One of the things that interests me a great deal is the steampunk sub-culture. I’ve played in a steampunk D&D type game that one of my friends created, became a big fan of the “steampunk band” Abney Park, and grown an obsession with old pocket watches, aviation goggles, and gears.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do (but have never actually gotten around to doing) is to get together a good steampunk costume. Over the past couple days, I have decided that I want to get together a motorist outfit. Hat, gloves, goggles, duster, and a nice long scarf to flap in the wind as a drive down the road in my horseless carriage.

Those of you who know me would now remember that I do not own a horseless carriage… At least not one older than my 2009 Scion tC. I believe that if you are going to do something fun, you need to do it right, and so I present to you, the Educator Steam Buggy.

I understand that the entire point of steampunk is that everything is powered by steam, but being the 21st century, I think I could do it cheaper and easier (less moving parts) if I redesigned it to run on electric power. I’m still not sure on the details, but providing I can figure out where to store it and I can get some help on the suspension system from my friends in mechanical engineering, I should start work on it sometime within the next 6 weeks.

Hello there, everyone. After a couple years of designing websites for people and dabbling with the idea of blogging, I’ve finally purchased my own domain and web space. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be talking about on this blog, or even if I’m going to keep the blog as the main aspect of this site. Also, I’m not very proficient with PHP yet, so until I learn enough from my dabbling, the blog won’t really have the look I want. I’ll keep playing with it though, so expect the look to change often until I find what I want.

I chose the name Red Leaf Collective, because I eventually hope to expand this website to include some other people that I find interesting. This was formerly just a wordpress.com blog with two other members, but one of them only wrote once, and the other moved to Nevada and started his own blog (which is fairly interesting so far if you enjoy reading about crazy adventures). I also chose the name because I don’t have any particular topic that I will be writing about ever, though it may tend to migrate in certain directions from time to time.

I’ve imported old posts from the former blog so there is actually something there to read until I come up with more material.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can learn/enjoy something from it.

This was a letter I wrote to my dad that someone at his church asked me to write for a spiritual journey type thing he went on.

Sometimes, life can really suck. When you’re a kid, responsibility is for adults, and even though you so desperately want to be able to stay out late or make your own decisions about where you go and what you do, you don’t really understand that you can’t have the good times without the bad. The first time that this revelation hit me, I panicked. I wanted to run away from responsibility and never look back. I would have given anything to be a little kid again – to live in blissful ignorance of how the world really worked. I thought if I just wished hard enough, that I would wake up the next morning in my bunk bed with my mom trying to rush me to get ready for school, the biggest thing on my mind being how I would annoy the girl in my class that I liked.

To most little kids, life is like a journey. Every week you can change your mind and decide you don’t want to be an astronaut anymore because you’ve decided that a career in race car driving would be more fun. People tell you that it’s okay, because you can grow up to be anything you want to be, and it’s true – just think about president Obama and the kind of life he had growing up. Some kids start to figure out what they want to do with their life in high school, and by the time they get to college they’ve got a major picked out. Sure, they may change majors a couple times, but it’s usually something else they just didn’t know they were interested in.

Then there are kids like me. Since the 4th grade, I wanted to be a musician. Even if I hardly ever practiced, playing cello was the one thing that could really make me happy. Throughout middle school and the beginnings of high school, I picked up new instruments left and right. Some people told me I had a natural talent for stringed instruments, and I could think of nothing more than playing music for the rest of my life.

Then I discovered how wonderful a resource the Internet could be, and I would spend hours every day reading about all sorts of things and learning as much as I could about the world around me. All of these things that I read and learned about were new and exciting to me, and I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to be a musician anymore.

Every day now, I grow further and further from knowing what I want to do with my life. It’s not that I can’t find anything I’m interested in or don’t have the opportunity to explore. The truth is, I want to do it all. I want to travel the world learning how languages work. I can think of nothing better than exploring the depths of the ocean or discovering new life on Mars. This is how it hit me.

The first time I really thought hard about things and how I couldn’t truly be a Renaissance Man in this day and age was the first time I felt truly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I’m talking just-been-thrown-into-the-Total-Perspective-Vortex from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy insignificant. I (an 18 year old boy at the time) called my mother, and at the points in time when I could stop crying enough to talk intelligibly, asked her to tell me that everything was going to be okay, and then talked to my dad for a few minutes before I felt a little better. I usually don’t think about talking to my dad in emotional situations, because my experience with guys has been that they’ll listen to your stories, but usually can’t offer much in the way of advice.

Later that day, I got a text message from my dad that changed my life. It told me exactly what I needed to hear at the time to know that everything was going to be okay. I thought about his life and about how when his old bosses wanted him to change jobs to something he had no interest in doing, he decided it was time for something new. I realized that even if I end up not enjoying a job as much as I’d like to, there will always be a time when I can say, “I’m ready for a change.”

Now when the bad days come, I just try to remember that life can really suck sometimes, but it’s just a part of growing up. My dad showed me what they don’t tell little kids – that once you do finally pick something, you don’t necessarily have to stick with it for the rest of your life if you just can’t do it anymore, and that’s okay too.

Thank you dad. I may not like to say this (cause it’s not very manly), but I love you.

Everybody knows
It sucks to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here.
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it

Ben Folds – Still Fighting It

On March 5th, I received four rather alarming e-mails. They were receipts from the iTunes store from earlier that day at a point in time during which I was in bed and asleep. These purchases totaled $500 worth of gift cards, which upon viewing in the iTunes Store history all seemed to have a message along the lines of, “Andrew, for me, Andrew.”

