Had a bit of a shock today when I checked the statement of one of my cards and it was almost £1.5K more than it should have been.

Turns out this CC company had managed to request a balance transfer twice from another card of mine. The fun part is that it had been authorised both times even though after the first transfer there was actually nothing left on the balance of my original card. Clever of them, huh?

No wonder the original card company seemed so happy when I called them up. I was actually *in credit* with them - that can’t happen too often.

Well, it’s midday on Monday and I’m busy finding things other than work to do, hence me updating this a bit instead.

July is creeping up on me so I’ve been thinking a fair bit about my plans to return to the US. One problem at the minute is the price of plane tickets to San Diego, as the average seems to be about £700-£750, which is ridiculous. I guess that’s the problem with flying during peak season.

I’m sort of toying with the idea to fly to the East Coast instead first, and then spending about a month driving across the whole country to San Diego, hitting as many riding spots as possible along the way. That’d be just incredible, but I need to figure out costs and stuff properly as I can’t see that being too cheap to do.

On a geek note, thanks to Glyn for my new toy - an Alpha powered Compaq workstation with a 500MHz EV6 CPU and 1GB RAM. This thing flies. I initially had FreeBSD on it (natch), but I’ve installed Debian/Alpha out of curiosity and it’s running really, really well.

Edit: This is gnarly. Would make a cool pet.

Fancied a change of scenery this weekend, so we headed to Sheffield to ride street and hang out with Fletch and Dan. The weather was gorgeous, scores of fantastic girls were out and about, and there were tons of ace things to ride.

Aside from the little concrete skatepark, there’s an abundance of really good stuff to ride there and even on the Saturday it never seemed like it was too busy to session one particular spot.

I should have taken a load of pictures, but I didn’t really fancy having to carry my camera around everywhere (probably for the best as some spots we rode were fairly ghetto) so I didn’t bother. Maybe next time though.

We stayed at Chez Fletch, so thanks again to him for putting us up.

A handy dandy little leaflet arrived today regarding jury service which basically outlines what goes on, what is expected of me, all that kind of crap. Seems straightforward enough, though the formality of it all rubs me the wrong way somehow.

Anothing thing is that according to this it lasts 10 days, which I didn’t expect. It had better be something pretty damn interesting to hold my attention for that long.

On a completely unrelated note, the new Shipping News album ‘Three-Four’ is absolutely stunning. Recommended listening, for sure.

Oh yeah, and respect due to this guy: “I got a letter from a general at the Pentagon when the name change went through and he says it was great to have the employ of the commander of the Autobots in the National Guard.”