My car’s in the shop right now — it started hesitating and even stalling
every now and again (while driving) last weekend, and yesterday morning, I
couldn’t keep the engine running for more than a few seconds. Earlier this
week, I had it into Canadian Tire three times — the first time, they
guessed at something and replaced it ($90), this has no effect. The second time
it sat in the parking lot all day because their scope wasn’t working, and the
third time they tried to hook it up to their newly-fixed scope, but it still
wasn’t working. On Thursday when I couldn’t start it, I had it towed to the
garage across the street (Al’s Auto Service).

At the end of the day, I still hadn’t heard back from Al, so I called to check on
the status. He said that he had had it out earlier, and it ran fine,
so he didn’t yet know. I had to come into work today for a conference call, and
Gail’s away, so I
had to rent a car (more on that later). I didn’t know when I would be able to
return the rental, so I asked Al if they were open on Saturday, and he actually
laughed out loud at the thought of coming in to work on my car on a Saturday.

When I got home from work today, I finally heard back. They have no idea what
the problem was, but it seems to be fixed now. He said they unplugged
a bunch of things and plugged them back in, so it’s possible that one of those
connections was loose and is now OK. It’s also possible that the problem has
simply gone away temporarily, and it will stall on the way to work on Monday.
Time will tell.

This is when I hate the fact that I know jack about cars. I can change my own air filter and windshield wipers, but that’s about it. I have a vague idea on how the things work, but there are so many parts that I don’t understand that I am always afraid I’m going to get taken to the cleaners when I go to the garage. I’m worried that I’ll hear “We found the problem — your mixtlflap is burnt out. It’ll be $850 to replace, plus two hours of labour. Replacing the mixtlflap is a serious thing, since you have to remove the flurbnarg first, and you know how hard that is.” Sure I do, that’s the thing that’s right next to the flux capacitor, isn’t it?

The car I rented is a Kia Rio. I’m actually
more impressed with it than I
thought I’d be. It’s reasonably comfortable (at least as comfortable as my
Sunfire), handles pretty well (it’s quite small), and goes pretty fast. I looked
at the speedometer at one point today and was surprised to find that I
was doing 130 — I normally keep it around 110-115. It doesn’t
accelerate as fast as my Sunfire (which isn’t all that fast itself),
and acceleration is very loud, but once you’re at cruising speed (or above!),
it’s very quiet. I haven’t even looked at the trunk, but I suspect it doesn’t
hold very much, and the space in the back is fine for the kids, but I think
that adults would find it rather cramped back there. But it has heated seats (or
as I told Gail yesterday “seated heats”), a CD/MP3 player, power locks and
windows, and remote keyless entry. Not bad for a car that starts at only
$13,595.

I just got the weirdest spam message ever:

Subject: anti-spammers are lamers
From: Marilyn Rice [weirdingdweller's@iguanalover.com]

subj

regards, spammer.

The hell?

Have you ever noticed that when you make a phone call to a local number but dial a 1 first (as if it were a long-distance call), you get a message saying that you don’t need to dial the 1, but then you have to hang up and dial again? Similarly, if you dial a number without a 1 that is long distance, you get a message saying that it’s long distance and you need to dial a 1. But in both cases, your call does not go through. Why the hell not? If they want to give me a nastygram telling me what I should or should not have done, fine, but then put the damn call through. The technology exists. It’s not rocket science. That’s what happens on a cell phone, so why can’t they do it on a land line?

The other day, I was making some phone calls at work to local businesses in the K-W area. Since I don’t live in K-W, I don’t know where I can call locally and where is long-distance, so in a few cases, I added a 1 when I didn’t need to. Every time, I got the “You don’t need to dial a 1” message, so I had to hang up and re-dial the number without the 1. Very frustrating.

When I call home with my cell phone, the call display stores the number with a 1 for some reason. If I then display the number, click the “dial” button, and then pick up the receiver, it dials “1-905-…”, and then I get the message saying I didn’t need to dial the 1. At that point, I need to hang up and dial the number manually. For our cell phone numbers, that’s no big deal, but if it was a different number that I don’t have memorized, I have to write the number down on a piece of paper and then pick up the phone and dial it. So much for modern technology.

