May 29, 2007 at 11:31 pm
(Uncategorized)
So…if you haven’t heard, Google released an update to it’s Maps service. Now, in a few select cities, you can view street-level panoramic photos. I was interested to see this in action…especially when I heard that good ol’ Denver was one of the five cities for which the service was available.
For most of the city, only major streets are covered. Nonetheless, the detail is somewhere between creepy and cool. Certainly, many of the scenes are very recognizable. I took a look at one location in which there is a Powerball billboard. The jackpot was $281 million. Storefronts are recognizable, you can read street signs. It’s easily as addictive as the addition of satellite imagery was several years ago. Some of the places I took a look at were:
- The back of my parent’s house
- My high school
- And…
Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment
May 23, 2007 at 11:08 pm
(Uncategorized)
So, as many of you know, I was relocated last June. In July, Mel and I changed cell phone companies and received new cell phone numbers with our new area code. Soon after this, the calls started.
The call is an automated voice message that says “This call is for Mark Helzberg. If this is not Mark Helzberg, hang up now.” It’s rude, right out of the gate, and just screams “collection agency.” It then goes on to say “By listening to this message, you acknowledge that you are Mark Helzberg.” Now it sounds a little scary. I picture a courtroom scene:
“Please state your name for the record”
“[I state my name]”
“Let the record show that this man acknowledged that his name was Mark Helzberg by listening to a phone message on Tuesday the 8th of October…”
At first, I just ignored the calls. I mean, for one thing, the phone company has a period of time during which an old number can’t be recycled. So I knew that this collection agency had been calling this fellow for months already without any response. Surely they’d give up soon. But this tactic didn’t work. And they always seem to call when I’m in meeting. After a few months, I actually tried to call back by calling the incoming number which had a Raleigh, NC area code. No luck on that one–the numbers that show up on the caller id don’t go anywhere.
At one point, I decided I’d had enough and Googled Mark Helzberg (not his real name, by the way) and found out that he is getting his Masters in Computer Science at the University of Cincinnati. I thought about writing him an email telling him to get these dopes off my back…but I decided if I could track the guy down in five minutes and the collection agency bozos still hadn’t found him, I sure wasn’t going to do their job for them.
Now that we’re passing the year mark, I’m finally on the verge of calling up the sales number for this particular collection agency and letting them know how insanely stupid it is to try to call someone unsuccessfully for what has to be pushing at least two years. I imagine their client could have tracked him down with an honest-to-god PI for less than they’ve been paying for this service. I listened to the message long enough to find out the name of the company. It is Absolute Collection Service, of Raleigh, NC.
I seriously hope that someday, a potential client of this group finds this blog entry and decides to look elsewhere for their collection needs. I’ll be calling Absolute Collection Services at 919-755-3900 to let them know what a lousy a job they’re doing. In fact, I’m going to call them three times a week until they get my number off their list.
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May 17, 2007 at 12:24 am
(Colorado)
Lexington’s leaders are on a trip to Boulder to see what, exactly, makes a college town.
He he!
From the “Boulder Blog:”
“Among the information supplied on one walking tour: Colorado has a state law that pedestrians have the right of way. “
I find that amusing…I mean, peds don’t have the right-of-way here? But of course, in Boulder, it’s a different thing altogether. In Denver, you’d get run down if you crossed at the wrong place. I think drivers are a little more courteous in Lex.
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May 16, 2007 at 11:24 pm
(Personal)
So…I came home yesterday and found a FedEx envelope on the doorstep. Odd. Turns out it was a letter marked “Urgent.” (Although I typically get the message from the next-day delivery tag.) Turns out the woman who bought my car over a year ago never had it registered in her name. And, with the bad weather in Denver, it got banged up, so she parked it. And somehow it “got into an accident.” An accident occurred. Anyway, I was supposed to call the claims agent at her insurance company and tell the agent that yes, I did sell the car to her. For future reference, if I ever sell my old car to you, and this car was my first car, something I purchased when the sweat of a day’s labor was more valuable for being worth less, something I put considerable effort into caring for, I do not want to hear about it if it gets so much as a scratch. Really, unless I know you fairly well, I expect you to kind of disappear forever because although I don’t like to admit it, I know this car is old and tired already and won’t last forever. I certainly don’t want the responsibility of making the call so that you get paid when it gets hauled away. So, I called. It was relatively painless. The truth is, I really don’t know how bad this “accident” was. (I do know that at no point while I owned this car did I feel it was worth anything more than the basic coverage required–certainly not comprehensive. So why is she getting paid?) Really, none of this matters. I’ve had another car for over 30,000 miles and plenty of time to break free of that silly emotional attachment.
