Blessed by the Potato

Rogers is having a contest for a Prius. If you’re a Rogers customer, all you have to do is switch your billing method over to ebilling to be entered in the draw. Since I’m a little Prius-happy of late I really wanted to enter the contest… except I already get my bills electronically. (Also: since I’m a little Prius-happy, I was tempted to not include a link above in order to improve my odds, but I hope that if any loyal BbtP readers out there did happen to win, they’d share :). Fortunately, the good laws of this country forbid a company like Rogers from running a lottery, so they cannot require a purchase for entry into their draw (and, if selected, the answering of a skill-testing question). This is the first time that I’ve actually taken advantage of those rules and I sent in a letter with a 100-word essay on why ebilling is “good for the environment.” Of course, that still costs me something (postage), so to me it is a bit like entering into a lottery. I figure my odds are 1 in 500,000 or better (how many of the ~10 million Rogers customers will really switch to ebilling or send in a letter?), so ~50 cents to enter is not too bad, as far as lotteries go.

I find this whole thing deliciously ironic, and really hope that I win for that value alone (…ok, not for that value alone, I really want to win for the new car!). First off, I’m entering by a mailed-in paper submission for a contest that is all about the merits of ebilling. And this whole charade in saving paper is being put on by Rogers, who first off have ridiculously long bills (4 pages on 2 sheets just for one service!) simply so that they can throw in ads for the Jays or their magazines in your bill, and who secondly are one of the most egregious users of dead tree admail there is (at least in the London market). I get, minimum, 4 pieces of full-colour junk mail from Rogers a month. Most of it is for their phone service, which they’re pimping lately like the dirty little bitch it is, so maybe that’ll settle down in the next decade when every household in Canada has received their quota of 480 Rogers Home Phone ads and someone in management asks just how effective the 481st unaddressed bulk admailer is really going to be. But even for their long-term developed products like TV, wireless, and internet I get an ad every other month (at least one of them each month), which also makes me wonder: how many people don’t know that Rogers is an option for their TV-viewing habits? Or that the internet now comes in “high speed” (wait, there’s something faster than dial-up AOL? Gasp!).

This contest somewhat reminds me of all the annoying promotions Rogers puts out for new customers, such as 3 free months if you buy a computer, but which just screws over (ignores) the current customer. There was no kick-back money from the computer manufacturer for the current customers? At least with this contest, even though I already get electronic bills and can’t enter the conventional way, I can still find some way to participate. But stuff like this makes me wonder if I should ever upgrade anything with Rogers, since at some point down the road they’ll very likely have a promotion or contest that I won’t be able to take advantage of if I, heaven forbid, happen to actually want what they’re offering.

I know I should just drink water right from the tap for both environmental and frugal reasons, but then once or twice a year this happens, and I go right back to the bottle or Brita…

After a long hiatus due to the writers’ strike, Battlestar Galactica returned for another season this week. One thing I noticed is that the delay seems to have given the animators more time to render the first big battle sequence, “spiffifying” it to a degree I haven’t noticed in previous seasons. Before this episode aired, I was speculating with some friends at work about what this season might have in store, which I will discuss after the

Spoiler warning!

So at the end of last season, we found Col. Tigh, the mechanic guy, and two other meat bags hearing music in their heads, and deciding that they were Cylons. I figured that there was no way they could be Cylons; or rather, no way Colonel Tigh could be a Cylon, since he had been with Adama since before the Cylons started their hybrid/humanesque experiments in the last war. While it’s pretty clear in this episode that the humans suspect that the Cylons might have the ability to copy a real human and make a damned bloody machine out of them, as far as we know the Cylon technology only allows them to grow a very limited number of humanesque Cylon models. Models created de novo. That aspect is even mentioned when discussing their suspicions about Starbuck: if she’s a Cylon, it must mean she was always a Cylon. Since it seems impossible that Colonel Tigh could have been replaced (especially under the watchful eye of Bill Adama), then it must mean that he’s not a Cylon. One guy at work agreed, also saying that “it would just be too goddamned easy for the writers to make Tigh a Cylon. It’s an easy out for them after all the prickish inhuman things he did in the resistance. If he’s a Cylon, he’ll never really have to answer or come to terms with that.”

