As many of you may have noticed, It has been a very long time since I have posted anything. No good reason aside from a crashed hard drive, Very busy with the fire department, My father passed away, and no real progress towards building SvSojourn.

That being said I am not sure if anytime in the future I will be taking on such a project. Life is funny how it steers us in different directions.

Not all is lost however, I did have a great education joining the various hangouts and following other boat builders on their various projects and adventures. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it is OK to watch.

I had thought about deleting this blog but then realized there may be some useful information to someone who happens across this blog in the future. For now I will just focus my attention on my fire department and the new Go Pro camera I got for Christmas from my brother. I thought maybe I would make a blog about it and my experiments.

So that is all for me on the Building of SV Sojourn. It was a nice dream that was not yet ready for reality. Thanks to all that were reading and were interested.

Take care...

Is your bank account secure?

While this is not directly related to building SV Sojourn, I think this is something that everyone can relate too.

Dangers

When we are doing business online, or even far away at distant port...sometimes our banking information is at risk. More specifically our credit, and or debit cards. In this day and age it is convenient to order our products online. While we usually try to stick with reputable vendors, often times we happen across that "Great deal" from an online advertisement or website that may be questionable. Even if it is a known and reliable vendor, things happen to put our security at risk.

For those of you with credit cards, no doubt you have far better fraud protection than those of us that have only a debit card. This article is more so aimed at users of debit cards but may also be of interest to users of credit cards as well.

My experience

Most recently I had an experience which caused a little bit of grief and inconvenience for me. I went to my local gas station for some fuel and a few other small items. I am a frequent customer so this isn't some sort of new place for transactions. I had recently checked my bank account and knew I had enough funds for my purchases.

Upon running my debit card, the terminal came back with transaction not approved. The clerk made a second attempt and still the same result. A bit irritated, I drove the 10 miles home and checked my bank account again to see if there were any pending charges. As I suspected there were not.

The next day thinking perhaps it was a communication error, I made the 10 mile drive back to the same station to try again. Same error...

I was able to call my banks customer service and the service rep was able to inform me that there were several suspect fraudulent charges attempted on my account so they froze my debit card use. This was a first for me but I am happy they have such safeguards in place. The service rep was able to unfreeze my card so I could make my transaction and after that I decided to shut down the card and have a new one sent.

The strange thing is I had not recently made any online purchases and can only assume my debit card info was obtained by someone getting my information from a vendor's website or records.

Solutions

We hear of these horror stories all the time and with more dire consequences. I try to do mostly cash purchases when I can. Of course those times online we can't do cash so other options should be explored.

I will likely be using my pay pal account more often and when I cant, I will be most likely using a prepaid credit/debit cards. My other option is to set up an account for online purchases only and just transfer funds into the account as needed.

These things happened near my home so not as big a deal. Consider if I was taking a road trip and in some far away place I discover my account had been compromised and I was left with no funds for fuel etc? Take it one step further and lets say it was some foreign port? All things to consider in this world of electronic banking and purchases.

I am sure many of you can tell similar stories. I know most of you have your own solution to these problems and would be great to hear them. This is a very real problem in today's society so being armed with more information on solutions would be great.

I look forward to hearing any comments and suggestions.

Scotty