It’s funny, isn’t it? The way cars demand this status as a friend or family member. I remember crying(!) when my parents got rid of the car they had when I was born. Sometimes a newer model eases the loss much as a new puppy helps when an old dog dies. Sometimes we hold onto the old car…for what? I didn’t even try to sell my Sentra until six months after I bought my car and half seriously pondered relocating with it. (Rainy days like today remind me why I prefer my new car. It handles much better in a downpour. But sometimes I miss the slightly higher fuel efficiency. And while a shiny car doesn’t stand out at the corporate office, it sure does at the factory. And I hate standing out that way.) Car commercials poke fun at the bond between car and person–the car as confidant–and in the past have exploited our tendency to look for faces in headlights and grilles. In some subcultures, the car is the extension of oneself. Despite my railing against car culture, I understand these things on some level. It is for this reason that I have posted a photo of my old car in better days.
It’s not the best photo of my car; it was taken with a digital camera that was old in 2002. But I think it captures something anyway. It was taken at an overlook near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania; I was traveling from Boston back to Denver with a friend. The car got me to Boston and back without a single problem; two years later, it took me to the Grand Canyon and back with a similar lack of complaint. For a short time, I delivered pizzas in it. It was the car I was driving when I picked up a certain girl I’d just met and drove her 100 miles out on the plains just to see the stars. It was a constant during a period of rapid change in my life.
It’s indulgent to write about a car, I know. But it was my first car, something I always owned outright and something I was always proud of. I’m going to try not to feel bad about it. But I’ll still get that little bit of irrational heartache when I think about pulling the keys from the ignition and seeing, for the last time, the garish letters on the car stereo flash up “Good bye.”
4 Comments
May 10, 2007 at 11:41 pm
(Social/Economic)
Something amusing occurred to me while I was writing my last post. The company I work for considers me to be an “associate.” This is a dressed up form of “employee.” Instead of calling our end customers “end customers” or “customers” we call them “consumers.” Our “customers” are the stores that buy our products.
Any good liberal will tell you that word choice is important. Liberals hate the word “consumer.” But what if you could turn this on its head? Writing my last post, I found it more convenient to call what I would normally call “companies” or “corporations,” “employers.”
So what if I used that term all the time? Here’s an example:
I’ve decided I don’t like that employer because they wouldn’t let me into their facility simply because I work for a competing employer. So I don’t think I’m going to buy that employer’s products any more.
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May 10, 2007 at 11:33 pm
(Uncategorized)
Healthcare seems to be destined to be the big topic of one of these years. As I’ve argued before (and alluded to a few times before that,) this should not be the sole responsibility of employers. The responsibility belongs partially with individuals and partially with government. The so-called Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR,) started by Safeway’s CEO and comprised of companies (read: employers,) seems to agree. And yet (perhaps because as a group of companies it would seem suspicious to eliminate the corporate leg of healthcare) they have a goofy formula that also includes employers.
Worse, they introduce the wacky idea that individuals should be forced to carry health insurance. From their website:
Universal Coverage with Individual Responsibility: Public policy has long mandated that care be provided when needed. We believe this policy should be balanced with a requirement that individuals carry health insurance regardless of their employment status. All Americans should have access to affordable quality healthcare services, with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions. The market should drive these policies with government, businesses and individuals sharing responsibility to ensure affordable healthcare coverage is achieved.
Never mind the enforcement difficulties. (You can take one’s driving privileges away for not carrying auto insurance, but how would you punish someone for not carrying health insurance?) They surprising neglect the onus this would put on specific groups.
When I graduated from college I decided to work temp jobs rather than work for the military industrial complex. I spent over a year of this time without insurance (and, as luck would have it, became as seriously ill as I’ve ever been in my adult life.) During this time, I was getting my life together: buying a car, renting an apartment. I was, for a short time, squeaking by. The cost of basic insurance would have been enough to make that impossible. In this car-centric society, I would have been unable to afford a car and thus get the job that eventually became the permanent position that I hold now. For someone young and healthy (my illness was Strep; I recovered nicely after a $50 office visit and $12 in antibiotics, barely more than the $60 I would have paid each month for coverage,) it made more financial sense to go without insurance, even with the risk that something more expensive could have come up.
And I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Safeway’s CEO Steve Burd has been reliably employed his entire life. But he absolutely must be in a minority. Very few people get the chance to even climb such a sturdy corporate ladder, let alone smoothly. There are gaps, however brief, in employment, even for affluent people. I’d be interested to see the Coalition’s plan for government support. My guess is that if you have paperwork to fill out and lines to stand in, this middle class transient unemployment is going to create at least a few insurance outlaws.
The CAHR is on the right track; someone bolder needs to go to the next step. Market forces are important but employers should still have nothing to do with health insurance.
Thought for the day: Business students need to have more solid backgrounds in calculus. Maybe they don’t need the rigor that the science/engineering crowd gets. But I really don’t think this class of thinkers fully understands that very small inputs can, under the right conditions, have a very large impact on a system.
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