from the edge of the deep green sea

Yesterday I ordered a pizza with Papa Johns and my credit card was denied.  “This can’t be good” was the first thing I thought. After quickly checking my online statement, I found out that between December 31st – January 8th, there had been about $5,000 of unauthorized charges to my credit card – ‘yay!’  For the record, most of these charges were done in Cape Town, South Africa, a place where Jose mentioned that 2 colleagues had the same problem a while back.  In other words, watch your freakin’ credit card while in SA, never let anyone take it where you cannot see it.

Even though I have credit card fraud insurance with HSBC, I will have to take the fall for 10% of the total charges, which obviously sucks.  I had heard about stories in which credit cards were cloned, but I never thought I’d be a victim.  So I’m thinking about ways for this to never happen again, or at least, that if it does happen again, it is not as bad as this one.  Here are some ideas:

1. Get a credit card that offers 100% insurance if your credit card has a high limit.
2. Regardless of the card, always have some type of insurance
3. Check your credit card statements every day.  Takes 5 minutes, can save you a lot.
4. Completely wipe out the 3 digit security code that every card has, make it so that it is not readable (but make sure you write it down somewhere)
5. Talk with your bank and have something fire off an e-mail alert when there are charges greater than $500 (thanks Maria)
6. Try to never lose sight of your credit card (something really to accomplish in Costa Rican bars and restaurants)

Any others you’d like to share?

[UPDATE] I wrote to some friends I met in Cape Town warning them about this issue and here is their reply:

crazy stuff is happening..my mastercard data has been copied and used as well. before i was able to block it I lost round about 1.100 euro between 30.12.2008 and 03.01.2009. in germany things run a little different.. I don’t have insurance but it seems like mastercard will do a “chargeback” after they received the receipts from the different shops… (what they basicly do is make sure it wasn’t me) luckily i can prove the abuse because I had left SA on the 19.12 already….
by the way, same thing happened to a friend of mine in cape town I was sharing a room with..

so at least you’re not alone

I arrived Cape Town on Saturday December 13th. While on the plane I started feeling by blood rush when I saw the landscape that this place offers (shitty pictures from my phone):

My bag arrived fairly quick from the carrousel and then I had to answer the million dollar question:

Should I rent a car or not?

Why was I being such a chicken shit in just renting a motorized mode of transportation? My biggest fear was the fact that in South Africa driving takes place place on the “wrong” side of the road (left). Other than that, I had no idea how safe getting lost was in this place, and I have a keen ability for this.

When I weighted these cons against the fact of being stranded to wherever those shitty red tourist buses take you, I decided to give the rental company a run for its insurance and gave it a shot. It is not as bad as one may think, although as soon as you are sitting on the car with the gears on your left (they did not have automatic transmission cars available) and your universe slowly shifting into bizzarro world you think to yourself “I’ve made a huge mistake”.

After driving around the Avis parking lot to make sure I got the hang of this new form of driving, I ventured forth into the road (with a GPS, of course) and see how things would turn out.

One of the first things I noticed whilst driving is that the average driver is Cape Town drives really slow even though there are amazing roads which we, Costa Ricans, can only dream of having. This of course was a great thing for me, because while listening to the GPS, shifting gears with my left hand, and dealing with roundabouts, my brain was about to have a meltdown. I also quickly realized (after a couple of honks here and there) that the slow lane in highways is the LEFT lane Here is a pic of my faithful companion during this trip (+500 Km):

I stayed at the Souther Sun Hotel near the Waterfront, which was a great place to be in terms of security, price, and general hospitality of the staff. They have a van that will take you to the Waterfront every 30 minutes and it runs until 23:00, which is a safe way to drink yourself into oblivion without having to worry about a DUI. It is worth noting that I also drove close to the 12 Apostles Hotel a few days later, which was right in front of the beach and very close to Table Mountain. Had I known before and I’d probably would have booked there given that I had a car.

Once settled, I headed straight to the Waterfront, which is where you will find lots of great restaurants, a big shopping mall, countless number of shops that sell all that native African stuff that is worth buying (masks, handmade crafts, drums, etc). Outside the waterfront, you are able to find all kinds of things going on in terms of entertainment. There is a small plaza where there are live shows and just walking around you will find find all kinds of streetside shows in a very safe environment:

For being a touristy place, I generally found Cape Town very reasonably priced. Dining out is very cheap when compared to the US & UK and the weather during this time of the year was close to perfect. I was in the Waterfront most of the day trying to chase away my jetlag, and what better way to do so whilst downing some some beers and wines (the wines were out of this fucking world, I tried an amazing Shiraz from Wines of Jordan)

Some random pics from that day:

Next post: Cape Town Day 2: The Winelands and the Boat Trip

Whilst I sit to board my flight, drinking an kick ass Shiraz, I am getting an empty feeling that is bringing me down. I feel like I am about to lose something that I enjoyed, an integral part of what has been an amazing experience for the last 4 days.

I felt this once in the past when I left Bangkok, and the feeling lives within until (I assume) one goes back to those places that have made you incredibly happy. Having the opportunity to visit South Africa, I decided to venture forth and head to Cape Town just because I had heard it was “kind of cool”.

