I had my favorite light rail conductor again today… and he did the same thing!
A lady pushed the button for some reason, and he answered with the familiar “Is this an emergency, or are you disabled?” line. I knew immediately that it was him. After the woman responded “Stop here!” he hung up on her and made the same train wide announcement: “Would the parents of the small child please keep them from pressing the red button unless it is an emergency”.
Oy.
Today at the light rail stop, there was a guy with his pant leg hiked up, on purpose… upon closer examination, I noticed that it was purposely hiked up so that everyone could see his house arrest thing around his ankle.
How pathetic is that? House arrest is supposed to let these people off a little easy, so they can keep their job, and try to reform. Instead, it becomes some sort of badge that he shows off to the world, to let everyone know how “bad” he is…
Ugh.
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl XL, this year… in fact I never watch it, as I couldn’t care less. I usually catch the commercials on the internet afterwards, since it’s not worth suffering through hours of football just for some funny commercials.
This year there was a commercial for the Toyota Camry Hybrid, which featured a hispanic man and small boy. Their conversation went like this:
Boy: Papa, why do we have a hybrid?
Man: For your future.
Boy: Why?
Man: It’s better for the air, and we spend less because it runs on gas and electrical power.
Man: Mire—mire aquÃ. Man points to console display, which shows the engine, battery, and electric motor status.
Man: It uses both.
Boy: Like you with English and Spanish!
Man: Si!
Boy: So why did you learn English?
Man: For your future!
What the hell? The subtext of the whole commercial is: immigrants need to learn English. I won’t argue against that point—that battle has been played out many times by many people. Instead I’ll just hit the point I care about: Why did they include this subtext in a car commercial. It would’ve been a fine public service announcement if not sponsored by Toyota. Instead, it just seems in poor taste, at least to me.
I noticed yesterday that ServerBeach billed me. I initially thought that was a little odd, since I remember I used to be billed around the 5th of the month, which was a much more convenient time to be billed $149 for me.
I checked into things and noticed that the billing date has been drifting backwards since I opened the account. Here are the billing dates for my account since I opened it: 2005-02-06, 2005-03-06, 2005-04-05, 2005-05-05, 2005-06-04, 2005-07-04, 2005-08-03, 2005-09-02, 2005-10-02, 2005-11-01, 2005-12-01, 2005-12-31, 2005-01-30. Yep, they’ve been billing me every 30 days.
It seems like that fact is evident on the bill, in the form of this line:
Sub-Total (30 Day Charges) $149.00
I opened a support ticket asking about it, and they confirmed and closed my ticket with this:
The ServerBeach billing cycle is a 30 day cycle instead of a monthly cycle. Due to the 30 day billing cycle, your payment date will vary by a day or so every month. We do not have monthly billing at this time.
Come on ServerBeach, join the rest of the world… hire a competent programmer to figure out how to bill monthly, and get that added. I love ServerBeach for every other reason, but this fact I absolutely hate. Ugh.
For the past month or so, Safeway has been giving out these “scratch and win” cards. We have scratched maybe 10 of them so far, but haven’t won anything, but I’ve been duly checking what we would have won. It’s always been sandwiches and soups. Why are they so stingy with the sandwiches?! You’d think they would let you win once in a while so as to not discourage you…
Jeremy Cole 