

This month I finale got what will be the first of my media extenders.  I got Linksys Media Center Extender off Amazon.com, with free shipping.  I am a sucker for the free shipping.  Though I am not a big fan of waiting, but it seems everything from Amazon ships rather fast and I get everything within a week.  I believe its because Phoenix is a mail hub.   So far I am happy with this extender even though it means another network cord running across the floor.  But I am able to stream TV into my bedroom from my office and control the single.  Not to mention have TiVo like capabilities without paying for TiVo. The funny thing is even though I never used a vcr to record shows (partly because most of the ones I had were impossible to figure out or did not work worth a crap).   But with this new machine I am practically recording everyday.  Honestly the only thing Vista seems to be good for is running a media machine.  Running it on my work machine has only lead to a lot of dread and despair.  I refuse to install it on my play machine.

My first dealings with Linksys was back in 1999 with their network cards and router for a dsl connection.  Back then networks were anything but user friendly to set-up.  So much so that I paid $219 to get my first network set-up.  The most frustrating part was spending a few sleepless nights to get it working, and then the guy who was paid to set my network connection up did it in less then 5 minutes.  Granted network connections are still not an easy thing but they are far easier then they were.  After this I hate a long hate relationship with Linksys because of this frustrating set up, it would be along time before I wanted to buy anything from Linksys.   However with the Linksys Media Center Extender I found the set-up rather easy.  The moment I hooked into the network every machine that runs Windows Vista detected it.  The only problem I had was minor, and the extender gave me information what I needed to do. Which was download a small patch.  After that everything worked flawlessly.  It seems the extender scrolls through my music collection faster then my media machine.  Perhaps later I will experiment with hooking up with multiple machines.  It would be nice to have another media machine to record regular programming and another to record not so regular programming signal streams rather flawlessly to the extender.  Even while changing channels the extender functions almost instantly, there is a small delay but barely noticeable.  This may be in part due to it being wired into my network. 

Nothing like waking up to a bunch of shows that came on while I was asleep.  One of the shows I have been recording is Thundar the Barbarian.  It’s a childhood favorite that never lasted long enough.  I think it got one season as there are 22 episodes.  I hope one day some other animator will take it up, and hopefully give the series a longer life.  I am using a program to remove the commercials off after I record.  However I wish they would release it to DVD as I would rather have a cleaned up version with out the boomerang commercial logo on it.  But the question I have is what happened to ABC, NBC, and CBS Saturday morning line-up.  I know it to have happen sometime in the mid 90’s.  Perhaps Saturday morning cartoons went the way of the dinosaur with the growth of Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network. 

This weekend my washing machine decided to stop draining so I thought I would call GE to come over to fix it. The nice thing was they came 2 hours ahead of the 4 – 6 pm schedule. The bad thing was the way the guy called to let me know. I had said hello, and the first thing he asked is if I was there. Rather cautious of this stranger I asked him to identify himself. He indicated that he needed to talk to me. I made it clear that in order to talk to me (not alluding I was me) that I would need to know who he was. Finale he lets me know that he is with General Electric and that an appointment ahead of me canceled and asked if he would be ok to come over now. I of coarse want to get started on the Laundry that I was behind from the weekend so I said yes.

When he got here I let him know that I wanted to get the door repaired on the washer as well. He lets me know its going to be expensive (not sure how its just a hinge piece). At this point I am skeptical since he was not forth coming with the price on a simple repair. But he quickly takes the washer apart and finds the problem. So shortly the washer is draining again. The next I know he wants to point out another problem he found and he wants to talk about repairing it. Come to find out that this cheap washer could last another three years with this problem, and after some long talk it would be better to just replace the washer then to fix this problem.

But now onto the door; after a lot of hemming and hawing he finale broke down and told me it would cost $84 labor to fix the door and $35 for the part (I was under the impression that he had the part because of this) however after I asked for just the part he for some reason does not have it and he is going to do me a special favor on telling me how I can order the part. Plus he says I look capable of fixing it myself.

Honestly I think this door fix should have been in the labor for fixing the original problem I called for. After all he spent maybe 5 minutes on my washer and there were no parts replaced for a total of $159.00 fixing the door by his price would have pushed me to close to $300.

