Lunikon

I spent most of my time working on a senseless assessment today. Senseless because it was, as so often, more or less a straight copy from the text book by assignment. I mean, why should I complain, this makes up a considerable amount of my grade in this subject. But it still kills any spark of motivation which makes it an annoying and unpleasent work. Oh well, it’s done now.

Later I received an email from our ticket system informing me about a ticket that has been escalated to me. After reading it I was once again assured that security checks are about useless in a webgame. The (intentionally unnamed) person frantically explained how he deleted his user account including all his credits although he actually wanted to delete only a holding. Now, for persons who’ve never attempted to delete their account or have never played AirlineSim, a short explanation: In case one wants to do so, he/she has to click a button clearly marked as dangerours by the text above. After clicking it the user is lead to a page that once again tries to point out the potential consequences of proceeding, including unrestorable loss of all account data and all credits bought for the account. This time the warnings are even highlighted in a clearly warning color. If you still decide to click the little button under this warning your account gets deleted. And what does this little story tell us? Players acting carefully don’t need security checks…the rest ignores them…bravely.

There are far more serious problems today though. I told you some time ago about our planned trip to Beijing and about all the trouble involved in getting the tickets for several means of transport. Well, we found a travel agency which made booking and paying far easier than the one before. But especially concerning the latter aspect they seem to be very selective. We all successfully reserved our flights and most of us were also able to pay for them, thereby actually booking it. But Nils and I were less lucky. We booked together and I wanted to pay for it using my Visa credit card. The next day I got a call asking me to confirm the given information and telling me that they will finalize the booking as soon as the credit check was successful. Some time later I received another call which I wasn’t able to pick up due to holding a presentation. I’ll never find out who called but since it’s more or less obvious I expect it to have been the travel agency which wanted to tell me the the credit check _failed_. I didn’t hear anything from them until today when I decided to write them an email asking what the status of my booking was. They told me that the credit check failed – thanks for doing so finally – and that I should "put money in the account". I assured them that the "account" had enough money in it so debitting the card should not pose a problem. But the reply was negative…"probably we don’t have an agreement with your bank, try another card". I acted as told and tried using the MasterCard generously given to me by my dad but the result as well as the response was basically the same. Now that makes me wonder…didn’t I get me a Visa card to be able to pay at any place accepting Visa cards? Isn’t that the whole point of having a card like this? If I have to care about what "agreement" a single provider has with my bank back in Germany, of what use is the whole thing supposed to be for me? After all this makes the card useless for its holder because he can not depend on being able to pay with it. I wrote an email to my bank about this story, maybe they can tell me what’s going on. Now we’ll try to use Nils’ card. Keep your fingers crossed!