Author: Ben

Ben http://benjaminfenster.com/

The ◊ Ouch Lane

Some cities build dedicated bike lanes to encourage residents to travel by bicycle on city streets. Others build dedicated lanes for busses to ensure that busses can travel faster than cars in heavy traffic.

Boulder, Colorado, unable to decide which of these options to pursue, combined the two:

Bike Bus Only

Bike Bus Only

I wish I could’ve been at that planning meeting. “I’ve got it! Let’s take the smallest, most fragile vehicle on the road — the bicycle — and make it share a lane with the largest, heaviest, most massive vehicle! This plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity!”

Fooled You!

The Boulder Creek Festival this year (back at the end of May) fell on a particularly hot day, so we were excited to see this booth in our wanderings:

Lemonade! Maybe!

Lemonade! Maybe!

This appears, at first glance, to be a fairly typical lemonade stand. But upon closer inspection the tiny yellow sign in the window (beside the Visa and MasterCard logos) says, “This booth does not sell lemonade.”

They seem to have failed to grasp a certain key element of the “lemonade stand” concept.

(Full disclosure: another lemonade stand was located in the adjacent space, and the sign clarified that not selling lemonade was part of their contract with the Creek Festival. However, I maintain that having a lemonade stand that doesn’t sell lemonade is a bit misleading with or without a contract in play.)

I’ll Get More Money Too

Sophie has earned her first-ever allowance. Beginning this week, she gets $5 every Monday to spend on anything she wants (that she’s allowed to have).

This strategic amount allows her to buy a few small items immediately, or save it for just one week to get a bigger toy in the $10 range. Being a generally responsible child, she listened patiently to my explanation of how an allowance would work and why she might want to save it, and then tucked the money safely in a wallet she’s apparently had stashed away.

And to celebrate, we took a trip to the Dollar Store. As Sophie browsed and weighed the pros and cons of buying each toy she encountered, Mom reminded her that she might want to save some money, in case she needed to buy anything later in the week. Her response, with the most exasperation I’ve ever heard her use:

Mommy, did you forget? I’ll get more money!

Well, that’s almost what we were hoping to teach.

Your Money’s No Good Here

I called T-Mobile to transfer my fiancée’s phone from the family plan it’s on now to a new individual plan. The call, with “Michelle” in India was unimpressive from the start, but really hit bottom when she started asking for identity information.

T-Mobile Customer Service: Let me have you full social security number, please.

Me: I’m sorry, I don’t give out my social security number.

T-Mobile: We’ll need to do a credit check to verify that you are eligible to have an account with us. We’ll need your social security number, driver’s license or passport number, and date of birth.

Me: I see. Well, I won’t give out any of that information, but I’d be happy to pay the contract in full today instead.

T-Mobile: You want to cancel the contract and pay the early termination fee?

Me: (stunned) No, I want to pay you. The remaining cost of the contract should be about $500, and I’d like to pay it in full, right now, to alleviate any concern about my credit history.

T-Mobile: You’ll have to speak to our cancelations department. Just a moment.

First, phone service providers have no truly legitimate reason to solicit identity information. The operating theory must be that people who have purchased the phone at a discount have taken out the difference as “credit,” but in practice that’s quite absurd. Like all other utilities, they may reserve the right to terminate my service if I should fail to pay. That’s sufficient.

But second, is the notion of people paying their bills so entirely alien that customer service representatives mistake it for a cancellation request?

(And for the record, I have excellent credit history; I just don’t like people prying into it.)

Charles Darwin on Twitter

I normally despise all things pertaining to Twitter, so it has perhaps taken me longer than others to discover that Charles Darwin is on Twitter now.

The posts are a real-time account (time delayed 176 years) of Darwin’s travels, culled from the Beagle Diary and from other journals, notes, et cetera that Darwin left for posterity. Upon first following the link I expected to find satire, but the reality is so much more interesting. It’s actually possible to get a sense of Darwin’s thoughts and the timeline of his voyage.

These sad updates, for example, were posted on April 7th:

What will become of me hereafter, I know not; I feel, like a ruined man, who does not see or care how to extricate himself

It is a comfortable reflection to me, that a ship – being made of wood & iron – cannot last for ever & so this voyage must have an end.

Behind the scenes of this delightful operation is David from metaburbia, a software developer in the United Kingdom.


Can You Hear Me Now?

This story appeared today on Yahoo! News:

Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Wouldn’t an even more impressive story have been about the earlier climber who, after ascending Mount Everest, built a cellular phone tower?

(It was actually a satellite phone, but it’s funnier to think of a cellular tower atop Everest.)

Blast Off!

Tonight began like so:

Sophie: Can we play dolls? Please, please can we play dolls?

No. No, we cannot.

Instead, we took my globe off the bookcase and played the classic “spin it and point to a place” game. When the real globe got boring, we switched to Google Earth, and zoomed into Street View in each of the places Sophie picked. Thus we had a little world geography lesson combined with fancy computer graphics to occupy our imaginations.

Next we switched to my lunar globe and naturally started talking about how people have walked on the moon. This naturally lead to YouTube videos and footage from Apollo 13 of Saturn V liftoffs, men bouncing across an alien surface, and ocean splashdowns.

Tonight ended like so:

Sophie: (running down the hall with a kite in tow) 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… blast off!

Now we’re talkin’.

Mostly at Night

Sophie, upon waking up from a dream (in a matter-of-fact tone):

Do aliens come at night or in the morning?

Of course, everyone who’s seen the movie Aliens knows the answer. In Newt’s own words, “They mostly come at night… mostly.”