Carousel of Hate

Ok, anyone who knows about Mardi Gras probably knows that the three items in the title do actually go together. During Mardi Gras it is tradition to have a party and serve a King Cake. Rouses Supermarket sells their king cakes online and has the following quote about the history of king cakes.

The Mardi Gras season begins on January 6th, or Kings’ Day. This day, also referred to as the Epiphany or Twelfth Night, marks the meeting of the Three Wise Men and the infant Jesus. It has become tradition to celebrate Kings’ Day and the Mardi Gras season by sharing a delicious king cake. King cake is an oval-shaped cake that is made from gourmet cinnamon dough, iced, and decorated with sugars in the Carnival colors of purple (for justice), green (for faith), and gold (for power). A tiny, plastic baby representing the infant Jesus is inserted into the cake. Tradition holds that the person who gets the piece with the baby in it is obligated to bring a king cake to the next party. The Mardi Gras season comes to a close on Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.

So I was driving around today and saw a billboard for Mardi Gras which reminded me of king cakes. I told my friend Jeff about them and explained how they insert a small plastic baby (sometimes explained to represent the baby Jesus). The person who finds the baby has different rewards or responsibilities. I was joking with Jeff that if we had one and he found the baby and choked on it and died, then his epitaph could read “Choked on the baby Jesus.” No blasphemy intended.

I am a creature of habit. I generally do things the same way, put my keys in the same place and follow the same patterns. Sometimes things get out of wack for whatever reason, and then chaos ensues.

Today I went with my family to see a film, as it the Christmas tradition. After buying the tickets from the kiosk I was putting away my credit card and sorting through the five receipts it spits out. One for free popcorn, another telling my I had achieved a new status, two different receipts telling me what I had purchased and the price, and finally a ticket to gain entrance. I walked over to the concession area and was putting things away. I found out I needed to get a sticker to indicate my new status so I then went to guest services.

After all of that I ended up back at the concession area. I put away my phone and was still holding my reward card so I went to put it in my pocket. I realized my “wallet” was not in the pocket I keep it in so I checked the pockets on my coat and still nothing. I put things on the counter to make sure I was not just overlooking it and then began to get a bit anxious. After checking my coat and pants pockets I announced that I had lost or left my wallet laying somewhere.

After searching and checking with the staff I began with my first phone call to cancel the cards from one issuer that were in my wallet. They looked up my information and then placed me on hold to contact the department to invalidate the cards. About 30 seconds from the time I was placed on hold everything changed. I happened to put my hand into my back pocket and there it was, my wallet. I never put my wallet in the back pocket. I did however have my reward card in my back pocket earlier. When I went to put it away I obviously put my wallet in there by mistake since I was still holding the reward card. By the time the phone rep came back it was too late and my cards had been invalidated.

This is not how I normally operate in life so I am going to be mentally smacking my forehead all day trying to figure out why I did something out of my norm and then reacted too quickly without checking all my pockets first.

Happy Christmas!

I found this post at Gizmodo today on how to deal with people using bluetooth headsets. The funniest part is I so thought I was watching my friend Aaron in the future. Truth be told Aaron is not stuffy but rather very practical. He just makes me laugh. Thanks Aaron!

So I heard about this yesterday on the radio. This site uses Google Maps to place incidents and activities related to illegal aliens in the US on the map. I knew the problem was growing but this makes it more obvious. So check out the
Illegal Alien Activities, Arrests, Crimes, Legislation, and US Border Enforcement tracker!

I was reminded of my friend Mike when I ran across this article today about Fight Thieving Restaurant Servers With Checksum Tips. Mike has this scheme in mind (correct me if I get this wrong) where you use the cents (at least the last digit) to indicate quality of service and satisfaction. He thought about leaving a little tip guide or perhaps a card pointing them to a web site to explain the different values. This article takes the make your tip mean something to an entirely new geek level. I had never even considered using binary to encode features or ratings! On and by the way there is a cute little cat in the corner of the page if you visit that site!

This article takes it to a new level of making sure you are not being taken advantage of by, dare I say, evil servers who feel that just having brought you a drink entitles them to huge piles of money. An alternate approach is offered by a comment on the site for using palindromes to compute the tip. I would agree that most servers out there are decent people working hard or even working the resraurant as second job because tips can be a decent income according to a friend of mine.

