07:36 – I just responded to what I think (hope) are the last couple of queries on the biology book. It’s scheduled to go to the printer today, so that should be that. Melanie, our production editor, should be sending me a link to the final PDF today so that I can have it available to answer early queries. Inevitably, even though O’Reilly always FedEx’s us an early copy of the print book, we end up getting a query or two from a reader before we get the printed book. Those queries are always in the form of “in the third paragraph on page 208 …”, which of course we need the actual book to respond to.
Work on the forensics book continues. I just finished the final lab session in the forensic drug testing group. On to something else today. I’m not doing the groups in order, instead just jumping around to whatever I feel like working on.
14:45 – This is very, very strange. I think I mentioned here that I got a call on Christmas Day from AmEx security saying that there’d been suspicious charges made on our card. They described several of those, which I confirmed that we’d not made. They canceled the card on the spot and sent me a replacement with a different number.
So, I just visited my Netflix queue page, and a box popped up to say that the credit card they were charging the service to would soon expire. The only card we had that expired this month was the old AmEx. So I updated the information with the new card number, and then immediately went over to the billing history page. Sure enough, Netflix has been charging to that “canceled” card on the 26th of every month, including December, January, February, and March. So how did they do that without AmEx refusing the charge? The only thing I could think of was that AmEx continued to honor the old card number because Netflix had been billing that number every month for years. So I just called AmEx, and they confirmed that was indeed the case.