early morning braindump
This morning as I walked to the bus terminal, I had a thought and said to myself, “You should write that down once you’ve got the your laptop open.” Of course, I’ve forgotten it by now.
They raised the bus fare, and not by a little! If I recall correctly, a ten-ride book used to cost $84. This morning I paid $95. Ugh! I had been getting the thirty-ride books for a while, because they’re a decent savings, but the driver gave me a hard time on Tuesday because my tickets were expired. (Strangely, this is only first driver who has ever said anything about my often-slightly-expired tickets.) To add insult to injury, I’m on a very new coach, and I’d bet money that the rows are at least two inchest closer together than on the usual coaches. I’m all crammed in, and getting rugburn on my knees from the seat in front of me.
Boy, I wish I could remember what I had wanted to write down.
sungo alerted me to the super-nastiness of Netflix’s recent class action settlement. First of all, they’re settling by giving members a month’s upgrade for free. I’ve always resented that sort of settlement: if a vendor screws me over, I don’t want to do more business with him, I want restitution – I’ll make my own decision about whether to use my restitution to give him more business. That’s not really the problem, though, because I didn’t feel screwed by Netflix to begin with. I think the suit was pretty stupid.
The thing that gets me is that after you get your free month at a higher grade of service, they don’t automatically set you back to your old service. You have to remember to go back and change your service level, or you’ll stay at the new, more expensive level. Who wants to bet that Netflix ends up making a profit on this settlement? (Ok, maybe not. Lawyers are expensive.) Anyway, I imagine that I will end up paying for a second month at the higher level, because that’s the sort of thing I tend to forget to take care of. At least it will give me more movies to watch.
Then again, it’s not like I’m getting a lot of watching done on my current queue. We’ve slowed down a lot over the past few months. This weekend we did watch Crumb, which we’ve had for weeks. I thought it was okay, but Gloria really disliked it. Mostly, it made me wonder why so many people like the guy’s comics and the movie. Neither did much for me.