gonewest

Last month was a busy one expense wise and as a result I went over my limit a little on my American Express card. Normally, this would not concern me, but several years ago American Express tried to hike my rate up to about 20% for going over the limit even though I never miss payments or pay late. Long story short, they reset the rate once I made it clear that they would lose my business if they didn’t fix it immediately.

Well, I just called them to make sure that last month’s activity would not affect my interest rate and the gentleman that I spoke with not only assured me that that would not be a problem, he also offered to lower my rate from what I pay now. The change isn’t very much, of course, but when is the last time a credit company spontaneously offered to reduce your interest rate (and hence their profit margin) without any strings attached?

American Express gets a big gold star for that.

Here’s a great marriage of the Craigslist and the new Google Maps service. It’s a little slow in calling up a city, but HousingMaps is a great way to browse listings of properties for rent or sale.

Well, another 4th of July has come and gone. I didn’t do much for it (had a lot of work to try and catch up on) but I did find a good seat for the fireworks display that Sea World put on.

For the last four or five years, I spent July 4th in my old apartment in Memphis with nice views of downtown and midtown. While the apartment was not especially close to either of the two main fireworks displays, it was nice to have a few friends and family over to grill out and catch a nice, if distant, view of the shows.

I had set aside some time this evening to catch the fireworks show at Sea World and left the apartment at about 9:00 pm to walk over to Ski Beach at Mission Bay for a good view of the show at the water’s edge. On the way there, I could see four other shows going on: one at Pacific Beach, one at Mission Beach, and two Downtown. According to this link, there were almost 20 different fireworks displays throughout San Diego county — that’s a far cry from the two or three that Memphis puts on each year, but then this city is much larger.

I thought about riding my bike over to Ski Beach to save some time, but since I don’t have a light, I figured I shouldn’t be out on the streets with it at night. Silly me, the streets were full of both pedestrians and bicycles tonight and I didn’t see anyone riding with lights. Well, that’s not quite true, I did see one bike with a light — but it was being ridden by an older, overweight guy like myself. I guess the moral of that story is that bike safety is not cool.

My friend Tim has an Internet enabled weather station that you can visit to check the current Memphis weather.

It’s apparently 99.3