How’d you like to have your own pet moose? (Kids don’t try this at home.)
December 2006
Cell Phones As Bugs
By way of the Interesting People list, here are some interesting links about law enforcement using cell phones as remotely-operated listening devices or tracking devices:
FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect and brother
I’ve wondered before if this could be done. Looks like it can.
Hertz Rips Me Off
The Hertz rental car company apparently tried to screw me out of a pile of money on my last trip to Chicago. The bastards. I should have known something was up when my credit card didn’t get billed promptly. Here’s the story.
I fly into Chicago’s Midway airport since I like to fly Southwest. The airport’s rental car facility is small and cramped at Midway and it usually takes a long time to either get a car or return one. I’ve had to wait forever at my usual rental car vendor, Dollar, so I thought I’d try Hertz this time. I dusted off my Hertz #1 Club Gold card and booked with Hertz. After all, any company who had O.J. Simpson as its spokesperson has to be good, right?
I landed at Chicago a bit ahead of schedule thanks to Southwest’s Outrageous Customer Service ™. Walking into the garage I was happy to see my name on Hertz’s rental board, pointing the way to my waiting Jeep Liberty. Into the car I went, hassle free. Less than two hours later I was in South Bend, Indiana for the next day’s meeting.
My meeting ended Friday a bit behind schedule. I raced back across the state line but got caught in unanticipated construction traffic. Even though I was late, I searched for the closest gas station near the airport. I stood freezing outside a Citgo in a questionable neighborhood while I filled up the thirsty Liberty. As usual, I made note of my gas purchase amount before racing into the rental return garage, though the receipt printer was not working.
I got there with precious few minutes to spare. There were returning cars everywhere! The lines were so long I barely inched my car past the automatic gate before I ran out of room. I waited there a few more minutes without anyone directing me anywhere (not that I could’ve gone anywhere, anyway). Knowing how close I was to missing my flight, I was about to put it in park when a garage attendant mumbled “I can’t let him park there” and waved me back to the Hertz end of the garage.
More precious minutes went by as I dodged hurried travelers and empty cars scattered in the traffic lanes. I was waved to a spot near the booth, where I collected my things and checked my watch again.
A Hertz woman noticed me but didn’t approach. She continued to show new renters their vehicle. More minutes went by. No one came to talk to me.
Screw it, I thought. Some “Gold” service here.
I gathered my things, left the key in the car, and booked inside to my flight, making it into the jetway after my name was called two times to board. Two other hapless travelers showed up behind me, out of breath as I was. The flight was full and still not loaded, so none of us stragglers delayed the plane, but it wasn’t a fun way to end the trip.
I assumed Hertz would send me a receipt, or I could pull one up on their website. I’m a Gold member, after all.
Days went by. Kelly began asking me to file my expense reports. I still hadn’t heard from Hertz.
Weeks went by. Still no charges. I put in a call to Hertz’s customer service center. After a long wait, a pleasant woman named Celeste answered. She took my call in the midst of the huge snowstorm that had kept most of her coworkers away. As it was 5 o’clock on a Friday I felt very lucky to have gotten her.
Celeste was puzzled why I didn’t have a receipt in the system. She agreed with me that it was very ususual. She asked me if I had filled it up before returning it and I told her I did. She put me on hold for a time or two before returning to tell me she was going to work on this some more. I should expect an answer by Monday or Tuesday, she said.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call back from her an hour later. “I found it,” she told me. I happily thanked her for the extra effort, giving Hertz customer service a gold star for exceeding my expectations. I anxiously awaited the emailed copy of the receipt she had promised me and then turned my thoughts to the approaching weekend.
It turns out the emailed receipt that was promised “in an hour” never arrived. I decided to do my expenses anyway and checked my credit card statement online tonight to see what my rental charge was.
It was a whopping $275.85, about $85 more than it should have been! What was I saying about Hertz again?!?
