short takes

[cellio]

This appalling discrimination from Virginia can't possibly be constitutional, but it's still scary. How did it pass? Bah.

Today I called Consumer Reports to find out why they had charged me for a second month of web access when I had cancelled 30 days after the initial 30-day subscription. "Let's see, it says here you cancelled on March 26." "Yes." "And you subscribed on February 25." "Yes. That's 30 days." "No, you cancelled on the 26th." "February doesn't have 30 days". (Pause.) "Oh. Right; we'll get that credit right out to you." I am completely satisfied with the support representative; their billing system might need some tweaking.

I hadn't seen this spammer tactic before: send a message faking one of those "spam-guard" services that requires people to confirm that they're real people (once) before their email addresses get added to a whitelist. I'm on enough mailing lists that it's possible I might have fallen for it if the sender had put my address, rather than a bogus one, in the "to" line. (On the other hand, I might have been suspicious of any subject line that wasn't "Re: [one of my recent subject lines]". Now I certainly will be.)

Quote from the lawyer defending the first people charged under the "Can Spam" law: "No one's done this before. It will be fun -- not for my client but for me professionally." If my lawyer publically called my case "fun", I might wonder if I had chosen wisely. :-) (Granted, the one time I hired a litigator he was excited about the case, but not because it would be "fun". It was going to be precedent-setting. I'm all for having my lawyer be motivated to do a good job because of the potential journal articles. :-) )

One of today's pieces of (physical) junk mail was from the "food fulfillment center" at some anonymous post-office box. I figured it was probably a charity looking for money, but I was curious enough to open the envelope. Yup -- Feed the Children. I wish I could deliver two clues to organizations that send me junk mail: (1) if you're not willing to put the name of your organization on the outside of the envelope I'm not going to be favorably disposed toward you, and (2) any organization addressing a general problem but only for children is not going to get my money because that's just a sympathy ploy. There are hungry adults too, y'know -- and adults who get cancer, are disabled in various ways, and live in cardboard boxes, just to pick three more child-specific causes that showed up in the mail in the last month. (Lest you get the wrong impression, I do give to charity, and fairly generously. But not to organizations whose tactics I don't approve of.)

Last night I took a short highway entrance ramp from a dead stop (because sometimes Edgewood is like that) for the first time in the new car. Vroom! My old car was pretty good for that (best I'd driven, though all the other examples were automatics so that's not balanced), but my new car is zippier. :-)

Memo to Tony on 24, c. 8:58AM: you idiot! That is all.

Comments

[siderea]

If my lawyer publically called my case "fun", I might wonder if I had chosen wisely. :-) (Granted, the one time I hired a litigator he was excited about the case, but not because it would be "fun". It was going to be precedent-setting. I'm all for having my lawyer be motivated to do a good job because of the potential journal articles. :-) )

If one does business with devils, one must anticipate a certain amount of unholy glee. :)