Today I participated in my second Walk America event for the March of Dimes. This event was held at the beautiful Nortel Networks campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. It was a day that verged on being rainy, but the rain held off until well after we crossed the finish line. The total walk was 3.1 miles.

I’m not really that big of a humanitarian. And I really, really hate kids, so it’s kind of odd that I’ve gravitated to supporting an organization that works to prevent birth defects. If I wasn’t spurred into action in 2005 by the failed pregnancy of someone close to me, I wouldn’t be inclined to do it. I justify my participation by the fact that there’s enough screwed up kids out there already that we don’t need anymore. Eventually, they grow out of being kids, or so we hope. But I really like walking outdoors the most. I’d probably walk (or run with enough training) for any organization that asked me to — the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, American Lung Association, American Diabetes Association, Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation — any of them, that is, except for the Illinois Chapter of the American Socialist White Peoples Party. I hate Illinois Nazis.

On the event level, there may have been less people there this year. The rain probably kept some people away. Pussies! It also appeared that there were less extras associated with the event. For example, when we crossed the finish line, there was no medallion. Last year they had the WalkAmerica emblem on one side and corporate sponsor SunTrust’s logo on the other. My 2005 medallion hangs on the rear-view mirror in my car to this day. It also makes me feel kind of studly, like I won a major marathon. Hope noticed that there was no Propel being offered at the break areas. She also noted that there were less break areas. They did happen to have a Draggin’ Wagon if you just couldn’t make it back to the starting line. I’m not sure why there were less ammenities this year. I speculate that there just weren’t enough businesses that needed another venue for positive publicity. I mean, Propel has been out for awhile and SunTrust has probably made most people forget that their local banks used to be the dismal Central Carolina Bank. The real winner as far as catering to the walkers was perrenial sponsor Wendy’s. Last year, if I recall correctly, they just gave you a hamburger. This year they gave you a whole combo. So if you didn’t feel like standing in the long line for hot dogs during the after walk lunch, you could head over to Wendy’s (like we did) and have a delicious triple hamburger combo with fries and drink. The best part was that it was free.

This year saw an increase in my personal fundraising for the event. I went from a pathetic $20 donation in 2005 (put in by yours truly) to a nice size $150 donation this year. This donation will provide fifteen families of babies in newborn intensive care with information to support and ease their fears and uncertainty. Thanks to my donors this year. YOU made the difference.

One interesting fact that I learned this year was that nearly half a million babies are born before their bodies are fully developed every year. Think about it. There are a ton of kids that are born with no eyes every year. No joke! That’s a terrible way to start things off, and that’s a terrible way to go through life. If only you had the power to prevent this from happening… Oh, wait, you do!!! Head on over to my fundraising page and help Team BSODmyself meet our next fundraising goal. The walk may be over, but the quest to prevent birth defects never ends.

I always thought that there was something romantic about the concept of society being totally wiped out. Those men and women who were left would build a new society, a better one where individuals survived on their wit and strength alone. When threatened by those who embraced violence as a way of solving problems, normal people would become heroes, come together and fight off the attacking hoards of bad guys. Kind of like a Mad Max movie, I guess. I thought that until I finished watching this evening’s New Orleans mayoral debate on C-SPAN2. I realized that rebuilding would not be like a Mad Max movie. It would be more like sitting at the DMV for a couple of hours.

This is the second mayoral debate that I watched, the first having been televised on MSNBC on April 17th. For a series of debates that is being hyped as a pivotal step in the rebuilding of the Big Easy, you would think that you would actually hear something being said that was at least borderline visionary. But it seemed that the debate broke down into an extended discussion of how quickly the remains of people’s destroyed homes could be torn down. It seemed like everyone was in a hurry to do this, especially tough-ass Republican Rob Couhig. It seems that he prefaced a lot of his statements with “my way or the highway type” statements. This was the most disturbing aspect of the evening for me. I mean, if I had lost my house and all my belongings, I would still rather have a pile of rubble than nothing at all.

It also rubbed me the wrong way for a couple of other reasons. First, there’s this tendency for people to look at their neighbors house or the way they raise their kids or whatever and pass judgement on them like they are not doing their jobs. These people who have time to pass judgement on others have a hell of a lot that they could devote to helping their neighbors, but they typically choose not to. Second, in this economy not a lot of people have a lot of extra funds to put toward their house. This is sometimes hard to believe if you drive through the parking lot of Home Depot on the weekend, but these people are out there. And I’m sure that New Orleans, the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi have their fair shares. Typically, people who are at a rush to tear down other’s homes (and use the force of the government to do it) are much better off than those people who have the aforementioned pile of rubble and nothing else.

I was not impressed by the other five candidates that were presented in the debate. The obvious lackluster choice was current New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin. A lot of people blame him for the majority of the failures in the Katrina evacuation and recovery efforts. I don’t really know a lot about this Ray Nagin, but if he chose to not use his magical hurricane busting powers, instead preferring to hang out with hookers, that would be one thing. Ray Nagin (or any other singular person) versus a Category Five hurricane? I’m going to bet on the hurricane. Unfortunately, he could have gone a long way toward redeeming himself if he didn’t make odd vaguely-Jesse Helms-sounding race-baiting statements about New Orleans being a “chocolate city again”. Sorry, Ray, but you’re obviously a typical pandering politician. In this case, however, you were great at pandering, but poor in the political execution of your pandering.