This posting is yet another example of the hard-hitting hold-no-punches journablogalism that you’ll find on Cut The Chatter. See, Whimsley, I can invent words too! Though yours kind of rolls off the tongue better than mine does.

Aside: Can you “channel” someone who’s not dead?

Update: Just to prove that I invented this word myself:

Best Buy has admitted having an intranet web site that is identical to the public web site, except that the prices aren’t always the same. Apparently the idea is that customers would come into the store asking about an item at a certain price, and the employees would then check the “web site”, showing the customer that the price has gone up. I have heard numerous complaints about Best Buy — not just that their salespeople are pushy (that’s true at a lot of places), but that they try to cheat customers and dupe them into paying higher prices. I’ve only been in Best Buy once, looking for something specific (don’t even remember what it was), and I didn’t buy whatever it was there, but because of all these stories I’ve heard in the past, I have been hesitant to shop there. After this latest one, they’re on my “boycott” list. Not that I really had a boycott list before (I can’t think of any other stores that I absolutely refuse to go to), but I have one now, and Best Buy’s on it. This is a little unfortunate, since I’m in the market for a Wii, and they’re rather hard to find. Removing one store from my list of possibilities will make it even harder to find, but, you know, standing up for your principles and all that.

Yappa Ding Ding wrote the other day about problems she had recently with Dell’s website. This is unfortunate, since we’re considering buying a new computer in the near future, and I was going to check out dell.ca. I probably still will, but I will be much more defensive if I end up having to speak with a salescritter.

We bought a new van last Friday. Well, leased, not bought. We leased a 2000 Pontiac Montana for three years, and then returned that and leased a 2003 Montana for four years, and that lease is coming due soon, but we’re already over on the kilometers, so we went in early, chose our options, and signed on the dotted line. I like the van, and Gail loves it, so we had no problem getting another one. Since Gail works for EDS (which used to be owned by GM), she gets an employee discount, which we wouldn’t get anywhere else, so we didn’t even have to do any research. Every car we have ever had has been a GM product, and all but two have been Pontiacs: 1988 Cavalier Z24, 1996 Grand Prix, 1997 Saturn, 2000/2003/2007 Montanas, and 2004 Sunfire.

Interesting note: when looking for the link above, I originally went to pontiac.com, and found that in the US, the Montana is no longer available. They only have the Torrent (also available in Canada), which is more of an SUV, but no minivan. Too bad for Americans. Of course, they get the G6 convertible which is not available in Canada.

When we got the 2003 van four years ago, we had big-time issues with the local Pontiac dealer — the sales guy was fine, but the leasing manager took a phone call from another customer while we were sitting in her office, and discussed his financial details (complete with down payment and monthly payment amounts) with him. When we asked if she had ever had customers in her office when talking to us on the phone, she didn’t seem to understand why that would be a problem, but then said something to the effect of “No, I wouldn’t do that to you guys“, like the customer she was just talking to was somehow less important. We had other problems with her, and I ended up writing a letter to the president of the dealership, explaining the problems we had and telling him that we wouldn’t be back. Well, I caved there since it’s the closest Pontiac dealer, and it’s just too inconvenient to go somewhere else (though not entirely – I bought the Sunfire two years ago at a dealership in Waterloo). But when I set up an appointment, they said that we’d be meeting with the same person as last time. I said “No we won’t”, and explained that we had had issues with her the last time. We arranged to meet with someone else, and I guess they went through our file and found my letter, and just fell over themselves telling us that they would do whatever it took to make us happy “this time”. You know how it is — the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, also has a blog, which is
one of my favourites. He writes about all sorts of things that don’t
appear in Dilbert, like politics and religion and stuff. It’s usually pretty
funny, but he’s quite an intelligent guy, so it’s frequently thought-provoking
as well. One subject that he writes about now and again is free will, or the
lack thereof. He believes that free will does not exist. By this he does not
mean that everything is predetermined, but that humans cannot control their own
actions or decisions. The idea is that given a certain environment and
set of inputs, your brain will make a deterministic decision.
Basically, free will is an illusion; what really
has control over our decisions is simply chemistry, biology, and physics.

