Nilus Mattive posted a great article today on Money and Markets about another silent threat to your wealth — identify theft.

Even though the fifth tip is more US-specific, you might want to check out what credit reports you can find and check in your country. I must check with a friend in the business, but from what I know here in Australia is that when you request a credit check/report, it goes on your report that a check was made, and that can impact the decision of some lenders. Will find out more and report back!

For the third tip about being wary of emails, I’d also suggest that tip equally applies to the telephone.

Many companies call these days and want to check your personal details, or solicit phone based donations. Quite often they do that from a number that comes up in the Caller ID as “Private” — there’s no way I’ll hand over that information to someone on the phone. They could be anyone, pretending to be someone else — just like phishing emails.

I’ll only give out that data when I ring them — on a number I can verify elsewhere.

A not so smart example the other day: a security company called (cold calling), asking on the phone about our security system. Surely they were kidding! As if I’m going to tell that to someone on the phone that I don’t know! Being in the security business, they should know a whole lot better about protecting information … yet their cold calling technique to me was abysmal. And it would be very easy to change their phone script to make their calls much more productive.

Anyway … I digress. There are two startling figures in the article … the rise in crimes last year (22 percent) and also that 10 percent of victims knew their attackers.

A good reminder to be vigilant.

KFC is not a hospital … but it is according to Google Maps!

I’m pretty much a fan of Google maps … but sometimes I’m not sure where they get their data from.

For instance, my old primary school (still today happily operating as Pascoe Vale North Primary School, 26 years later!) is marked on Google maps as “Victorian Rehabilitation Hospital - Northern Melbourne”.

Now, if you looked at the map, just down the road is Dorset Private Hospital, in Derby Street. But this is marked on the Google map already, so they haven’t just misplaced that data.

And, if we head over to the main Puckle Street shopping area of Moonee Ponds, in our home neighbourhood, the local KFC outlet is listed as “Royal Melbourne Hospital”.

You can tell by the satellite shot of the size of the cars that this would have to be a very very small hospital! Hardly room for the foyer area of a normal hospital, let alone any ambulance bays.

But there’s more!

On the Google Map immediately below, Aspen Street is showing as a street that goes all the way through (to Everage Street, named after Dame Edna Everage).

But again, this isn’t a through road — it terminates at the end of the KFC carpark (as shown on the second map below).

Hmmm, rather strange! A non-existent street and non-existent hospital!

In the local street directory (the Melway), they’re correctly marked:

Now, that’s not to say even the Melway is perfect — I’ve let them know of a couple of areas where the maps are wrong (and they correct them!) — and they even reward eagle-eyed spotters with a discount on the next edition of their map. (Currently, they show the Citylink tolling point incorrectly near the Albion Street overpass).

So … map users beware — what you see on the map isn’t always what is there!

I noticed the update link to 2.7 today on the dashboard before it even made the WordPress development blog!

The “Coltrane” version of WordPress has just been launched.

One big change will be the new interface, which makes Wordpress a lot faster and uses less clicks.

I’m looking forward to trying it out … once we get to 2.7.1 — that’ll give the time for plug-in authors to catch up and the early adopters to point out bugs that still need ironing out.

As it says on the blog, every screen will be easily customisable.

Here’s one great feature, if you want to keep up with latest releases (hopefully plug-ins will keep up too!):

WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

I’ll be watching with interest …

I took the plunge today and upgraded to Firefox 3 … my second try, since the first time around I found a few annoyances that I couldn’t resolve (and it was too early for many of the add-ons I use to have caught up to a major change in versions).

So now I’ve gone from 2.0.0.17 to 3.0.3.

I try to balance between waiting awhile while new release bugs are sorted out (I never download the x.0.0 version!) and add-ons and plugins are updated, and then not too far behind that old versions are no longer supported.

The biggest frustration was the way FF3 handles bookmarks: in FF2, I’m used to grabbing the icon in the address bar, and dragging it to the sub-folder where I want to place it.

But I can now only do that in the first folder level down in FF3, not sub-folders. Aarrrggghhhhhh, that’s crazy and frustrating!

However, I’ve managed a workaround by using a new add-on called Add Bookmark Here 2 — seemed the best of the options I found in the add-ons after a little Google research.

This nearly emulates the FF2 way of bookmarking by dragging — you can just navigate to the folder you want the bookmark in and click on “Add Bookmark Here…”. In fact, in one way it’s better, because as you do, the Properties box pops up automatically to allow you to change the name (which I often do, especially to remove “Welcome to” from the names of websites!).

The only downside is that the bookmark is added at either the top or the bottom of the folder — you can’t specify exactly where in the folder it goes (you can go back into the folder and do that manually) — but, at least it’s in the right folder. Saves going the long way via the sidebar or “organise bookmarks” — which are too clunky and time-wasting for me.

The second issue related to my actual bookmarks: because it’s previously installed FF3 and reverted to FF2, somehow I had lost my new bookmarks. This mozillaZine knowledgebase article on recovering bookmarks after upgrading to FF3 fixed the problem for me.

The only other annoyance I’ve discovered to my usual browsing habits is how FF3 shows you your address bar history as you type in a URL. This nifty article helped me clean up my address bar history.

Now these issues are sorted out, I think FF3 and I will remain friends.

I’d still like them to fully revert bookmarks back to the FF2 way, but I can live with it for now. There is one good change though to the FF3 bookmarks: when you have a folder open, and delete a bookmark (right click and choose delete), the folder stays open — like it used to way before FF came onto the scene (probably the way it was in Netscape — it’s too long ago to remember!). So it ain’t all bad!

And now I’m here, I’ll also be checking out the 15 coolest FF tricks.