A look at my Hertz receipt (now online) showed a charge for $85.08 for gasoline! The fuckers had charged me for gas when I returned it with a full tank! Hertz better be glad no one was around to take my call a few minutes ago, because someone’s phone would’ve melted.
My next step was to call my credit card company and dispute the charge. That’s $85.08 that Hertz isn’t going to get from me. When they open tomorrow morning, they will get an earful that perhaps might singe someone’s phone if not melt it. Cold weather will be the last thing on the lucky bastard’s mind when he or she takes my call tomorrow.
I want whoever ripped me off to be fired, but of course the odds of that are slim. I anxiously await how Hertz handles this. I’ll be happy to show them the gas purchase from my credit card receipt if they choose to dispute this.
In the meantime, I want to let everyone know that HERTZ RIPPED ME OFF!!. A company that rips people off doesn’t deserve your business, either.
Now, let’s see them try to talk their way out of this . . .
Living On A Thin Line
Living On A Thin Line
The Kinks
All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there’s no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.
All the lies we were told,
All the lies of the people running round,
Their castles have burned.
Our eyes see change,
But inside we’re the same as we ever were.
Continue reading
It’s Now Legal Unlock Your Cellphone!
Since I’m on the topic of telecommunications, I think we’re going to see some interesting moves in the telecommunications industry now that the Copyright Office has ruled that as of December 1st unlocking your cellphone is legal. Read this PC Magazine article explaining what the law says is legal.
Perhaps some competition will bloom now that phone service doesn’t have to be tied to the phone.
Bellsouth – AT&T Merger
You may or may not be aware that AT&T (actually what was known as SBC Communications before SBC adopted the AT&T name) is trying to merge with Bellsouth. This merger was announced early this year and has been held up by a deadlocked FCC. The merger would put tie together the majority of former Baby Bells into a reconstituted AT&T, reversing the decades of progress that the breakup of AT&T achieved.
Thanks to AT&T’s 1984 breakup, Americans now have more phone choices than ever before. The cost of telephone calls has plummeted. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Companies actually compete for your business (to some extent, anyway). Few of any of these would have happened – or happened as quickly – if AT&T was still guarding their mostly taxpayer-funded universe. If SBC … oops, I mean AT&T succeeds in swallowing Bellsouth it will put a huge swath of American telecommunications back under near-monopoly control, leaving only Qwest and Verizon out of this new, improved Ma Bell.
The reason for the delay is the FCC. Commissioners are deadlocked, 2 to 2, on the merger. FCC Commissioner (and Tar Heel) Kevin J. Martin break the impasse/a> by bringing back commissioner Robert McDowell, who recused himself due to earlier lobbying against similar big mergers. McDowell used to be general counsel for a trade group representing small phone companies.
In spite of Martin’s desire to clear this off the FCC’s decks, I think major changes will be needed for this thing to pass. Even though I believe McDowell’s vote may torpedo the merger, I think the conflict-of-interest laws should be respected and his participation should be barred. If the merger can’t convince the two commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, to vote yes then the two companies will just have to buckle down and make a more convincing case or call it off.
Signing Up for Net10 Cell Phone Service
I’ve written before about MVNOs, the cell phone providers who lease airtime from Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint. I decided that my Sprint PCS Vision plan was way too expensive. I don’t use the Internet option much at all now that I’ve got a Boingo account and the 2,000 minutes per month is far more than I ever come close to using. Thus it was time to do some shopping.
After visiting some online forums, I discovered Net10 (and have written about it before), an MVNO which has one of the most affordable plans around. The cost for calls is 10 cents per minute, period. No contracts, monthly fees or daily minimums, just a dime a minute. As opposed to other services, Net10’s minutes can be bought in quantites which last all year. I can buy a card from them providing 1500 minutes and keep them fora whole year. Thus, my monthly cellphone bill can be as low as $12.50 if that’s all the minutes I need a year. Instead, my usage is about 300 minutes per month, which equals (duh) $30 per month. That’s less than half of what I’m currently paying for Sprint!