I find this to be a fascinating topic, with zillions of implications. For me,
the primary implication is that of the law — should a person be found guilty
and punished for a crime that he did not explicitly choose to commit? If someone
is found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, the idea is that some defect
in his brain meant there was no way for him to make the choice not to
kill. There is talk of serial killers whose brains are “wired” to kill, and it is
not only inevitable that they will, but unreasonable to expect them to be able to
resist. But if there is no free will, then all of our
brains are wired in some way — most of us are wired not to kill,
but not all. Similarly, most of us are wired not to steal, but not all.
Therefore, those who steal (including those who know it’s morally wrong)
are simply following the instructions wired into their brains — they cannot
choose not to. Obviously we have to put people who are “wired” to kill in
jail or some kind of hospital, because they pose a danger to society. But what
about those park in a no-parking zone — do they
deserve to be punished for it, when it could be argued that they did not
choose to commit their crime; they are merely a victim of their own
brain chemistry?

For my part, I tend to agree with Scott. However, the “illusion” of free
will is enough for me. Perhaps it is completely deterministic that given a
particular set of circumstances, my brain will make a certain decision, but
there’s no way to calculate in advance what that decision would be, so my
decisions have the appearance of being in my control. This is why you
hear people watching people in some difficult situation (on TV or whatever) and
saying “I don’t know what I’d do in that situation”. Well, the answer is
essentially hard-wired into your brain, but since there’s no way to access it,
the fact that the answer is already there is of no use.

In addition, the number of
variables that go into a decision is incalculable, so even if you could access it,
you couldn’t look it up without knowing an unbounded amount of data about the
environment and circumstances. And if that weren’t enough, you can also throw
quantum mechanics and chaos theory into the mix, and now at least some of the
variables that have an affect on a decision are essentially random. It boggles
the mind.

Aside: Actually, quantum mechanics is itself enough to boggle my mind.
I love reading about it, but I generally can’t wrap my head around the concepts.
I suspect I’m not alone in that respect.

Well, spam is useless anyway, but I seem to be getting a lot of spam recently that has no links, no images, no URLs, nothing. People who send spam, I thought, were generally trying to sell you something – buy my stolen / copied watches, buy my illegal drugs, buy penny stocks (that have already peaked) in my company, check out my porn web site, stuff like that. But if the message contains no way for you to get to their web site, how do they make money off of it?

My family web site has a guest book. Every couple of weeks or so, I get a couple of spam postings, which I promptly delete. This morning I got one from “Bill” (uh-huh) which said (this was the entire text of the message): “Hello, nice site look this:”.

Bill, if you’re reading this blog, I assure you that I really wanted to “look this”, but there was no “this” to “look”. My interest was piqued, and then disappointment washed over me like I was a Senators fan during the playoffs. Most of the people who visit perrow.ca are my family, so in order to spare them that level of despair, I deleted your message. I’m sorry, but I have to do what’s best for my family.

While sitting in line at the Tim Horton’s drive-thru a couple of weeks ago,
getting ready to order the exact same thing that I always order when I don’t have
breakfast at home (“Sesame seed bagel toasted with butter, large steeped tea,
one milk, one sugar, double cup please”), I thought of an idea. It’s unlikely
to ever happen, but it’s cool anyway. The idea is for Tim Horton’s to create a
small device, something that could hang on a key chain, that functions as a remote
control. I’ll call it the TimFob. The TimFob could have several buttons
on it,
and each button could be programmed to a different order — when you get to
the drive-thru, you point your TimFob at the ordering window and press one of the
buttons. The order is transmitted and placed, and the total immediately appears on
the screen. Then you can drive up to the window and pay.

Each TimFob would have a unique ID number, and when a button is pressed,
it simply transmits its ID number and which button was pressed, and the computer
inside the store checks its database for the order corresponding to that TimFob
and button. Customers could set and change their favourite orders on a web
site. If they want, customers could also tie their credit card number to the
TimFob so that their purchase is automatically paid for. You’d have to make the
TimFob easily removable so that people could hang it on their key chains and then
use it while their keys are still in the ignition, and then replace it once
they’ve ordered.