And as for the rest of the pack: Another candidate getting a lot of buzz was Mitch Landrieu. He’s the current Lieutenant Governor and comes from a political family. While he can cite loads of experience, he’s in too deep. My dad always tended to vote against incumbents and career politicians. This influence has rubbed off on me, for better or worse. Peggy Wilson is a candidate that I would have liked to hear more from. Whenever a break in the action would could, she would shout out “Tax Free City”. This is an intriguing idea, considering my strong opposition to taxes, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a clear picture of what this idea really was about. A candidate that I really liked personality-wise was Tom Watson. Of course, liking someone’s personality is completely different than liking their politics. He brought up some fairly plausible concerns about civil rights and disenfranchisement of voters, which set well with me. It got a bit extreme at some points during the debate though, what he was trying to link to civil rights. I half-expected him to say that his civil rights were being violated for Ray Nagin and himself for being seated at the same end of the table. The one bad point is that too many civil rights and civil liberties focused people miss the mark by advocating socialist economic solutions, which is just a different form of slavery. Then there was Ron Forman and Virginia Boulet. Ron Forman was completely uninteresting. I almost turned the channel every time he started to talk. Virginia Boulet was kind of interesting. She appeared to have a pretty big-time business resume, so I would have been inclined to have voted for her, but other than being the hottest woman in the debate, I really couldn’t find anything that made her stand out in my mind.

Anyway, there were a number of candidates, like usual, that were running but failed to have enough political clout to make the debates. I’m not going to go into all of them, although they all probably have their merits. Some of them may even be superior to the goobers that showed for the event. One that did strike me was James Arey, who apparently is running on a support for the arts program. Maybe he’ll use the rubble of homes for art projects, as artsy types are wont to do. His website sports a picture of him standing in front of a US flag with only forty-eight stars, which begs the question, which two states does he not want to be part of the US? Hmmm, we could have some sort of separtist or radical revisionist on our hands, which only endears me to him more.

My prediction for the mayoral race: Landrieu and Nagin in a run-off. Landrieu takes it in the run-off.

My prediction for New Orleans: More of the same bullshit, only piled higher and deeper.

Do you know what it is? No, of course not. How could you?

That’s kind of how a commercial goes that I see every so often on TV. Except in that commercial, the question is: “I’m thinking of a number between 450 and 850. Do you know what it is?” The answer is a credit score. I think that this is a commercial for FreeCreditReport.com, but I can’t recall for certain. Anyway, if you click through to the site and look in the upper right hand corner of the screen, you see a logo for Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus. The other majors are Equifax and Transunion.

Why is this even an issue? In this case, you’ll be prompted to enter your credit card information to get a free credit report. If you forget to cancel right away, you’ll be hit with a recurrring $12.95 charge on your account each month. Now this probably isn’t a problem, but something about it just doesn’t smell of encouraging proper use of credit.

But that’s not really the biggest problem. People are led to believe that this is some altruistic pursuit on behalf of these credit bureaus. Now, I’m a happy capitalist. I understand that not everything has an altruistic bent must even be done for that reason to have that result. Look at the situation regarding the extinction of whales. The real problems, however, are secrecy and privacy.

Many people don’t know what’s in their credit reports. Contrary to what I discussed earlier, it’s a good thing to request and review your credit report regularly. If you’re new to requesting your credit report, you may want to start by requesting it through AnnualCreditReport.com, however. This site allows you to request a free credit report from each of the three majors every year. And the best part, is that there are no strings (or unexpected charges) attached.

Once you have requested your reports, you’ll find out what other people are seeing. Who are these other people? Just to name a few: companies that you have applied for credit with, companies that you’ve never heard of that want to extend credit to you, insurance companies deciding what type of rate to charge you, companies that you already do business with that are making sure you are paying your other bills, even potential and current employers. While you may never have requested your credit report, a lot of other people have. Luckily, there are resources to lock others from looking at your credit file, such as OptOutPreScreen.com, which will keep people with whom you don’t do business from pulling your report in an attempt to offer you credit. But still, companies that you do business with still have access to your report. They could, for example, use this information to cancel your account with them based on whether you’re paying your bills with some other company.

Once you’ve got a copy of your reports, you’ll also have the opportunity to dispute incorrect information. This is usually the most frustrating part of the process. It is long and isn’t even guaranteed to correct the errors that are present. Even in cases where some form of identity theft is evident, it could take many months to even get a semblance of truth in your credit report. In my case, I’ve been disputing errors for many months. My most recent disputes successfully had all disputed items with Experian updated, while the same creditor reported that there was no error with the incorrect Equifax information. For cases where you have no idea who the particular company is that is reporting incorrect information, you can try debt validation in an effort to remove the incorrect listing. While this process is far from perfect, it is much better than credit reporting in the 1960s, which involved collecting files on even more personal information, such as sexual orientation and drinking habits.

So many things of the decisions that individuals make in life are determined by these secret organizations. Ultimately, because of the difficulties associated with the use of the credit bureau and dispute system, there is a feeling of complicity on the part of credit bureaus. Credit bureaus make money off requests for your report, regardless of whether the information is correct or not. The process is too long and obfuscated. The credit bureaus are private corporations. As government created entities, these corporations are subject to the same laws that other corporations are. Relevant legislation that every person should know about includes the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (which protects you from overzealous collection agencies). Know these acts, as they are the rules of the game and one of your only protections in the fight for your credit rights.

But back to my original question. Recently, I was checking the status of my Transunion dispute. Nowhere on Transunions’s site could I find the link. This could have been operator error on my part, so I googled it. I came up with a page that asked for my File Number, which I had and my Password, which I couldn’t recall. I clicked on the Forgot Password link and was taken to a curious prompt like this (click for full image):

To get my password, I need to answer my secret question. But my secret question isn’t being displayed. How can I answer a question when I don’t know what it is? Is it really for privacy purposes, or is it part of the conspiracy to keep people from fixing their credit reports?