The phones aren’t flashy, which to me is a good thing since I don’t care to have to lug around a PDA/camera phone/rocket launcher when I need to talk. The battery life should be pretty lengthy without those add-ons, too. The underlying cell phone service is provided by Cingular and T-Mobile, so the coverage is good.
I bought a reconditioned Motorola V171 from Net10 to try them out. Cost was $40. This flip phone has a color screen and is fairly easy to use. The remaining minutes are displayed on the screen so I know what I have as well as when they expire. It has support for polyphonic ringtones, in case I ever go insane and want them for some reason.
My biggest beef with the phone is that the volume on calls is a bit weak. I had trouble hearing Kelly when I took a call from her while I was driving. I thought this was a fatal flaw so I called their support number to return the phone. A nice woman in Belize answered the call and took down all my information. Even though I told her I wanted to switch to a Nokia phone, Net10 sent me an identical V171 in return! I was going to send both of them back when I decided to give the new phone a spin. It turns out the volume wasn’t turned up to the highest level, which makes a difference. Also, I reasoned, if I’m talking while driving I should be using a headset, anyway. I bought a headset and now everything seems fine.
My other beef with the V171 is that the phone just doesn’t seem to fit my ear. Motorola designed the earpiece to be totally flat, which doesn’t match any human ear I’ve ever seen. Thus you can press it against your ear and never get a good seal around it, nor feel comfortable talking on it. Once again, the headset saves the day.
To summarize, I’m happy so far with the Net10 service. I’m marginally happy with the phone. Given what I’ve spent on the phone so far, I don’t have much room to complain. Oh, by the way, the phones come with free airtime, so my $40 bought not only a phone but 300 free minutes, too.
I’m porting my Sprint number to my new Net10 service now. I won’t miss Sprint’s fat phone bill nor its now-redundant Vision internet service. Net10 may be as close to a perfect cell phone service as I’ve seen yet.
Grounded Weekend
When I was a kid, being grounded was a bad thing. Being the daddy in a cool family has turned that upside down, though. I had a nice weekend to become grounded and quite enjoyed it.
Friday was Kelly’s birthday, so we went out to dinner with the help of a neighbor who volunteered to take the kids for a while. We went to a local restaurant near the local mall. Bad move. The service sucked and the food was only marginally better. Atmosphere was zero, too. At least we didn’t invest much time in it and could head home to take in a movie.
The flick was The Da Vinci Code, which I understand everyone else on the planet has already seen. I thought it was interesting – mainly due to Tom Hanks’s excellent acting – but I found myself squirming and checking my watch well before it ended. There were some things too implausable to for me to maintain my “suspension of disbelief.” Like inexplicably carting around the goon that had just tried to kill you, for instance. Or a priest casually taking a cellphone call at 40,000 feet. Or a junkie takinig money to walk away from a fix. On the good side, Ron Howard is getting much better as a director: this movie didn’t seem nearly as wooden as some of his others. Overall, I give it 2.5 stars out of five.
Saturday morning I cooked the family a breakfast of pancakes. Then I went to the local Big Box Electronics Retailer and picked up a new car stereo for Kelly’s Oddity. The CD player refused to play CDs, so I reasoned we could buy a new deck and get free installation for less than the cost of taking the old one to the dealer and having them troubleshoot it. I wasn’t planning to install it myself but the professional installers balked when they saw the navigation system in the van. They said if they installed it the navigation system wouldn’t work right. The installation was probably the easiest of the half-dozen I’ve ever done but what they told me was true: the navigation system doesn’t talk through the stereo anymore. I figure I can figure that out at a later time: not having music in the car when the kids are riding in it is a much bigger problem!
Cleaned out the leaves on the lawn with the leafblower Saturday evening. Then got cleaned up and visited my parents’ house. My sister’s family was visiting from Shelby and everyone seemed to be pretty happy. I found myself feeling pretty emotional that night, just enjoying everyone’s company. I was sad when we had to go. I guess when I sneaked upstairs to look through a few photo albums from twenty years ago, I started to realize just how quickly time flies. Too often I don’t make the most of every minute of my life and that is a crime for which I can’t forgive myself. I’ve only got one life (this time around, at least) and its up to me to enjoy it.