In the past I have been all over the spectrum of tipping from exactly 10% (I remember my grandmother having a tip calculator card she kept in her purse) to 15% for lunch, 20-25% for dinner depending on the quality of restaurant. I also went through the “rounding phase” where I just figured the tip roughly (not the Canadian tip trick like Aaron’s friend Shawn) and then rounded to the next even dollar, and finally today when getting take away I just usually add $2.00 maybe $3.00 depending on the price of the meal.

Overall I am trying to be more aware of tipping and trying to keep cash on hand for tips. After asking one server about tips they indicated that if a tip was left on a credit card not only would the house keep a percentage because of the credit card fees but that percentage was higher than a cash tip so the management felt they deserved more of the server’s money. In tipping with cash I feel like I am letting the server know that they were appreciated.

So as I previously mentioned I have owned a TiVo Series 1 since 15-Jun-2000. I was recently made aware of an upgrade offer, the second such offer I have heard of, to upgrade my existing device and transfer my lifetime service to the new device. When I purchased the device I figured making a one-time payment made more sense than paying them something every month for as long as I could concieveably own the device. Their only key is when yo udo the service transfer you get to pay them $199, which is actually more than I paid to begin with for the lifetime service. But some time ago they realized they could make more money with monthy service so they stopped offering lifetime service.

I ordered my TiVo HD device today and am waiting to have the service transfer completed now. I was told by the nice CSR that transfering my service does not preclude future transfers should the offer be made on a newer device. Hopefully TiVo is happy that an existing user with no forseeable revenue stream is sending some more green their way and will keep making offers in the future. Then again after doing two transfers would I be better making monthly payments to the man? I guess we will have to consider that situation should the time come in the future.

NOT!

My mother received an email last night that contained an attachment called winmail.dat. I have dealt with this before and continue to find it annoying. I am putting a link to a useful article that explains how to deal with this. Feel free send this link to anyone who is sending them to you!

I heard about Prosper yesterday on the radio so I went to the web site today to investigate. It seems like an interesting idea making small loans together with others to reduce risk. I figured the loans would be made by ACH transfer from your bank account to Prosper so I clicked on the frequently asked questions about funds transfer. Here is what I found.

Transfer request is on day 0. Day 0 can vary based on day of week, time of day and holidays.
Funds are withdrawn from your account on day 1
Funds are received and held by prosper on days 2-3
Funds are available to you on day 4

Although we refer to you and other individuals as “lenders”, the loans are being made by Prosper and then sold to you, making you a loan purchaser. The term “lender” is used through the site for the sake of simplicity.

Prosper holds the funds on days 2-3 (which also includes day 1) because all ACH transfers can be canceled or marked failed within a three day period. What do we think Prosper is doing with our funds during this magical three day window? Perhaps they are making interest and increasing their balances and cash flow? They indicate that this waiting period is standard practice and make us feel better by adding that it makes our external bank account more secure.

I am getting more and more baffled today. I was running iChat last night and still this morning. I closed the application and several hours later opened it back up. When I opened it up it took me through the setup interview asking me to put in my account details again and to enable Jabber and Bonjour. Why is my PowerBook acting so strange lately?

Several weeks ago I ran into a problem with my .Mac account and sync. I have my account set to sync Contacts, Bookmarks, Email accounts, Keychains etc. I was on .Mac web mail to send a message. When I tried to use an email address from my contacts it took me to a page that said my Contacts were not synced and would I like to erase them or merge them. I choose merge because that would seem the best option. I sent my email message and went on happy as a lark.

Several days later I was looking at my contacts on my PowerBook and I noticed that something was strange. I had roughly twice the number of contacts that I previously remembered having. Then I started looking around. The data from the contact records had been corrupted. Some of the names were mixed with other phone numbers and email addresses etc. It made no sense how it was all messed up, but at this point I figured I would email .Mac support and expect to go through all 300 entries and put together a complete, de-duplicated set of addresses again. I may have a backup from where I moved from my original PowerBook to the new PowerBook but I do not have the backup drive with me now.

So today I was just working on my blog when a message popped up on the screen.

Now I have only 30 contacts in my address book. Anyone have a thought about this one?