I had never, ever imagined that a place with such magnificence could exist. From the ever lasting gaze of Table Mountain, to getting a buzz early in the morning while tasting some of the best wines in the Winelands, to being in a freakin’ cage admiring a Great White Shark a meter away or just driving and getting lost – there is no wrong turn in Cape Town – or at least, I could not find it.

I really do not want to make this all of one post because it would not be fair at all to this incredible place, I’ll try to slice it and dice it to give anyone an idea of what to do and how to do it when they come around.

Now…I don’t want to write anything. I am feeling a knot down my throat as I am watching the sunset from afar, hoping that I could extend this stay a day or two, or why not – the rest of my life. I will see you again Cape Town, you can count on it.

Listening to LastFM is amazing, you can find amazing music there based on the music you currently listen to. I was growing a bit tired of copying and pasting artist and album info to find some of their music in torrent sites, so I wrote some applescript code that gets the job done.

This code ONLY works if you are listening to Last.FM with iScrobbler, because the script uses the iTunes applescript dictionary to get the current iTunes song, and iScrobbler does exactly that – play LastFM tracks on your iTunes.

You can watch the script in action in the following link: LastFMFinderinAction

So in order to use:

1. Open Script Editor and paste the script below
2. Compile the Code and save it as an Application so you can quickly invoke it, call it “FindLastFMAlbum” or something more creative
3. Download and Install iScrobbler
4. Tune in a station that you want
5. When you find hear a song you like, invoke the app, it will use artist + album parameters to find the album that has the song

The script:

property this_artist : “”

property this_track : “”

property this_album : “”

property serch_url : “”

tell application “iTunes”

try

if not (exists current track) then return

set this_artist to (get artist of current track)

set this_track to (get name of current track)

set this_album to (get album of current track)

end try

end tell

–Demonoid

set searchString to replace_chars(this_artist, ” “, “+”) & “+” & replace_chars(this_album, ” “, “+”)

set search_url to “http://www.demonoid.com/files/?category=2&subcategory=All&quality=All&seeded=0&external=2&query=” & searchString & “&uid=0&sort=”

open location search_url

–PB

set searchString to replace_chars(this_artist, ” “, “%20″) & “+” & replace_chars(this_album, ” “, “%20″)

set search_url to “http://thepiratebay.org/search/” & searchString & “/0/99/100″

open location search_url

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to the search_string

set the item_list to every text item of this_text

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to the replacement_string

set this_text to the item_list as string

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “”

return this_text

end replace_chars

(give this pic a thumbs up in the social wallpapering site! )

I went over to Mount St. Helens this weekend. Long story short: this active volcano erupted in the 1980s and pretty much changed everything around it. Some of the pics below show the mountain post-eruption, it pretty much blew the top off, here is what it looked life before (it had a top):

It is an amazing place, definitely go see it if you happen to be close to Seattle (2 hour drive) and happen to catch one of the 226 days that it is NOT cloudy. Some random pics:

My beautiful mother and myself on our way to the top (driving – of course)

That’s in Johnston Ridge observatory, looks like a montage

Amazing place

On our way there, the climate could not have been more generous

This was about 1 hour away from getting there

Today I met with a colleague from work who coincidentally was on vacation in Thailand.  This changes the panorama a lot because quite frankly it sucks to travel alone.  After 1:00 p.m. we too the BTS to the Somdet Phra Chao Taksin bridge.  From there you can take the tourist ferry for like 100 Bahr (~$3).   That is the easiest way to get to the area around the Grand Temple and the Wat Pho since no metro or BTS arrives to that area (I really wonder why).  You gotta love a country where you can buy beer anywhere, and Thailand is no exception.   Just before getting in the boat, buy a beer from the local merchants and then enjoy the trip.

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Here are some pics from the Thai Boxing match (takes forever to upload):

If you no likey slide show, here are the pics:

Mai Thai Fight September 9th, 2007

In Costa Rica, we have boxing matches every now and then.   Usually 3-4 fights, they cost like $30 and quite frankly, after seeing Thai boxing, I have come to the conclusion that Costa Rican boxing plain sucks.  Let me rephrase that, Boxing sucks.   Thai boxing is way cooler than any Ultimate Fighting Championship matches, and this is based on the matches that I saw yesterday, which was a regular Sunday match.

There are Thai fights every night around the city, just ask at a tourist info office on which stadium is the schedule one.  The one we saw was in Ratchadamnoem Boxing Stadium.  You can buy ringside tickets for 2000 Bhar (around $60) and they are worth every penny.  Yesterday night we saw about 8 fights, one of which was a comedy one.  I really don’t know if it was the beer or the comedy fight was that funny, but I was literally laughing my ass off.

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I was gonna append this to my earlier post but it was way big already.   The Grand Palace and Wat Phra Creaw are on the western side of the city.  If you are tight on time, make sure you go here, it is an impressive place.  You will see lots of impressive structures as well as the Jade Buddha.   Here are some pics.

The Grand Palace

I was recently informed that I had the chance of going to Bangkok, Thailand to deliver a seminar on Microsoft HPC technology.  Knowing a bit on the subject, I decided to give it a go.  So after 20+ hours of plane time I arrived Bangkok.   Customs and immigration was a breeze.  When you arrive, I’d recommend taking a taxi from the yellow dressed people next to the baggage claim.  They will arrange everything for you and it will cost you around $30 (they will verify the address of your hotel or where you are going, which makes it safe).

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