Blessed by the Potato

As far as customer loyalty programs go, I like Air Miles. It’s used across a number of stores (so I don’t have to carry a separate Shopper’s Optimum or Bay Rewards card), and the rewards actually rack up at a perceptable rate (partly due to the fact that you get them from a number of stores, and partly because they don’t suck as hard as Shopper’s Optimum points). Almost every year, I’ve redeemed for three or four “Night Out” passes for the movies, so it’s very easy to see the benefits.

However lately I’ve seen some concerning things happening lately that I just want to briefly mention. First is that they’re starting to depreciate the points by making rewards cost more. I had thought that it was a good system since it was pretty much inflation-proof: you get a certain number of Air Miles per $20 spent, and 125 points gets you a $20 gift certificate. As inflation occurs, you spend more in dollars, getting more Air Miles, but they’re automatically worth less as a $20 gift certificate buys you less. In simpler terms, an Air Mile was worth about 16 cents. It was also a handy measure for determining if you were better off paying cash for one of their merchandise rewards and using the miles on something else. Now, however, the cost of the gift certificates is going up, and thus the value of the miles is coming down… not by much, though, just to about 14 cents, but it makes me a little worried, remembering my Dad having accumulated enough Aeroplan miles from travelling to Edmonton for work every other week that he boasted he could travel around the world three times; then they depreciated the points and he couldn’t even get 4 seats to PEI in the winter. What’s strange is that $20 gift cards to different stores cost different amounts. It seems like the stores where you might give the certificate to someone as a gift (such as clothing stores) come with a significant premium relative to gift certificates for grocery stores, even though it’s all $20 in the end. This either arrogantly speaks about how they measure the intelligence of their customers, or is a brilliant marketing scam. Either way, I’m just a little bit frightened.

Speaking of scams, I decided to see what it would be like to actually use some Air Miles for… well… air travel, rather than movie popcorn. It would be a bit better to find a student rate and pay cash, but even with the peak season premium it wasn’t a huge waste of my accumulated rewards. What was scary though was that if I didn’t have enough reward miles to cover the whole flight, I could use cash to make up the difference… at a rate of 30 cents per Air Mile. That strikes me as nearly criminal, since the value of the rewards (particularly for the gift certificates, where it’s patently obvious) is less than half that when you redeem them. You can take that “option” if you have at least half of the required miles: at that exchange rate, you would pay the entire cash value of the ticket, plus lose a bunch of air miles in the deal.

The last thing that’s been concerning me is how much more slowly I earn the points now. For a few years there, A&P/Dominion was really pushing the bonus Air Miles. I’d earn about ten times as much as I would from their normal 1/$20 spent offer from the bonus miles, and it would (almost) all be on stuff I would buy anyway. Buy a cucumber and get 2 points; three packs of toilet paper would get you 15 (hey, it keeps); two blocks of cheese for 5; five cases of water could get you 25. There have been a few of those around still, but not nearly as many, and they’re a little more ridiculous (buy four canteloupes and get 2 bonus points — the sort of thing that it’s hard to stock up on without wastage, and without much incentive).

All that said, it’s still a better program than Shoppers’ Optimum, which I’m thinking of dropping out of once I get to the next points level and redeem. I’ve carried that stupid card in my wallet for almost 8 years now, and I still haven’t redeemed anything. While it is only one store, I shop there all the time (and it’s been 8 years!). I’m still a few months away from the $55 reward level (at least now they let you actually just get $55 of stuff for free; the first incarnation would have required something like a $140 purchace that you would get 40% off of).

As much as I wish I could shop at Pharma Plus more (by far the best Air Miles sponsor), Shoppers is just such a good store in its own right: they’re close to me (actually, Pharma Plus isn’t much further, it’s just in the opposite direction, away from the grocery store and everything else), they have excellent candy selection (Resse’s pieces and mini cups; they used to be the only place to get Allan sour fruits; and all kinds of other goodies), they’re open late (24 hours in the case of the one by me), and have all kinds of cool seasonal stuff for Halloween and Potatomas. While their prices have been rising faster than inflation lately ($3 for Skittles?!), they also have decent sales on a fairly regular basis, particularly on Coke. In fact, aside from a great sale at Sobeys two months ago, I haven’t bought pop anywhere other than Shoppers in the last year. At least 2 weeks out of every month it’s on for 3×12’s for $11, and at least one week it’ll go down to 3 for $10; last week even saw 4 for $12. For comparison, I used to buy pop in cases of 24 (what the heck happened to two-fours for pop anyway?) for $6 each, then briefly at about $7 each before they stopped selling them in that format (and these are prices from 4 years ago or so). Now, the A&P sells pop at $4.50 for a 12-pack, and hardly ever puts on a sale. Price Chopper still sells 24 packs, but in the old school flat cases (not the “cubes”), and that’s still $8/case.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point, so I’d like to conclude by saying that I really like turning in Air Miles for the Night Out passes, because they let me go to the movies without having to pay cash so I don’t sit there the whole time thinking about how I’m being ripped off to watch a glorified video game. Oh, and how I wish I could keep earning Air Miles so the flow of passes can keep up with the flow of movies (not too hard this last year…).

