A student in Germany was busted for plugging his laptop in while waiting in a train station.
German prosecutors say they’re investigating the student for pilfering less than a cent’s worth of electricity.
I wonder if he knows the potatoes-in-the-computer guy.
Yesterday was a pretty bizarre and frustrating day, though at least I managed to unwind at the end of it.
It started, for me, with waking up at about 0600 from a dream thinking that I’d heard somebody screaming for help. As it turned out, it wasn’t a dream; there really were screams for help coming from somewhere. I grabbed the cordless phone and started dialing 911 while heading downstairs. Helen was eating breakfast, but hadn’t heard anything; the dining room is in the back of the house. I stepped out the front door in a nightshirt, and saw a woman down at the corner, screaming “he took my bag!” (I’d originally heard this as “he took my dad!”, which when combined with the volume of her screams, made me expect to find someone who’d been knifed or something.)
As I was describing the scene to the 911 dispatcher (who said that I wasn’t the first call they’d had), the woman walked toward me, and I said “here, I’m handing her the phone”. I gave it to her and headed inside to put on something warmer (fleece pants and a winterweight bathrobe) before heading back outside to see what was happening.
By this point, another neighbor had come out and was standing on the corner talking to the victim as she waited for another police car to arrive (the first had apparently already taken off looking for the culprit). As we stood there talking, a third neighbor came running out saying “are you all right ma’am? are you okay?”
Shortly after this, the second police car arrived, the victim got in, and the rest of us headed back home. After that start, it was basically impossible to get back to sleep, so I didn’t even try; I had breakfast, did the other usual morning stuff, and headed in to work.
After that start, the usual grind of email and other work stuff was pretty anticlimactic, and the morning relatively uneventful.
After lunch I headed down to the mall to get our (currently broken) DVD player replaced. I was pretty frustrated about that; we’d already taken it to the authorized service center, which held on to it for about three weeks (since they were backlogged); then, when it got to the bench, they found out that the manufacturer’s policy on this model is to do exchanges through the retailer instead of repairs. (At least the service folks were honest; when I brought it in, they told me that it could be a few weeks before it got looked at, and longer if it needed parts shipped in. They were as much victims of this secret policy as I was.)
I’d called the manufacturer’s support line Wednesday night to confirm all this, they said that it was the case, and we’d headed over to the service place Thursday to pick the unit up. I gathered all the cables, manual, remote, etc and made sure everything was together, and took them to work so we could get this done before the weekend.
Naturally, this was not to be the case.
We got to the mall, went to the store’s customer “service” desk, and got the “our policy is 30 days on returns unless you buy our protection racketplan” speech, and told that we’d have to contact the manufacturer.
When I pointed out that I had contacted the manufacturer, who had sent me to the retailer, and gave them a copy of the documentation the service center had given me, showing this model and saying that there were no repairs and it was a retail carry-in exchange, they were adamant.
Talking to a supervisor got the same speech, with the slight bending that “we will ship the unit back to the manufacturer for you if you’d like”. Gee, thanks.
I wound up calling the manufacturer’s customer relations line again, this time on my cell phone while standing to the side of the counter. After waiting on hold for the requisite three weeks, I got through to a helpful person; he said that they’d had problems with this retail chain before, and that they’d take care of it by contacting the store manager through their channels.
When I called later that night to check on the situation, they said that I should expect to hear back “within two business days”. Sigh. We’ll see what happens between now and Tuesday.
(After that? More work, this time fighting with the backup system; once that was beaten into submission, home for dinner, and off to my usual Friday gaming session, which is how I finally unwound from the day.)
Saturday? Saturday was great.
Paco Underhill explains the mall.
I recently read his Call of the Mall and found it amusing and full of “yeah, I’d noticed that, but never thought about why it was like that” insights. For example, why are perfume counters always near the main entrance in department stores? He asserts that it’s a hold-over from the days when it covered the smell of horse manure wafting in from the street. (I’m not sure I buy that explanation; it smacks a little too much of the sort of folk-etymology explanations of word origins that wind up being too good to be true.)
Other observations he makes are on firmer ground, however. Why are mall entrance hallways always full of such low-value stores? Where did all those kiosks come from? Why aren’t there any stores men care to visit in most malls? (The CambridgeSide Galleria is an exception, having a Sears, a Best Buy, a Borders, an Apple Store, and Cambridge Soundworks; it also has the usual round of mall stores like Victoria’s Secret, Pac-Sun, Abercrombie & Fitch, Benetton, and Ann Taylor.) What possessed the architects and designers to make such an incredibly bleak exterior? Underhill explains it all.
I’ve requested his earlier book Why We Buy from the library; if it’s even half as funny and interesting as Call of the Mall I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.
Underhill will be appearing at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge (MA) on Wednesday. I’ll probably be there.
The American Museum of the Moving Image has an exhibit entitled BLIP: Arcade Classics from the Museum Collection opening Friday, February 27.
There’s also a Newsday article on the exhibit, including the reactions of a couple kids:
Son Matt is a stranger to most of this stuff. “These games are not from my millennium,” he says, but concedes a soft spot for Zaxxon, which boasted state-of-the-art 3-D graphics when Sega released it in 1982, nearly a decade before he was born. His sister Taylor, 11, prefers Ms. Pac-Man, another game from 1982 that was the cuddlier, yet more complex, sequel to Pac-Man - one of the first games to become popular with women. “It’s fun,” Taylor says, still not quite sure what to make of it all. “It’s a challenge.”
(At least that’s a better set of reactions than these kids had to Pong and other older games, including the infamous Atari 2600 E.T. cartridge, which is classic only in the same sense as fossilized dinosaur crap.)
