This is just a rant. I don’t care.

When I am stopped at a light I just sit there until the light turns green — then I go. It makes sense, right?

When other folks are stopped at a light about 10% seem to want to constantly creep forward as if their car came to a full stop they might never be able to get it to go again. Eventually the light turns green and for the most part they have worse reaction times and don’t move before I clear the intersection!

Well yesterday I saw someone get their due. Finally. (Ok, they didn’t get much, but that’s OK I guess… )

I’ve colored the inductive loop “car sensor” green in the diagram above. They pulled so far up that they were no longer on the loop and they didn’t get a green light!

(You can take a look on Google Maps if you want — this is rotated north up so you’ll have to mentally flip something around)

Suckers.

If you just follow the rules in this case you can actually have things work better for you!

That and I kept getting behind people driving 10 mph under the speed limit for no good reason. And no, I don’t count being on your phone or drunk as a good reason. Put the phone/bottle down before you kill someone! If you can’t drive the speed limit in good conditions (i.e. daylight/dusk and dry) then you shouldn’t be driving.

First a bit of background. En has a new bike and I moved my bike computer (Garmin Edge 305) to her bike. My bike (older) has a new computer to replace it (Garmin Edge 800 — more on that in another post).

Problem: in the five years since I purchased the old computer the battery has degraded. What started off as an 8-10 hour battery life is now closer to 4 hours. Not just that but the self-discharge rate has gone through the roof (25% in three days! Gaaahh!!).

Not to fear, the internet comes to the rescue with instructions on how to replace the non-replaceable battery! Internet: +1.

Step one: acquire battery.

This is the point of this. The battery was purchased on eBay for the princely sum of $3.05 shipped to my doorstep.

How on earth is that profitable?

The price of shipping is $0.44.

Oddly, the USPS shipping label is printed on UPS label stock. I’m guessing that was a “donation” from UPS so I’m not going to count that (or the printer that was used to print it). The envelope is a pretty decent one with bubble padding and all that. The price I’m seeing for that is around a dime. The PayPal fee for this small transaction is $0.39.

Summed up this is $0.93. This is just simple overhead that can’t be avoided at any cost.

The rest of this $2.12 has to pay for the product and handling.

Even if the battery were free to them how is this profitable?

I found a UPS envelope on my doorstep today and in there was a new credi card from American Express.

American Express monitors all account for fraud on an ongoing basis. Our fraud detection systems determined that you name and card number may have been intercepted by an external party and, as a precautionary measure to protect your account against unauthorized use, we have issued the enclosed replacement Card.

This happened before — kinda. They called and asked if I was trying to book a flight from London. While I wish I was it wasn’t me in London. They gave me a new card then.

Today this came and I hadn’t talked to them recently.

I checked the recent transactions and nothing came up looking odd.

I’m not even on using the online Playstation gaming network.

I wonder what triggered this. I’ve not been hanging out in any seedy parts of the internet. (Or at least not any new seedy parts.) The FAQ specifically says “American Express cannot disclose information regarding ongoing fraud investigations.”

Odd.

It’s just a pain in the butt to now give everyone my new card that regularly bills me for stuff. Oh well. I suppose it’s better than the alternatives.

A few weeks ago EA managed to screw up the weekend for a whole bunch of people playing (well, attempting to play) Bioware.

Then I started talking to one of my coworkers and a similar “you don’t own it” reared its head: DVDs.

Whenever a certain Disney DVD gets inserted into his vehicle’s system it takes 15 minutes to run through all the previews — and you can’t skip them even though it says you can.

The thing is if I was in the same position, I’d just copy the DVD to one of the hundreds of blanks I have and just leave out the stupid parts.

…that is if I didn’t pirate it. If I pirated it I wouldn’t have to put up with it in the first place.

There’s the problem: if the customer experience (not even counting the money) is better for the pirated version, what’s the incentive to get the legit version? The copy protection and unskippable previews and all the other crap that’s loaded onto stuff we buy is simply ridiculous.

Of course — that is we don’t buy it. We simply license it.

Bastards.

Of course that doesn’t change the picture that the pirated version is still better.