This morning Kelly mentioned needing some time to get some work done. I realized today is the first Sunday of the month, so my solution was to cart the kids off to the New Hope Valley Railway for a train ride. Kelly decided to join us so we threw some snacks together and headed off to Bonsal.
As usual, we had a great time. If the train wasn’t enough, Santa and Frosty the Snowman were there. We found seats in a caboose’s cupula where we could watch the rails and stay warm at the same time. A bonus was hearing the steam whistle on Engine 17 blow throughout the day. There’s something magical about the sound of a steam whistle!
Hallie looked positively exhausted after the train ride but wound up sleeping only an hour. Kelly was anxious to keep working so I entertained Hallie by pulling out a deck of cards and teaching her “Go Fish.” She caught on quickly though she had trouble fanning her cards to see her hand. It’s so fun to watch her pick up new games and skills – mainly because she does it so effortlessly. I wonder if its too early to start her on chess?
I again stepped up to the “dinner” plate and cooked up a tasty spaghetti for the family. The kids and I wrestled a bit before bedtime, which went smoothly. Now its time for me to finish up a few chores before retiring tonight myself. The upcoming workweek doesn’t excite me much but I do have plenty of upcoming visits with family and friends to keep me happy.
Thanks to y’all for reading, too. It’s nice to have an audience sometimes.
A Critique of Children’s Music
As a musical guy and a father, I’ve learned to appreciate the children’s music my kids listen to. Here are my thoughts on those CDs we play around the Turner household.
They Might Be Giants’s No! album is good enough, but it doesn’t stay with you. Some songs are annoying enough to shelf the whole CD. I’m a big fan of TMBG, but the overall tone of No! is a little disjointed to be a long-time favorite.
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer can write catchy, clever songs but they’re aimed more towards the kids than the kids-and-adults music I prefer. If you’re going to have to listen to songs with your kids, you might as well enjoy them, too. There is too much children’s chorus in the songs for my liking. Still, songs like “A Pirate’s Life” are clever enough to put smiles on even the crabbiest parents. Arr arr arr arr!
The Wiggles are non-starters. Annoying times ten! I don’t like music that talks down to my kids, which is what their music seems to do. While I wish Greg Page, otherwise known as Wiggles Yellow, a speedy recovery from his disease, I wouldn’t miss the Wiggles if they never played another annoying note.
Laurie Berkner is in my view the queen of children’s music. Catchy, clever, silly songs with simple guitar accompaniment. Many of these songs were the only things we could decipher from Travis when he was first learning to talk. I can listen to Laurie Berkner all day and not want to pull my (remaining) hair out. That’s quite a feat for children’s music.
Tom Paxton, though, is a brilliant children’s music musician whom I think tops them all. Some CDs are better than others, though. I was indifferent to the first Tom Paxton CD I heard, Your Shoes, My Shoes. It’s got decent songs, but Tom’s singing usually aims for kids rather than kids-and-adults. Still, I love the deliciously morbid writing in The Worms Come Crawling Underground. Even the childrens’ chorus doesn’t take away from it.
Then there’s Tom’s 1992 release I’ve Got A Yo-Yo. I consider it the best children’s CD I have ever heard. This one doesn’t talk down to the kids. It’s good, not just good for kids. It’s silly without being goofy. Oops and The Crow’s Toes are my current favorites. Plenty of variety in musical styles are on this disc, too, so you don’t get tired of it.
So to the moms and dads out there: who am I overlooking? Got any favorites you’d like to mention?
Birthday Girl
Someone special is having a birthday today. Kelly, my babe of a wife, is celebrating another year on planet Earth and I’m fortunate to be sharing it with her.
Happy birthday, Sweetie!