Recently I got a call from my attorney that you really don’t want to get. No, I didn’t lose a law suit. Instead, his office was broken into, and part of the records stolen include my credit card info.

So the question is, how to deal with this – and how to prepare for the next time this happens. (If you assume your credit card info will never be stolen, you are taking a risky gamble. I’m rather careful with my personal data and still have to cancel my cards about once every five years).

First, calm down. While it’s annoying, you’re not on the hook for large amounts of money. Federal law limits your liability to $50. Still, it’s a good idea to notify your credit card company immediately. Usually, they cancel your card the moment they receive your call, but if you want to be safe, follow up with a letter.

However, that’s when the fun starts. You’ll likely have several services that get charged to your credit card on a monthly basis. And the card companies take their sweet time to get a new card to you – up to 10 business days. In my case, I started getting lots of e-mails reminding me that my card was invalid – and Vonage was nice enough to cut my international phone services. (Understandable, but rather annoying)

So here’s the list of steps I’m now taking to be prepared:

• Keep a list of all your credit cards complete with the number to contact in case of loss.
• Keep a list of all services that are charged to your card on a recurring basis, complete with contact info.
• And finally, have an alternate card that you can switch over to.

That way, you’ll be able to minimize your hassles once the inevitable happens.

If you’re in a similar situation, you know how annoying this is – I really don’t want to do the same status update on 15 webpages. For a long time, I’ve been only updating my Twitter page. It’s the most convenient one, just one key press away, thanks to Twitterific. A few days ago, Tim Bray was also wondering about different places to update your status. And one of his readers was kind enough to point out MoodBlast. It’s a wonderful little application that lets you post your status to a large number of services simultaneously.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have decided it might be a good idea to make legal threats against anybody who’s not using their approved API – which doesn’t support status updates. (Interestingly enough, Facebook has no problem employing the same techniques to scrape data from other applications, like gmail.)

This points out a fundamental problem of many web applications – your data is under the control of somebody else. Both import and export only happen at the whim of somebody else. And in Facebook’s case, that’s a 23-year old who seems to have power delusions.

This probably means I’ll abandon Facebook sooner or later, and I’ll definitely be re-evaluating all the web services I use if they provide open access to my data. I suggest you do the same – otherwise, more important data than your “status” might be locked away.

Tags: Twitter, Facebook, open data

The situation: A guy is running iTunes Visualizer during a party, and the Apple Logo is one of the Visualizers, so it pops up from time to time. (It’s not really a surprise – if you ever ran Visualizer, you’d know…)

The solution Ellinore over at CNet has is writing a blog article to complain about the “troubling” act of Apple, “sneaking in” a billboard.

Let’s instead try to solve the problem. We want to run iTunes Visualizer without the Apple Logo – how can we invoke the power of the Internets for us?

Well, obviously Google is one answer. So how do we build a decent search query for Google? I’ve usually had luck by keeping the search terms to a minimum, only listing items that are crucial to the question at hand. So what goes into our query?

• iTunes – this is what it’s all about
• Visualizer – that’s the part of iTunes we want to fix
• Apple Logo – that’s what we want to operate on
• remove – that’s what we want to do

Now, let’s structure that so it resembles a Noun-Verb-Object structure – Google seems to like that. This gives us: “iTunes Visualizer remove Apple Logo“. And lo and behold (I love saying that!), the very first result gives us the answer.

It turns out the guy who wrote the original iTunes Visualizer also wrote something called G-Force – a visualizer plugin for pretty much most media players that have any relevance, including iTunes. Without any logos, for somewhere between free and $30, depending on what features you want.

To be fair, the original article mentions in passing that there are other options than the default – but without any links. I guess it’s easier to complain than to solve the problem…

For more interesting tidbits, check out Wikipedia’s keyboard shortcuts.