I've been buying more and more music from iTunes lately. Surprisingly, I have been buying a lot more albums lately. I used to mostly buy singles. I would like to go back now and get the whole album for some of the songs I already bought a single off of. What I think apple should do is deduct the price of the first song I got from the price of the album. That provides a financial incentive for me to purchase the whole album after getting hooked on a single song. Or perhaps you found out about the tv shows and other video that they now offer on the store. Let's say that you buy the first episode of Lost and like it. You like it so much that you figure you'll be interested enough to watch the rest of the season and purchase it. That would be an easier upsell because tv shows in a series like that are related, so people could actually get hooked after watching the first show or two.
Anybody who lives near a Universtity can attest to the overpopulation of students with cars. As such, these cars tend to end up parking on (a) the wrong side of the street, (b) across sidewalks, and © on people’s lawns. All of these things will get you a parking ticket in Syracuse and the police are not reserved in handing them out.
If you don’t live in a town where parking alternates from one side of the street to the other on a daily basis I will explain it to you. The wintertime in Syracuse tends to bring with it a good amount of snowfall. In an attempt to keep the streets relatively snow free, the city says that most streets allow parking on only one side of the street at a time. The twist is that that side switches every day. This is supposed to help the snowplows get a full sweep over each street every two days or so. I think it actually does help, but the system is a real pain in the ass. It gets especially annoying during the summer, when there isn’t any real good reason to alternate the parking, seeing as how we don’t get much snow that time of year.
Back to my point. With the local authorities giving out hoardes of tickets to students, you would think that the city would make a good amount of cash from the student neighborhoods that could be used to put more police patrols out on the streets. It is my belief that a good deal of these parking tickets go unpaid because there are a lot of students who graduate and then leave New York to go back to thier home state (or somewhere warmer, at the very least.) Since they have no vested interest in keeping a clean record of parking tickets in a state they don’t care much for, they don’t bother paying the tickets. I know that if I ever got a parking ticket while I was in a nother state I probably wouldn’t bother to pay it.
What to do about this?
I had the thought in my head that the University could make students pay outstanding parking tickets in order to recieve thier diploma’s when they graduate, but I am starting to reconsider that plan. It is certainly an interesting idea, and I’m sure that the city would love the University for it.
dfc thinks that this amounts to treating students unfairly under the law and it punishes students for a flawed parking ticket system. I can’t agree on the part about treating students differently under the law; the University is a private organization and they have every right to institute a “good citizen standing” as part of the graduation requirements if they want to. You can’t graduate if you owe the library boatloads of money, so why does the University let the city get balked on this one. This, of course, brings up the question of what would a state college do in this situation?
As for the system being flawed, I will agree with that. At least the parking ticket situation isn’t as bad in Syracuse as it is in other places, Boston for example. I can’t really comment much on this issue, although I will say that I wonder how cost effective it would be to have our city police spend more time enforcing delinquent parking tickets instead of stoping robberies.
Interestingly enough, I found this (about halfway down the page, “A Post-Graduate Course in Government Finance”) tidbit about the city of Boston trying to do exactly what I just wrote about.
Quote from the story:
Boston parking enforcement officers wrote $6.5 million in tickets that weren’t paid in 2002.
I would love to see the numbers for the City of Syracuse.
My last post used the phrase “five by five” in the title. dfc wasn’t at all familiar with the phrase, and I couldn’t put a specific derivation for where it came from, but I knew that it was analogous to “everything is okay.”
Searching around the net, it seems that “five by five” has been hijacked by Buffy the Vampire cults across the web. My favorite quote came from UrbanDictionary:
Term meaning everything is okay.The term comes from old radio slang. When communicating over radio, the operator would report the strength and clarity of the signal on a scale of 1 to 5 each. Therefore, if a radio operator described the signal as “five by five” it meant it was both loud and clear.
I don’t use the phrase “five by five” because they use it on Buffy.
I am heretofore 86’ing the usage of “five by five” in the Clarendon Haus.
So Microsoft had a recruitment presentation on campus last night and I decided to head on over to see what it was all about. I figured, at the very least, I could win some software or an X-Box and (listening to Lao Tzu in the back of my mind) know my enemy slightly better.
Getting there I realized that it was going to be disgustingly hard to keep my (slight) bias hidden from view. The auditorium was packed with students, most of them drooling. The Archangel (as I referred to the woman who ran the presentation. she had some sinister looking red pants on.) had a casual attire and completely informal air about her. She started out by talking about how cool it was working for the largest software company in the world. "How many of you used a Microsoft product today? Raise your hand," she said. I think I was the only one with my arms still resting nicely on the arm rests of the chair I was in. She went on to talk about how MS Office grossed more money than the entire movie industry in 2002. "I just think that is really cool," she exclaimed. I had to turn to the kid next to me to ask him how much a copy of Office went for these days. He tells me that they are somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 per copy. I look back at him and say, "If I had to pay $200 for a piece of software I don't imagine I would have much money left for movies."
The one other moment when I almost vomited my last quad-espresso came when someone asked about Microsoft sponsoring visa's for foreign students who get a job there. Archangel responds with something about how they will help any employee of theirs get their citizenship and how they have a pretty good legal department (wink, wink to the audience.)
The presentation goes on for a while with some pretty uneventful Q&A between the Archangel and a summer intern they brought in. Eventually we get to the part where people start to get lively again, the prize raffle. On a table in the front of the room they have an X-Box with 2 games, 2 copies of Office XP, 2 copies of Visual Studio .NET, and a wireless mouse. The kid next to me, by now knowing that I am anti-MS asks me what I would do with those windows programs if I won any of them. I thought about it for a second and told him that I would head home, fire up eBay, and then take what I earned and write out a check for the Free Software Foundation with a nice little note on the check that said "Bribe from Microsoft."
Needless to say, I came home and gave my PowerBook a big hug, went to sleep, and had a marvelous dream about a day when gcc produced better code than VC++ and everyone used OpenOffice.
Anyone who has ever had a jeep with a soft top will feel this one.
I got out of work today and went to get my car, which I conveniently park in some strangers backyard near campus. Knowing that the apartment had little to offer in the way of sustinence, I decided to make my weekly pilgrimage down to the King of Burgers' for one of those great 99 cent Whoppers.
Irk #1 - They don't have 99 cent Whoppers any more. What more can I say?
Irk #2 - As I unzipped the plastic window on the driver's side of my vehicle, the window decided to succumb to the cold weather and snap in half. If you have ever had a hole in the side of your car in the middle of winter then you know how I felt. For those of you who don't know the pleasures of flow-through air conditioning in January, let me tell you it sucks.
Oh well, at least I have a matching hole for the one on the back of my jeep now. When people ask about it I feel compelled to quote the ever wise Homer; "Speed holes... they make the car go faster."
Found some more good info on why my window snapped after a quick google search.
Heres an update from my previous irk of the day...
Aparently I'm not the only one who noticed the presidents repeated mispronounciation of
the work nuclear. The NY Times has an article running about the linguistic view of the mispronounciation
of words and thier acceptance into the vernacular of our times...
Free registration required
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/weekinreview/13SHEI.html