Do I.T. Yourself

Several years back I had tried installing and using Ubuntu on an old Toshiba laptop. This was in 2007, and it was Ubuntu’s Feisty Fawn that I had received free cd’s after having signed up for them on the Ubuntu Website.

Four years later and we’re into Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, released in April of last year. I hear the Maverick Meerkat is out and it’s only going to be a matter of time before I update this laptop, provided for (albeit temporarily, until June) by the iSchools Project of the Center for Information Communication and Technology at the National Computer Center in Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.

The iSchools Project is the brainchild of former CICT Commissioner Emmanuel C. Lallana. Dr. Lallana recognizes the need to modernize the educational system. He believes that education, like medicine and business, should take advantage of the benefits of ICT and explore what ICT has to offer. According to Dr. Lallana, unlike the other fields, the educational system is still stuck with 19th century methods of teaching and learning. It’s time to bring education to the 21st century.

I was taken in as a writing and technical consultant in the last five months of the project, and to help me do my work I was issued an HP 6530b laptop with Edubuntu installed. I’m not sure if it was my familiarity with Ubuntu or its closeness to the Windows environment that had me jump into work right away with nary a learning curve on how to use the free and open source software operating system.

But it all came back to me: Synaptic package manager, sudo apt-get, gimp and open office. I even remembered how to put in a new root password for su. Well, I really didn’t remember on my own, but I did find a place on the ‘net that reminded me.

Launch a shell as root. Therefore, using sudo you can type:
~$ sudo passwd
Password:
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:

-from Ubuntux.org

So here I am typing happily away, browsing with Chromium (Chrome for Linux) and getting my domain mail via IMAP on Thunderbird.

Long live FOSS!

Yes, I am a credit card defaulter.

Now that THAT’s out of the way I would like to share with you what I have learned while researching how I could best pay off my debts.

First note: I am a defaulter NOT a defrauder. Those are two very different things.

A Defaulter is someone who, for one reason or another, is not at the moment capable of paying his credit card debt.

A Defrauder, on the other hand, is someone who used false information to acquire the credit card in the first place. This is what happened in Singapore recently when several people from a credit card sales company were arrested for falsifying employment details of several clients just so their applications for credit cards would be approved by the issuing banks.

I am a defaulter. I had used my credit card, when it was active, to buy groceries to feed my family and pay household utility bills. I didn’t even use the cash advance facility, because my issuing bank had not enabled it for my account. I was settling my bills back then, every payday via online banking, because our payroll bank was also my CC issuing bank. I could pay direct from online access.

Then Typhoon Ondoy struck. And from then on I had been unable to make payments on the card. Too many repairs on the house, too many furniture rendered useless and needed replacement. I had maxed out my card and had to use cash on hand for purchases.

I am writing this now because a law firm has contacted me by mail, and is now demanding that I pay an amount that is more than three times my card’s credit limit, and to pay thirty percent of that amount within the next five days to avoid litigation. When I contacted the law firm to confirm and negotiate I was told that the payment was necessary before they could send me the restructuring agreement. In the meantime I had to come up with several thousand pesos to give to them.

While I was pondering how on earth I was to manage that when I was currently jobless and sending one child to college, I recalled a conversation I had with a friend recently. He had mentioned that people in the legal department of any company usually had a difficult time getting a credit card, and that was mainly because credit card issuers know that these people knew their rights.

And what are OUR RIGHTS, as credit card holders now unable to make payment for one reason or another?

I looked this up in Google — something I should have done long ago — and I found these two blogs:

Clickmarbin, in his blog post How to Deal with Credit Card Debt Collectors in The Philippines? has made be breathe easier by informing me of my rights as a credit card defaulter. In addition to that, he has also written this: A Credit Card Debt Collector in The Philippines Can Tell A Lie.

Further reading revealed another source, Mr. Banker, in his blog post Utang – What I’d Do!. This is one of many very informative and down-to-earth advice for credit card defaulters, in his blog DISKARTE (Guidelines on Credit Cards Paranoia).

These two bloggers have helped me sleep better after I read their articles, knowing that I am EMPOWERED TO PAY MY DEBTS, but in a manner in which I can afford.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Banker’s blog:

1. Ask for a Statement of Account

This is the FIRST step. You mean you will just accept ANY amount just because of their say so?…. okay, I give up then. go ahead, pay.
Otherwise, you cannot go to Step 2 without resolving this issue first.

2.Once received, review.
Is it duly signed and certified correct by an authorized bank signatory?
You would not want a janitor signing your SOA, would you?

3.Offer what you can afford ONLY,not what they want.
You are the one responsible for its payment,not them.
propose reductions or waivers.
(especially those excessive charges!)