A similar exhibition, Game On, was shown in London at the Barbican (where I saw it), then went to Edinburgh, and on to Tilburg, Holland after that.
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was quick to say things like “[w]e must now act to preserve the voice of the people and the representatives they elect” when the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples had equal rights to marry.
As the law currently stands, Romney would appoint an interim senator to replace Kerry. The appointee would not face an election until 2006, when they would be able to run as an incumbent after having been in office for almost two years; that election would be to fill out the term until January 2009. In other words, for a third of the 6-year term, the seat would be held by an unelected gubernatorial appointee. You know, like the SJC judges.
I’m absolutely certain that the crowds of pro-amendment folks who came in for the Constitutional Convention will soon be outside Mitt’s office chanting “Let The People Vote”…won’t they?
The truly ironic quote is at the bottom of the article, though:
“You really don’t want to create a monopoly that has so much power it is going to change the law in such a blatantly partisan way and at a time when people are really looking to have fairness and equality on Beacon Hill,” Romney said.
Yes, Mitt. People are looking for fairness and equality, and you’re the one trying to deny it to them.
The playlist I’m currently listening to in iTunes takes advantage of smart playlists to a somewhat absurd degree.
It’s a list of songs that:
This is a great way to hear stuff that I haven’t overplayed yet; combined with Synergy to let me rate or re-rate songs with a quick tap of a function key, it’s nearly perfect.
The BBC is covering the story under the misleading title “Human genome data to be released”. This is misleading, because the public Human Genome Project released their data long ago (which they do mention in the article). (A badly-written headline on a news story? Quelle surprise!)
I’m pleased. I’m biased, because I worked on the public HGP, but having this additional data in GenBank is a Very Good Thing in my opinion. Free availability of genome data has already helped researchers around the world.
Yes, I’m one of those iPod users that the NYT talks about in The World at Ears’ Length. The only difference is that I don’t like earbuds, and in this weather the remote is under my jacket; this means that I’m not visibly iPodular. I also hit pause when I’m in line for something, so I won’t clog it up for everyone.
It is great for ignoring the various street haranguers, though.
Sunday. It was too cold to wait outside for the bus, so I took the T and it was probably faster than waiting for the bus would have been anyway; Sunday schedules are not nearly as frequent. Arrived in plenty of time for the 10am panel on “How Extended Edition DVDs Are Changing the Nature of Movies”. Fun and interesting, though fairly LOTR-heavy for the obvious reason.
Then a decision between two panels (”Those Terrible Middle Ages” and “Historical Myths in SF&F”); I dithered a bit before opting for the latter, simply because it was less crowded, and I was going to be leaving partway through to meet Helen for lunch. The write-up didn’t seem to be very clear to the panel, and I wasn’t really there long enough to see how it was developing anyway.
Lunch, some shopping, then back to gaming for the 12:30 Kill Dr. Lucky. I almost got the old coot (known in this case as “Dr. Pucky” since his token was the puck from a table-top hockey game), but all I managed was to clear out the failure cards so that another player could get him.
This left me time to catch the end of “The Dreaded Mary Sue” before the final panel I’d planned on: “Twenty Panels in an Hour”.
No blog entry I can write will do this one justice. The four panelists (Michael A. Burstein, Keith R. A. DeCandido, Leigh Grossman, and the victim-of-the-year, er, moderator Bob Devney) were clearly having a great deal of fun, as were the audience members. I lost count, but I think we actually got through thirty panel topics, even with miscellaneous digressions, running gags (”What if author were John Norman?”) and Geek Transcendence. I had so much fun that I’ve been threatened with being on the panel next year.
With that, I headed out to get some other things done before dinner, since I had system maint work scheduled after that (yes, I had to go to work in the middle of a three day weekend, sigh).
So that was Boskone as I saw it.
Saturday. Caught the bus (which helpfully arrived just as I reached the stop) over to Boston in time for the “Not Just War Porn: The Best Military SF” panel. A similarly-named panel at Noreascon 3 was responsible for my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold, so I had hope for this one. I wasn’t disappointed; I’ll have to check out both James MacDonald and Walter Hunt now.
A swing through the hucksters’ room and the art show, then into the gaming room for Chez Dork. This wasn’t nearly as much fun as Ninja Burger, however. Oh, the cards were cute, but it seemed like “draw good stuff, ‘buy’ it, get the Autographed card on your 3 point item that matches your obsession, win” was all there was to it. Nobody traded, nobody auctioned, nobody slipped on ketchup during combat.
The game lasted long enough that I’d already missed most of the noon panel I’d wanted to attend (”Why Not the War of 1812?” on alternate alternate-history turning points). I grabbed a quick lunch in the mall food court, then headed to Michael Flynn’s “Return of How to Lie With Statistics”. This was lots of fun, but he didn’t get through all of his examples, alas. Dropping something (the “write a bunch of Ts on a piece of paper” exercise could go) might have worked better. This was up against the Nielsen Hayden tag-team kaffeklatsch, too. That was an annoying pair of program items to have to choose between!
None of the 2pm panels sounded interesting, so I wandered back down to gaming. We managed to put together a game of Settlers of Catan (including introducing someone to it–how he’d managed to avoid encountering it by now is still a mystery to me), and then a game of Puerto Rico with the same four of us. After that ended, it was about 6pm and while I’d sated my “German game” fix, I was hungry and somewhat tired, so figured it was the better part of valor to head home rather than get caught up in the Steve Jackson Games tournament. The tourney turned out to run until about 4 am, so I definitely made the right choice!
I did miss the GOH speech/awards ceremony/charity auction, though, but missing the latter was probably safest for the wallet in any case.
