As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the worst year in a long, long while was capped off by discovering that my car had been wrecked and towed without my knowing about it. I finally got the pictures I took at the junkyard up for the horror and edification of all and sundry. Long story short, my car was indeed totalled, undrivable, time for an insurance payout. As usual, Captain Corner Case strikes again and everything was way the hell more difficult than it ever really needed to be. Where should I start?

I went around to my neighbors …

quantum budget superposition - noun - A bank account's state of existence during the time in which you're waiting for your landlord to cash the rent cheque so you don't actually know how much money you have at a given time t.  Spend too much and your rent cheque bounces.  Spend too little and you put off important bills for too long.

When manufacturers of ATMs started using Windows to run them, you just knew that no good would come of it.

Eastern European banks discovered this the hard way when the security companies Sophos and SpiderLabs discovered strains of malware tailored for automated teller machines that record the second data track of banking cards inserted into the reader slot along with the PIN entered by the machine's user. That's really all you need to make a copy of the card and loot the account. As if that's not enough, the malware also makes it possible for anyone carrying a specially encoded …