By now, I’m freaking out, because I don’t even have $500 in my bank account at this point in time. I immediately go to PayPal and file a report to them that I’ve had four unapproved charges to my account that I would like to dispute, as well as change my passwords and security questions on both iTunes and PayPal. Next, I run virus scans and clear browser history on every computer I own, plus my iPhone to check for spyware and such (resulting in no spyware per say, but some apparently interesting cookies). Because the charges were made early enough in the day and were marked for immediate withdrawal on PayPal, I assumed that when my bank account still hadn’t taken a hit that PayPal was starting to do something about it, so foolishly I didn’t call my bank and tell them what’s going on yet.

On March 6th, I check my bank account balance. -$260. Ohhh craaap. First things first, I transfer enough money from my savings to cover the negative balance in my checking (I now have some change in my checking, and a few bucks in my savings). I shoot an e-mail to iTunes telling them what’s up and ask what I should do and how they can help me, and then I call my bank’s fraud department, who tells me I should wait until after PayPal investigates the case, and if PayPal doesn’t refund my money, I should call them back (something about lots of paperwork being involved and it being easier to see if PayPal fixes it first).

On March 7th, I get an e-mail back from iTunes. What follows is the relevant information, plus they said the obvious: change your account password and security questions.

I urge you to contact your financial institution as soon as possible to inquire about canceling the card or account and removing the unauthorized transactions. You should also ask them to launch an investigation into the security of your account. Your bank or credit card company’s fraud department should then contact the iTunes Store to resolve this issue. The iTunes Store cannot reverse the charges.

Right. This e-mail, plus a blog post by Chris Pirillo that I read while searching for information about my situation on Google made me think that filing claims with PayPal was pretty much NOT the way to go if you ever wanted a chance of getting your money back, though at the request of my bank, I waited to hear back from PayPal before calling them again.

On March 12th at 4:42 am, I received an e-mail from PayPal which said the following:

We have completed our investigation of your claim and have determined that
this is not an instance of unauthorized account activity. At this time,
your claim has been denied.

Okay, freeze. Let’s think logically for a second and look at what PayPal and iTunes are claiming I did.

• They assume I purchased FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS worth of gift cards in FOUR SEPARATE TRANSACTIONS. The $500 worth of gift cards doesn’t really seem like something someone would do, but for the sake of the argument, lets assume people do that all the time, and do it in four separate transactions to be sent to (what I’m assuming) was the same e-mail address.
  
  Factoid: When looking at your purchase history, you can’t see the e-mail address that the gift card redemption link was delivered too.
  
• The content of the “to, from, and message” fields on the gift card’s picture imply that not only did I purchase $500 worth of gift cards on iTunes, but I sent them to MYSELF.
  
  Factoid: as this Washington Post article states in an update, since the beginning of March 2009, “the [Internet Crime Complaint Center] has received a total of nine complaints about credit card fraud related to unauthorized purchases on iTunes” for charges as much as $1,600.
  
• Finally, PayPal and iTunes assume that I reported my own transactions as fraudulent no less than 5 hours after I made the purchases, including many e-mails and even a couple phone calls to PayPal to make sure the fraudulent charge claims went through.
  
  Factoid: The Watchmen is a fantastic movie, and I think it’s a shame if you haven’t seen it (I ran out of related facts).
  

So here we are. It’s March 12th, and I have just woken up to some bad news, which only gets worse when I look at my bank account, and despite the fact that I put money in the account the same day it dropped into the red via an IMMEDIATE online transfer, I have overdraft fees (putting it firmly BACK in the red). My parents, worried about me and my utter lack of money, write my a check for $400, which I take to the bank and ask to talk to someone about what I can do.

The people at my bank are very nice. I showed up about the same time they were going to have the lobby closed, and despite the long line to talk to a customer service representative, they let me in and even offered me candy and coffee. When my turn came to talk to someone, I explained to them my situation, and they gave me a phone number to call. They also told me that despite my negative account balance, the fact that I needed money to buy food and pay utilities meant that I would be much better off going to my parent’s bank and cashing the check (the check funds would have been put on hold for what she said could be up to two weeks).

Now here I am. It’s 7am on March 16th, I’ve got a bit of cash on hand, and my bank’s fraud department has what they called, “a large stack of papers” in the mail for me to fill out, sign, and return in order to take some sort of legal action (I think) to get back my money.

If I learned anything from this ordeal, it’s this:

• If at ALL possible, avoid using PayPal. They have horrendous customer service, and will do anything to place the blame on someone else.
• If you’re going to make online purchases (something I do A LOT), credit card gift cards from grocery stores are the safest way to go, and some banks even offer features like a separate account thingy for online transactions that you can set up with purchase limits, time frames, and even a disposable account number.
• Don’t make online purchases just to skip out on sales tax. That sales tax going to your local government helps pay for roads, parks, and lots of other things that communities need to thrive.
• Finally, if there’s a local music store nearby, don’t be too lazy to go there to get your music. The best thing you can do for the economy in times like these is buy local and support small businesses.

Thank you all for your moral (and financial) support while I try to get through this mess. I couldn’t do it without you guys.

**EDIT**

After filling out the large stack of papers from my bank and faxing them in, the money was returned to my account and I soon got a letter from them telling me what they had repaid me. I also tried to update applications on my iPhone, which gave the message that my account had been disabled, but a quick email to iTunes customer support explaining what had happened got me access to my account again within 24 hours.