My credit card number is stolen again.  I think it is the 2nd time this happening to me.  Last time the bank notify me on a suspicious transaction on an expensive item somewhere in another province, and cut my card right away.  This time the usage pattern of the stolen credit card is different.  The credit card theft made lots of small purchase online, several tens of dollar here and a few hundred there.  I only catch it when I review my credit card statement before I pay the balance.  I am pretty sure those are not my purchase, since during the day of transaction, I was locked away in a church retreat with no internet connection.  I called the bank at once, after they confirmed with me the fraud transcations and they deactivate my card.  I will receive a new card with a new number in a few days.  The bank will refund the fraud purchase to me after I complete some paper work.

The report a credit card lost process seems quite customer friendly.  I heard stories that people got their credit card stolen and the debt ruined their life.  From my experience, stolen credit card seems not a big deal, just some minor nuisance and inconvenience.  Yes, I have still have to go through the troubles of update all my pre-authorize credit payment.  This is the same process that I have to go through once every few years when my old credit card expires, nothing to worry about.  I still have no idea how my credit card number got stolen.  It is not missing from my wallet and I only make online payment through trusted websites.  The lesson of this story is always check your credit card statement.  Fraud in a mall amount may easily unnoticed if you don’t check the statement carefully line by line, especially if you are a high volume credit card user like myself.

I finally create a fluff in Facebook of my own. The idea of fluff is not new, Tamagochi pioneered the market of virtual pet. Linking up your virtual pet with virtual the pets of your friends over the internet is also not new, Sony had made the now defunct Post Pet in the Web 1.0 era. On the surface, fluff offers nothing new. You have cute cartoon animals, you can buy various virtual food or habitant with virtual money. You can earn virtual money either by petting your friend’s pet or place bets in virtual pets races. It is just a plain old boring virtual pet.

I have quite a number of friends is obsess about petting and feeding the virtual pets.  I try to understand why fluff is so popular and many people are addicted to this simple 2D virtual pet. Cute graphics definitely helps, girls love cute things and then pressure their boyfriends to play along. Piggy-back on Facebook is also a major factor. Many people logon to Facebook quite often, so playing fluff and recruiting new members is very convenient. Fluff catches their eye-ball and it is only a mouse click away.

I think the most important factor is the racing system. To be exact, it is not the race itself, but the speed attribute of the fluff. You can increase this number by feeding your flutt. In order to do so, you have to pet your friend’s flutt to earn virtual money to buy food.  Your friends will pet your flutt in return and hence complete a never-ending pet, feed and race cycle.  If there  exists some sort of score, it is just human nature wanting to get a higher score. When the score goes up, it will give the mind a sense of satisfaction, even the score really doesn’t mean anything. This mentality applies to fluff players, applies to online RPG gamers who pursuit high level and stronger weapons.  To some extend it also apply to those who accumulate wealth but never spend a dime.

I am elected the VP of education of the Toastmaster club at work.  The role of VP education is to help the club member become a better speaker.  Although I am half way through the advance speaker bronze program, I don’t think I can make particularly good speeches comparing to the native speakers.  I am not very convincing to teach others how to deliver a good speech.  Anyways, if I am just comparing to myself, I can see the progress I have made over time.

One of the responsibilities of VP education is to give presentations to the club members on how to give better speech or make the club better.  The Toastmaster has lots of resources to help my role.  The education series manuals are prepared speeches with slides ready to use.  Today, I just inherit a box full of education materials from the previous club president.  I volunteer myself to give the first education session, hoping that it will inspire other executive to step in for later sessions.  I quickly went through the stuffs and picked a manual for next month’s education session.  Maybe I couldn’t do everything right that is outlined in the manual when I am giving a speech.  I strongly believe in the best way to learn is to teach.  By giving a presentation, the points will engrave deeper into my mind and help me become a better speaker subconsciously.

A 17 years old kid hacked the iPhone, making phone call using networks other than AT&T is already old news. There is also an alternative hack fooling the iPhone using a turbo SIM that pretends to be a AT&T SIM card. I have quite some friends at work who bought the iPhone readily tried the hacks and eagerly showing off their fully functional iPhone.  As an engineer, I am genuiely interested in the technical details of hacks, but I am more interest in responding to an comment from a friend who condemns the hacks.

She is complaining all the hacking deprive the profit of AT&T and hacking in general cause the lack of investment in R&D because company cannot turn a profit. I have to disagree with her argument. AT&T is making a wrong and stupid business decision for locking up the iPhone.  It is our consumer right to tinker with whatever product we purchase by making it a better product that suits us better. If the company put in anti-user features that alienate the customers by making the product hard to use, we have every right to remove those unwanted features ourselves.  The invisible hand will punish those who act against the force of the free market.  The only way to make a profit is by giving the consumers what they want, not stupidly going against the consumers’ will.

In terms of business ethics, the consumers should only be responsible to pay for whatever they wish to buy. It is unjust to exploit the consumers by bundling sub-standard product with a high demand product.  The consumer should be given the option of not buying things they don’t need or wanted.  Everyone knows AT&T has the worse cellular network in US. If AT&T wants to gain more market share, it should provide a better service, instead of holding iPhone users as hostages.