Has anyone else heard of Jonathan Coulton? (Is anyone else reading this? Feel free to let me know if you are.) Anyway, Jonathan Coulton is a singer I had never heard of whose songs are full of awesomeness. Geeky, geeky awesomeness. My recommendations:

For computer geeks and other people with cubicles: "Re: Your Brains", "Code Monkey"

For bad sci-fi movie geeks who like zombies and robots and such: "Re: Your Brains" (yes, I meant to put that in both categories), "Skullcrusher Mountain", "Chiron Beta Prime"

For history/literature geeks: "Presidents", "Soft Rocked by Me" (because not many lyrics can correctly identify the use of the passive voice in their own song)

Other: "Madeline", "Ikea", "Stroller Town"
- posted by Darcey @ 7:13 PM

 

So you know all those TV shows about “flipping” houses? Well, I believe the house of my childhood has been flipped. My parents sold the house and moved a couple months ago (to a condo, in Fishers, but don’t get me started on that). Now, the house is back on the market – and the new owners are trying to sell it for a 100 grand more. How do they expect to get all this money? Well, from the photographs, they seem to have ripped out a wall, added some hard wood floors and a basketball goal, and then they did one of two things – they either discovered a portal to another dimension that magically doubled the size of the house, or they lied. I’ll let you make up your own mind. Here is the link:

Darcey's House No More

Can you find the 5100 square feet? Also, they appear to have either added a bathtub or lied some more about that. I suppose that one could go either way.

But on the subject of my parents and their foolish decision to move away and leave me homeless… this foolish decision also seems to have prevented me from viewing my credit report. I decided yesterday that I should try to view my credit report and make sure no one had stolen me. The way this works is you get one free credit report per year from each of the three major credit agencies. You do this by going to annualcreditreport.com, not freecreditreport.com, no matter how much their jingle tries to mess with your mind. The annualcreditreport.com comes from the government and takes you to each of the three credit reporting agencies.

Each agency, after trying to sell you things without you knowing it, then tries to verify that you are you by giving you a pop quiz about you. It claims to be asking you a series of questions that it claims only you should know the answer to. However, in reality, these questions are freakily detailed facts about your car and your student loans that even you don’t know the answer to, and you are a little scared by the fact that the credit reporting agency does. I failed my first two quizzes, so now I can’t get the reports from those two agencies unless I send them several more very personal pieces of identification, like a social security card or a kidney, through the mail. I was able to access the third one, which is where I discovered why I had failed the first quiz, which brings me back to my original point.

The credit agencies seem to think I live at my parent’s new hoity toity townhouse. The first agency asked me which of the following streets I’d lived on – I said “None of the above” but apparently the answer was the street where my parents just moved, where I have yet to even visit. (I failed the second agency’s quiz because it wanted to know which bank was in charge of my student loans – apparently this is a different organization than the one that actually sends me my bills. I have looked through all the papers they have sent me and couldn’t find this info anywhere. Only the credit agency knows.) Anyway, the report that I did get seemed to be slightly confused by my plethora of addresses and the order in which I lived at them, and they also listed a phone number from college as my current phone number, but they didn’t list any overdue payments on a yacht I’ve never seen or anything like that, which I think is all I need to be concerned about.

- posted by Darcey @ 6:24 PM