Advantages:

• Obviously, this would speed up ordering, and
  cut down on errors in data entry (i.e. 1 milk 2 sugars, or was that 2 milk 1
  sugar?). One of the Timmy’s near us almost always screws up some part
  of our order. Either Gail’s tea isn’t decaf (in which case she’ll have a headache
  all day), or my tea has too much / not enough sugar, or the sesame seed bagel has
  cream cheese and the whole wheat bagel has butter instead of the other way
  around, or…
• If the TimFob handled multiple buttons on the same order (and
  why wouldn’t it?), the whole family could place their standard order with a
  couple of button pushes.
• You could also grab someone else’s TimFob when running to Timmy’s for a
  group and make sure you get what they want.
• If you wanted something other than one of the preprogrammed orders, the
  standard drive-thru procedure still works.
• Tim Horton’s could implement some kind of reward program (i.e. buy 10 coffees
  and get a free donut) without having to have stamp cards or things like that
• Handy for people who have strong foreign
  accents!

There are some drawbacks too:

• Timmy’s could then track people’s purchases, as well as locations and purchasing habits, and some people may not like this idea (but in that case, don’t use the TimFob)
• If the payment thing is implemented, they’d have to make sure the system is
  fast — Timmy’s currently does not accept credit or debit cards since they
  frequently have long lines, and credit/debit transactions take longer. I cannot
  think of any other company that could get away with only accepting cash
  in this day and age.
• There are the obvious security issues with having your credit card tied
  to something that could easily be stolen and then used with absolutely no
  authentication, but Esso already has that issue with their Speedpass.

Of course, creation of the TimFob would cost Tim Horton’s money, and it’s not
likely that people would pay to use it (though maybe they would if Timmy’s offered
a discount, or perhaps the aforementioned reward program — people pay for
the 407 transponder after all). Their
biggest expense might be to pay me for the idea and use of the term “TimFob” which
I invented today. (This
blog posting and all contents are copyright © 2006, Graeme Perrow. All
rights reserved.) Since this idea doesn’t really help the company much,
just the customer, it’s unlikely that they’ll do it (call me a cynic). But if
they ever do, remember, you read it here first.

Note: No, I am not so arrogant as to believe that I am the first person ever to think of this idea. I’m sure many other people have thought about the same thing — this is my own original idea inasmuch as I’ve never heard or read anyone else talking about such an idea.

Here is a Flickr photoset containing images of signs containing unnecessary quotation marks. This is something that’s always bugged me. In a previous job, I walked to work every day, and I passed a gardening business. On the side of their trucks, they had the phrase A “cut” above the “rest”. I never figured out why “cut” and “rest” were in quotes. I just chalked it up to bad grammar — people who had never figured out when to use punctuation properly. I, on the other hand, have always been anal pedantic about such things.

If I see Breakfast “burrito” on a menu, I read that as “It’s not really a burrito, but it’s kind of the same, so we’re calling it one anyway”. Generally, I just ignore the quotes, but you never know — it could be that they really do know what they’re talking about, and it’s really not a burrito. Just make sure that you use the little “finger quotes” signals when you order it.

I just read a story on boingboing.net about a guy who got seriously screwed over by the Bank of America. To sum it up, this guys sold a couple of bikes online for $600, and the guy who bought them sent a cheque for $2000, telling him that the extra $1400 was to cover shipping costs and his “trouble”. He was suspicious, so when he went to the bank to cash the cheque, he told the teller that he wasn’t sure if the cheque was real. She checked it out, the cheque was not real, and the guy was arrested and thrown in jail. Note that he did not write the cheque, he received it from someone else and tried to warn the bank about it. He’s since been forced to spend over $14,000, in bail and, presumably, legal costs. The Bank of America refuses to apologize or reimburse him.

Since then, many people have closed BofA accounts in protest of this, totalling over $50 million. I don’t have a BofA account, and I suspect the majority of people reading this are Canadian, but if you happen to have a BofA account, please consider closing it, and make absolutely sure to tell the branch manager why you’re doing this.