That lead me to conclude that the musical four must instead be some kind of nascent prophets. There is, after all, plenty of religious and quasireligious events in the series, including numerous visions by various main characters, include Madame President herself, so I figured it stood to reason that the god(s) of the humans had selected those four loony bins to help guide the fleet towards Earth (which only part of me hopes is not trapped 1980), or find a way to negotiate with the Cylons (perhaps by leading them to think they were Cylons, and thus open up a dialogue), or to find a way to bring the holy fire of vengeance to bear against those godless (er… godfull) machines that nuked the 12 colonies of Cobol.

Of course, that line of reasoning looks to have been shot down as Anders looked straight into the red eye of a raider (who bleed this season, by the way; wonder if that’ll be retconned into some of the DVD releases) and had a response… of some sort.

Anyway, it promises to be an interesting season. And we can thank the writers’ strike for potentially opening up the summer months to new episodes for the first time ever. Hopefully that’ll stay and we’ll get more episodes per season of our favourite shows (that, or that the networks will decide to continue to air other good series through the summer instead of reruns and filler crap).

I never met a punctuation mark I didn’t like, and while I have made it my personal mission — indeed, the very purpose of my blogging career — to bring back the emdash and its misunderstood cousin, the semicolon… and mmm… ellipsis… though the comma is perhaps my very favourite piece of punctuation; maybe it was all those typing classes repeating “I’m King Comma” ad nauseum, or perhaps simply its use for adding small pauses to cadence which I use and abuse to mimic my halting style of oration. So you can imagine that I am in general in favour of the “serial comma”, currently a source of discussion over at John Scalzi’s blog “Whatever” (though I’m also in favour of using the ampersand {&} within a list to unambiguously identify compound elements, even though many editors seem to cringe at the “informal” character). I suppose that makes me evil, but it’s not the only thing.

I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter & jam. {deliciously evil}
I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter and jam.
I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna and peanut butter and jam.

Of course, I’m not nearly enough of a language geek to actually engage in any kind of debate like this, and had to look up what a serial comma was (though I do instinctively use them even if I don’t know what they’re called). These sorts of posts by authors are interesting to me moreso for the insight into the world of professional publishing. I’ve had my share of experience from both sides of the editing/reviewing processes in scientific journals, and it generally hasn’t gone very well for me. I tend to take editorial comments too personally (especially “this would not be of general interest to our audience”), and often have a really hard time making changes to my manuscripts. So it’s healthy to see that real live successful authors also get edited (and I’m going to remember “stet”).

This also reminded me of a broker report (for Q9) I read recently that included an interrobang in the title (“Trading Below Replacement Value?! Upping to ACTION LIST”). I mentioned this to Wayfare, in part because we both own a bit of Q9, and we’re both down quite a bit on it. She hadn’t heard of an interrobang before, and it instantly became both her new favourite punctuation mark as well as her word of the day.

Dear Bell;

Please stop highlighting this box on my bill. I’m typically a pretty careful guy when it comes to managing my finances, and for over a year with this new bill layout I’ve managed to find the right box for my payment and have sent in the right amount by the proper time. But every time, I look to that right-most highlighted box first, and then have to catch myself. Last month I don’t know if I was in a rush or tired or what, but for some reason I didn’t, and ended up sending in a payment that was short by the amount of the taxes. The late fees (10 cents) were pretty reasonable for being short by about $6, so I’m not complaining about that. But please, just stop shading that subtotal box. It’s not where people’s attention should be directed, so it shouldn’t be highlighted equal to the amount due. It will even save on ink!

For that matter, how about following typical layout conventions for people who read left-to-right and put the final sum on the right, with the smaller line items on the left? Better yet, how about going back to the old bills which were one or two pages, depending on how many calls I made, as compared to the three taken up by the new bill?