Ant Drewery

I thought it was one of those things that only happened to other people but I’ve become a victim of identity theft. Despite shredding documents and being cautious when entering personal information on the Internet someone managed to get enough information about me to change the address on my credit card and go on a £12,000 (US$20,000) spending spree! The credit card company have frozen the account and are now investigating.

Whilst you can’t guarantee to protect yourself completely you can take some sensible steps towards prevention and minimising the possible impact:

• Shred all documents using a cross-cut shredder before putting in the trash.
• Be very aware when you are entering personal information over the Internet. Is the site asking for too much information about you?
• Make use of online banking facilities to regularly check your bank and credit card statements for unusual activity.
• If you don’t receive expected statements/documents by post chase it up with the sender ASAP. This is what prompted me to contact my credit card company as I also couldn’t view my account online.
• Don’t answer security questions from cold callers even if they claim to be from your bank/credit card. Politely decline then call them back on the official customer service number. That way you know you’re speaking to someone from the company who called you.
• Check your credit history on a regular basis to ensure no one is taking credit out in your name. Sites like www.creditexpert.co.uk can provide a service where you’re notified by email or SMS if there are any changes to your credit report.

I’ve just signed up for 30 Boxes and whilst exploring the features noticed it has the ability to display your local weather to your buddies. As with a lot of applications I’ve encountered they prompt for a US zip code thereby giving the impression that only US weather can be displayed. However, in most cases you can also enter a code for other cities around the world. To get the code for your city try the following:

• Go to the weather.com World Search.
• Find and display the weather for your city.
• Now look at the URL for the page. After /local/ you should see a code that looks something like this UKXX0215.
• Copy the code and paste it into the Your Weather field on 30 Boxes.

With a bit of luck it will have found your local (non-US) city.

Technorati Tags: weather, 30Boxes, 30 Boxes

They say that every day is a school day and today is no exception. Maybe this is common knowledge for most but I learned that data is actually a plural from the Latin singular datum (in the same way that agenda is the plural of agendum).

Although it has become acceptable in modern language to refer to data as singular its correct usage would be as a plural e.g. “My data were corrupted by the server crash”.

Technorati Tags: grammar, language

It’s been a bit light on the postings front for the last few days due to work commitments and some DR exercises we’re running. As a result of this though I should have some interesting topics to blog about very soon.

Welcome to my blog. I’m Ant Drewery and I currently manage the Messaging team at an international container shipping company. I’m responsible for our global messaging systems and the team that supports them. At 6000 mailboxes our Exchange implementation certainly isn’t the largest around but it does have a degree of complexity due to the way we use email and because we’ve consolidated 5 separate Exchange 5.5 organisations into a single Exchange 2003 deployment. We’re currently running in mixed mode whilst we decommission the remaining Exchange 5.5 servers.

I’ll mainly be posting about Exchange with the odd posts on Windows Media Center Edition or gadgets. My intention is to share some of my experiences, issues faced and the solutions found. I hope you find them of use.