My wife and I have a shared credit card. I also have my own personal credit card. These are both from the same financial institution. The cards are under the same no fee program. Aside from the numbers and names on the cards they are identical with one major difference.

The interest rate.

I carry a balance. I am what they call “financially irresponsible” and probably shouldn’t be given any domain over any amount of money as I will inevitably squander it.

My wife, on the other hand, is the studious squirrel, carefully storing nuts for winter. Having a balance on her/our card is enough to make her nauseous.

The difference in our interest rates is pretty close to 2:1. The interest rate on my card is nearly double hers. It didn’t start that way. We started at the same interest rate. She never asked them to to take hers down. One day they sent her a letter telling her that her interest rate had gone down by nearly half.

This is easily understandable. They’re trying to entice her to use the card. To carry a balance. They don’t make money otherwise. I get this. Entirely.

That doesn’t change the rate that I’ve got. Considering the fees that I’m paying and my first hand knowledge that they can and will change the rate on these cards I sent a quick inquiry to my credit card company. It rambled down to basically, “Is there a method I can have my interest rate lowered? How?”

I received a form letter response in return that basically amounted to (and the voice in my head read it like Saddam from South Park… don’t ask), “Hey buddy. It’s always that interest rate, guy. We can’t change it. But since you’re such a spineless puppet and our card perks are so freakin’ awesome you’ll just sit there and take it. Go on. Take it. Yeah. You like that, don’t you?”

Yeah. The perks aren’t that awesome, I don’t want to take it, and I know for certain it is not always that rate.

I would have been okay if they declined. That they flat out lied to me that it can not be changed is what irks me. Looks like that card’s going to be paid off and canceled really soon.

david shute - 25.02.10 @ 21:26 - permalink

If you were using the old rss feed it is now dead that I’ve switch over from blogger to word press. The new link is http://www.butterflybullseye.com/?feed=atom

Of course, if the only way that you keep up with the site is through the old feed you’ll never see this. Meh. I’m good either way.

david shute - 24.02.10 @ 21:36 - permalink

I’d mentioned this on the old site but unfortunately that isn’t available through the new wordpress setup. (I know it’s tedious and I will stop bitching about it at every opportunity soon) So here’s the second go around.

Back in January of 2009 I had my first one act stageplay produced through KWLT‘s One Act Weekend. The production, A BRAND NEW HELL, went over incredibly well. I really enjoyed directing for the stage and the process was new and interesting for me. Having such a well received project get me in the mood to continue the process.

I wrote another one act shortly after called THE BETTER RAT TRAP. With my wife being pregnant at the time and the stage date being close to the due date I decided not to submit to next one act weekend. I passed it on to a friend, Lynn, shortly after and was chastized for not submitting it to her previously. I was something she was interested in directing herself. Unfortunately that has yet to come about as her schedule is packed pretty tight to begin with. By itself it still needs a bit of work both with me at the keyboard and with a couple actors going through the material.

I had gone to KWLT to check out THREE TALL WOMEN while it was on. I’m a big fan of Sue Kluckow, one of the performers in the productions, as evidenced by my using her in everything I possibly can. While I was there I started getting inklings for a new stage production. This was further ramped up the deadlines for submissions for the June One Act Weekend being a week away. Fifteen pages? One week? No problem.

Well, there was a problem. I really started to enjoy what I was working on. So much so that I wasn’t happy just to jam out twenty pages and submit it. I knew it wasn’t going to be ready anymore than just having the words down on page. There was some work needed to smooth it out and flesh it out. So I let it pass.

I’m still working on that one act as of this post. It is, coincidentally enough, titled EVERYBODY’S DEAD. The basic premise is simple. Everyone has fallen over dead except for two people who have the good fortune of being geographically close enough to find each other.

I still have a lot of work to do on it but I should have a first draft ready to go shortly. I think in the long term I’d like to finish this and two more one acts. Have a collection of five one acts that have been produced. I think that would be pretty decent.

david shute - 24.02.10 @ 01:34 - permalink

So it was an ugly hack and I’d hate to have to do it again and it really shoehorns my old site in to wordpress but it’s back and it didn’t take me all night. Still took way more that I’d like it to have. I’m sure I’ll find broken shit as time goes on. For now it works… Too bad I don’t have my old posts. Lame.

david shute - 24.02.10 @ 00:39 - permalink

Well, nothing I seem to do will import my old Blogger stuff. A serious pain in the ass and I don’t think I’m 100% ready to deal with that reality just yet. I’m also discovering that wordpress has some fuck bag format that makes it less than ideal to simply just kick over my old site formatting. It’s going to take time, effort, and patience. None of which I have. So for the time being I’ll be suffering this sad little theme.

david shute - 24.02.10 @ 00:14 - permalink

In honesty, I don’t know if I’m going to have to start all over again with this new WordPress install. There was just simply no way I was going to be able to continue with Blogger after they switch to Google only hosted webpages. This was just the easier way even though I haven’t quite figured out how to get all my Blogger content ported in to this new format.

I’ve got a lot of work that I need to do to get this up and running right, not the least of which is getting the page formatting all together again. It’ll get there, it’s just a pain in the ass when I had it all working previously just fine in Blogger. Blah.

I’ve  been messing with the WordPress import feature and it just hangs. Does absolutely nothing. It does this in both Firefox and Opera so I’m curious as to exactly what the fuck is going on. I tried exporting the atom RSS feed from Blogger and importing it that way. It tells me it’s all done and to “have fun” but doesn’t actually do anything.

I hate Google so much.

david shute - 23.02.10 @ 23:28 - permalink