4.If there’s an Agreement,document it!
no verbal agreement. they can deny it later on.

5 If they won’t agree, don’t force yourself to pay even if you cannot afford.
it will just dig you deeper further into debts.

6.Since no agreement can be made,let the court to decide.
(definitely, the court will reduce it!)

So now, you have your reason everytime they call.
How can they collect when you are still asking for that SOA?
How can they charge you with RA 8484(Intention to Defraud)?
How can they file a case when you are willing to settle it?

Learn from your lessons after that. Avoid making the credit card as your financial crutches.

Perhaps the most important advice is the last line. Contrary to what some readers may think, Clickmarbin and Mr. Banker are not advocating non-payment. What they are advocating is CREDIT CARD DEBT PAYMENT within one’s means.

I may be a defaulter, but I am by no means a defrauder. My credit card issuer has my complete contact details, and so does the collection agency. I answer my phone calls personally and I do reply to text messages and calls when I am able to do so.

No credit card collector has the right to bully me into paying an exorbitant amount to “settle” my debt. No credit card collector has the right to coerce me into paying by sending threatening text messages, or pretending to be sheriffs who can come into my house take away my property in payment for my debt. I am not hiding, they know where to find me. I am willing to pay, but within my means.

I hope whoever reads this and happens to be on the same boat as I am will visit the other blogs that I have linked to above, and know that we do have our rights and that we should uphold them.

File Extension RTF may not be familiar to newer computer users. In these days of MS Office 2007′s docx format and backwards file version compatibility, the rtf file has fallen by the wayside, forgotten as the format that can be read by almost any other word processing software.

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated File Extension RTF) is a document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.

Unlike most word processing formats, good RTF code can be made human-readable. That is to say that when an RTF file is opened in a text editor, the text is legible and the markup language is not too distracting or counter-intuitive. The RTF files produced by most programs, such as MS Word, will contain such a large number of control codes for compatibility with older programs that most files will easily be an order of magnitude larger than the raw text and very difficult to read. Formats such as MS Word’s .doc are, in contrast, binary formats with only a few scraps of legible text.

So next time you would like to share an MS Word document with someone who does not have the Microsoft program to open it, try saving it with file extension RTF.

At first glance it looks just like the real ebay site. But a quick look at the URL in the address bar will tell you that this is NOT ebay.

The link says http://www.grandzawiyah.com/state.wa/signin.htm?213rjceirjqexr98rdlkmsanchfrinvc58ucrdjkxnerimjgtmxkjnzmhrugt45ncoirehviuhtrckm45x and you end up here if you happen to have received the spoofed ebay email.

My client got theirs from email address eBay Member: quickshipelectronics [mailto:lindbergjh@hotmail.com] and as usual I checked the URLs embedded in the email. While on the surface the URLs say http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130258573190 the actual destination is http://www.shamick.com/SWF?item=130258573190 which leads you to the URL of the site in the screenshot above.

However, www.shamick.com and www.grandzawiyah.com appear to be legitimate domains and websites — but people with malicious intent may have hijacked a subfolder on their hosting service where the redirect from shamick.com/swf has been placed to lead to the fake ebay landing page above.

So a CAVEAT to all. Check the actual links before you click on them, especially if you know you shouldn’t be getting emails from services you have not signed for. Mouse over the link and then check if the URL that appears in your status bar matches the link and is the actual URL of the service.

A friend introduced me to the CoolIris (formerly known as Piclens) plugin for Firefox and like a giddy nit I downloaded it and plugged it into my spanking new Firefox 3.0.1 installation on this spanking new laptop.

Turned out it was one of the culprits that, with Norton 360 installed, caused programs to turn into zombies in Task Manager after I had closed them. Imagine having five instances of Firefox lined up in the Task Manager Processes list each consuming a minimum of 50,000K and you’ll feel the chill. Add to that other instances of programs that you have already closed, still sitting in Task Manager as running programs, eating up resources that they should have spit out a few seconds after they were closed. Feel your spine tingling now? Mine did, even with 2GB of RAM on this Intel Centrino vPro.

Googling around gave me two solutions. Disable the CoolIris plugin and unregister buShell.dll which is part of Norton 360′s backup component.

For a few minutes I couldn’t uninstall CoolIris through the Addons window in Firefox. Every click on Disable or Uninstall and Restart Firefox I made ended up with the plugin still there and enabled. I had to go into my Firefox Profile folder and delete the darned folders just to get rid of it.

But after the buShell.dll unregistration and the removal of CoolIris, I must report all is well on this installation. According to my research the same effect is caused by the Skype plugin for Firefox as well so if anyone out there is experiencing the problems stated above, look into both CoolIris and the Skype plugin on your Firefox browser.