Well my bank account still has not been restored. But my reason for calling was not this issue but one where I was getting charged a $29.00 monthly fee on all of my bank accounts. This time I called the number on the back of my debit card, and I was able to get directly to someone that could ………………. Somewhat help me. We first dealt with the closed account that had not been restored. I was told several times that a closed account could not be reopened. But amazingly after playing the get your manager card the account. But for some reason they were able to bring it back on, we will see if it stays up this time.

The logic of one account that has no activity going on is still open while an account that has multiple activities being closed escaped both the associate and the manager.

Needless to say I found out something new after bringing up the nsf fees I had earlier this month. Bank of America will wave NSF fees on any charge $3 or less. However you have to contact bank of America within 60 days of the charge to get the charge removed. You would think being in the digital age that they would automatically do this. Then again you would think they would not charge you $35.00 for a $10 charge.

But on to the $29.00 monthly fees. This appears to be a screw up on the banks part that they are willing to admit. Back in December (I forget the issue here) but the associate told me that he could save me money. Who does not like to save money (atleast save money that could be spent on other things such as WoW). In a nut shell what I was offered was a buy one account get the other free deal. In other words for every 2 accounts I only pay the cost of one. Will some how this got messed up and I was really signed up for some nonsense special banking service. Turns out I was supposed to be only charged $29.00 on one account which covers 2 checking and 1 savings account. The logic of this escapes me.

By this point is been 60 minutes and I make it clear that I do want to do the automated survey to express my disgust over this. The manager lets me know that she can do the survey. However the survey turned out to be her giving me advice on how things should be done from my end. After not really giving her much room for giving me advice on a survey (can’t say I have ever done a survey where I have to listen to someone else’s advice on what I should do). I think she got pissed and handed me off to the automated system where I gave no higher then a 3 in terms of the 1 – 10 scale rating and 1 being the lowest rating. Over all I spent 72 minutes on the phone (having a timer on your phone tends to be a bad thing I think).

I have been with Bank of America for 8 years, and to be honest have not left them because it seems all bank are a like and going from one bank to another just seems like trading one evil for another. It did bother me to find out that an illegal immigrant has a better chance at getting a credit card with them then I would.

But my issue with them started at the beginning of the month. I have a few accounts with them. One of which I all my money comes in, another which money I spend, a savings account, and one that I use with what may be questionable businesses. The one that’s for questionable business’s has had a zero balance for over 7 months. However they closed another one of my accounts that I use for buying things because they claim it had an extended zero balance. Which would be ummm 2 days. Yet the account that had the zero balance for 7 months was still open. I called them and got my usual run around, because so and so could not help me so they pass me to some one else. Each time they pass me to someone else I have to re-verify that I am the owner of the account. This gets rather annoying after the 5th time and spending 2 hours on the phone does not really help my mood. By the 5th person they say that they would have my account reopen by later to night. I was told that I would get a letter in the mail to explain why it was closed (could they not save a tree and tell me on the phone?).

Its two weeks later and I finale get the letter stating why my account was closed, and that they would not re-open it because “an extended zero balance”. They give me a number to call which was the wrong number to call, and the message states that I should call another number. So after called this number and have to go through what I consider the worst automated system of any company.

As I am doing this I am reading another letter from Bank of America stating I was being charged 2 $35 NSF fees for 2 transfers I did one for $1.00 and another for $680.00. I log onto my account to see:

As you can clearly see my account was not in the negative. I figured I would go over this after I dealt with the closed account. By this point I have been transferred 3 times, and I make it clear this lady could not help me she needs to transfer me to someone else. But she needs to verify who I am before she can tell me if she can help me . At this point I am livid and it took 5 times of demanding a manager before I got one.

And of coarse the manager wants to re-verify everything. I rush to give him info as I am hurry to get this done and over. He tells me that any information I volunteer is automatically disqualified.

Finale he looks into the account states he sees no reason that it should have been closed down. He states once again that it will be open within 24 hours.

Now I get onto the overdraft charges. He states it was because the charges were rejected and I was charged for insufficient funds. however I clearly had the funds on the account, and as you can see in the snap shot above there were funds in the account.

He ended up saying because of my issues with the account being closed he would give me my money back. But he should have been giving it back because there system messed up. So I will see if in 24 hours if they brought the account back online. It does appear I got my money back.

I conider it highway robbery to charge $35.00 on insufficent funds, esspecially a $1.00. I could see how this policy could bleed a poor family dry.