Ode to credit card payments using machine or human

I travel a lot. And as a result, I fly out of Houston Hobby airport and become very efficient and getting there, parking, and making a fast get-a-way. Something occur to me a few weeks ago as I was peeling out from the parking garage to head home.

When paying for parking, you have a couple of options. You can use an auto teller and swipe your credit card through a machine, or you can do it the old fashion way and interact with a parking attendant who will gladly process your credit card.

The issue is, when I use the machine, I insert my parking ticket followed by the credit card and usually 15 seconds later, a receipt is printed and I retrieve my credit card. Now, in the event that the automatic machine is down (which is often), I have to go to the parking attendant. I give them the parking ticket, a total is calculated, I give him my card, he swipes the card, I wait about 1 minute (I've timed it), he hands me clipboard, sign the receipt, and then get my card back and my copy of the receipt and then I'm out of there.

My question, why is it that I have to sign a receipt when using the parking attendant but do not have to when I use the automatic machine? I've heard that transactions under $25 don't require signatures, but most of the time, my parking ticket is on the order of $50. What gives?

Flight Status using Google SMS

Tonight, while reading through Lifehacker, came across a great post on checking flight status using Google SMS. Apparently, by sending a text message to Google SMS like "Southwest Flight 48", you will receive a message back with the status of the flight. As a frequent traveler, this is way cool.

Judge upholds $30M Judgement against Ebay...what the?

The AP is reporting that a federal judge upheld a ruling in favor of a small Virgina based companies claim of patent infringement by EBay. The article states:

The dispute revolves around eBay's "Buy It Now" option, which sells
merchandise at a fixed price instead of fluctuating bids. MercExchange contends
the system tramples on its patented technology.

Since when is buying merchandise on line at a fixed price an infringement of a patent? The article concludes with:

Since the legal tug-of-war began, MercExchange's payroll has shrank from more
than 40 employees to three. Thomas Woolston, MercExchange's president, is trying
to revive the company's growth by licensing patents to other e-commerce sites.

MercExhange is the name of the company that filed the lawsuit...hmmmm...I guess patent holding companies are a thing of the past...at least with respect to Internet intellectual properties.

A Christmas Tragedy

Once I realized that it was the woman sitting a few chairs down from me snoring and not some special affect, I was able to realize how bad of a telling of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol put on at the Alley Theatre really was.

From freakish choreographed ghost dances you would be proud of at your 5 year old daughters dance recital; the predictable transvestite maid servant of Scrooge; a steam clock; and to the tricycle riding ghost of Christmas future, the play was an utter disappointment. Until last night, I didn't realize it was possible for a professional stage group to put on a poor performance.

Yes, you read right, the ghost of Christmas future was riding a rocket propelled tricycle full of exhaust steam, twisty pipes, and some kind of canisters that you would see at an oil refinery.

Suffering from an identity crisis, the producers and directors tried to bring A Nightmare Before Christmas to the stage through this classic story. Needless to say, neither are a Tim Burton and their attempt was unoriginal, boring, and down right stupid. I found myself laughing out loud throughout the play as scene after scene contained some kind of cheese that Kraft would be proud of. For example, there was an entourage of 5 ghosts doing some stupid choreographed dance routine between many of the scenes wearing Halloween masks straight out of the movie Scream.

Suffice to say, I'm going to think twice next year before slapping down my $67 per ticket to avoid suicidal thoughts to rid myself of the agony of watching this play, as it was truly the worst play I've ever seen.

P.S.
I'm not kidding about the lady snoring.

TLAP Follow Up

joel s says:
Hoist the mizzen and swing the lead! tryin' out this new pirate talk thin'y fer MSN

joel s says:
http://messenger.zone.msn.com/en-us/nongame/upgrade.aspx?gameID=10331057

joel s says:
Swab the deck, matey or you'll kiss the gunner's daughter. it automatically translates into pirate fer yeAye, but aren't ye a fine lookin' lass.

joel s says:
lubber, this thin' is pretty sweet Aye, Aye, captain.

K3bert says:
Aye, but aren't ye a fine lookin' lass. I'm all about TLAM next year

K3bert says:
Gar. TLAM = Talk Like A Modem

joel s says:
If'n ye don't swab the deck, ye be swimmin' with the bilge rats! TLAM, what th' hell is that? some TLAP knockoff?Aye, but aren't ye a fine lookin' lass.

joel s says:
aye Measure ye for yer chains.

joel s says:
moden eh

joel s says:
medem

joel s says:
modem

K3bert says:
I BE a fine lookin' arse Aye, me bucko.

K3bert says:
who in th' fuck comes up with this shit? Avast ye scarvy scum.

joel s says:
You li'ly libbered land lubber. hows that work? beep-beep--b-e-e-p-beeee-p

K3bert says:
errrgggghhhh.....sreeeeeecccchhhhhh......ehhhhhohhhhhh.....errrrrrrr

joel s says:
You li'ly libbered land lubber. geeks, real geeks.

Humanized.com...putting the human back into customer support

From an earlier post, I raved about Enso, a product produced by Humanized.com. If you haven't tried out Enso and you work on a PC, you have to. It makes working on the PC easy by killing the need for your computer mouse! I love it.

I have installed it on all of my PC based computers, including my work laptop. The other day, I had just restarted my laptop for the first time after installing Enso and much to my dismay, the application crashed. Not only did it crash, it opened a window telling me it crashed and asked to send the information to Humanized.com. I nearly dismissed the window and had all but un-installed the software when I thought, what the heck, I'll go ahead and submit the information.

Then, within a few hours of my submission, I received an email! Yes, an email, with a real person on the end of it. After picking up my jaw from the floor, I read the email.

Hello Kevin,

Sorry Enso crashed for you. Thanks for reporting the bug. Enso needs to have access to your "My Documents" directory, because it stores its "learn as open" targets in a directory inside that one. It looks like your "My Documents" directory is on a network share (also known as a file server). Is that the case? If so, then if the network share is unavailable at the time that Enso tries to start up, this kind of crash will be the result. Some users have reported that restarting the server which hosts the network share fixes the problem. You might ask your network administrator to try doing this. In the long run, we need to fix Enso so that it won't crash in this situation, but will just quietly keep trying to read the directory until the network share becomes available. In the meantime, I'm afraid there's not much that you can do about the problem. Changing "My Documents" to point at a local directory on your hard drive would fix it, but I understand that this might not be an option for you.

Once again, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
xxx xxx, Humanized, Inc.

I replaced the person's name with "xxx xxx" to respect the employees privacy. But yes, there is a real explanation to why the software crashed! I have now reconfigured the program to point to a local directory on my laptop and thanks to the outstanding humanized support I got, I am one happy customer. Oh, by-the-way, did I mention that Enso is free? Or at least the beta product is free. I didn't realize that there was a commercial product available, but now that I just found that out, I'm marching over right now to purchase their non-beta product Enso Launcher.

When was the last email you received from Microsoft offering an explanation to why a Windows crashed and subsequently reported to Microsoft?