Kirk’s Blog

The craziest thing happened to me yesterday as I began my apartment hunting. There’s a stinking dead rat in my apartment again (that’s another story), so I’m looking to move soon. One of the places that I found on craigslist went by the name of New York City Rentals or something like that (646-393-9171) and they are located at 304 Park Ave South 11th Floor at East 23rd Street. I spoke to a really friendly woman over the phone by the name of Jennifer.

Basically, the deal was a room in Chelsea, no smaller than 14×16, ranging in price from $150 to $165 a week, with a $200 refundable registration fee. The kitchen is shared with a maximum of 2 other people, and you have a private bathroom (hotel style). Sounds like an amazing deal, right? That’s what I thought, almost too good to be true.  I did keep an open mind, but it turns out that my suspicions were not far from the truth.

On my way up the elevator to meet Jennifer, there were several other people riding along with me going for the same purpose.  I thought, wow, they must attract a lot of business.  However, something seemed amiss, and it turned out that one of them was an undercover cop.  She asked me if I was going for a room, and I said yes, and she said don’t give them any money; they are a scam!

So I followed them up and watched for a bit.  One guy looked really bitter, as if he had been scammed in the past.  I watched as he stood in the background watching one guy go into the office, and then he nodded to the police lady telling her that was the same woman he had dealt with.  I asked if I should stay, and the woman told me that I didn’t have to.  So, although it might have made an interesting scene, I left.

What are the chances of walking into an elevator in the middle of sting operation? Had I not rescheduled my appointment at the last minute, I might have gotten scammed.

I don’t like Zempt. Every time I make a post, I get an error: “WordPress database error: [Got error 12 from table handler]” at the top of every page. Somehow, after posting through the online form, it went away. So I decided to make another post using Zempt and I got the frikkin error again. I don’t know what’s causing it, but I think the best way to make offline posts would be to install apache on my machine, and run a separate WordPress locally. Then I can synchronize the two blogs once I get connected.

This is a test to see if Zempt works.

Woohoo, my Handspring Treo arrived in the mail today. I bought it used off of Ebay for $50. It’s an old Treo model, several years, but it’s just what I wanted: simple, color, qwerty. Now I don’t have to overload my brain trying to keep everything that I have to do stored in my personal RAM. I need to keep it cleaned out so I can focus on other stuff.

Also, Mercury has stationed retrograde today. Exactly what that means for my Treo only time will tell. I suspect it’s just symbolic of the re-evaluation I’m doing concerning how I keep organized.