Oh, and never bother redeeming for the alternative Cineplex/Air Miles 2-for-1 passes: while the Night Out ones count as cash when getting your tickets, the 2-for-1 deals count as passes/coupons, so you can’t use them for any new movies, and moreover, can’t use them on Tuesdays, matinees, or weekends (never mind that Tuesdays are no longer cheap days, or that the free ticket would have also cost less). I redeemed for 4 of them last year, and only ever got to use 1 before they expired, they’re so restrictive!

I had a chance to play with the demo for Darkstar One. It could use a lot of work still, but I liked it. Basically, it’s Privateer/Freelancer again, except instead of being able to change ships, you’re stuck with your one semi-organic ship that upgrades with you over time (though it doesn’t appear as though you’ll be able to change your mind and go back to a cargo hauler mode like you could when you sold your ship in the other games; this might be a significant limitation later). Despite the lack of originality or significant improvements over its predecessors, I think I’ll buy it just because I’ve been hankering for a game like this for a while now (or better yet, another Mechwarrior/Heavy Gear: Mercs type game).

The combat is right out of the Wing Commander games: ships are fairly nimble, and the name of the game is “ride that ass”. The physics are definitely not Newtonian (which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — it’s a hard physics model to play in space, especially if draw distances are restrictive). Unfortunately, this game doesn’t even seem to feature weapons with different ranges and ships with different speeds like Privateer had — everything but cruisers and large freighters seems to top out at the same speed, so running isn’t often an option for you. I haven’t fully tested the weapons in the game, but they all seem to be “whites of their eyes” type affairs as seen in the other games of this genre. I know you’d hardly ever hit anything, but I’d like to see a gradual dissipation in weapons for these games, rather than a sudden vanishing of weapons fire. Even perhaps being able to tune your weapons for spray vs focus fire mode (rather than having to outfit a completely new turret at space dock, if available). The game is also sorely lacking an autopilot feature. There is a time compression one so you don’t spend all day floating around, but you can only go in a straight line — no plotting roundabout courses to avoid patrols and the like. I also can’t seem to find a system map option, just a galactic map, which I would find annoying if there were more than 2 or 3 things in any given system.

Minor things the game could really use include a targeting reticle: the mouse cursor looks like a reticle, but your shots still go straight ahead, which can be quite confusing in joystick mode. Also, there’s a cycle through targets, and target nearest enemy function, but no target under reticle option (which is needed for dogfights and also for grabbing space junk). The joystick hat function isn’t very good: instead of looking out around you to spot for enemies, it provides you with an exterior view aimed at your ship. A number of other things (especially the English translating) just aren’t very smooth or intuitive, though it is possible these will be fixed by release in a month.

The universe so far is pretty bland, but it is just the demo. It doesn’t have the depth of hidden items that Freelancer had, nor the map system for tracking them. And you can’t randomly chat with people or beg for your life like you could with Privateer.

All that said, it is still a Privateer-type game. You get a ship, you blow stuff up, run cargo, make money, and upgrade your ship. So I’ll probably be buying it come August.

It was a very quiet Canada Day weekend — yet it seemed very busy nonetheless. I had planned to read a lot, wash & wax my car, and play a few games, but mostly just played frisbee and watched movies.

First up was Mirror Mask, a film with practically no advertising that I’ve seen. It’s very esoteric and visual, probably the same group at Jim Henson that did Dark Crystal. The acting was pretty decent, but I thought the story was a little weak. Unfortunately, I can’t be any more specific with my criticism, since I can’t really think of what was lacking; as Wayfare pointed out, Labyrinth wasn’t much deeper, plot-wise. It was just that certain je ne sais quois that would have tied all the strange and dazzling visuals together more tightly.

Date Movie was playing over at Dan’s, and the less said about that piece of crap, the better.

Then I saw Superman Returns, which needs no link. I liked it, as far as Superman movies can possibly go (Netbug has a longer review on his site, where he makes a good point: Superman is so super, that it’s hard to believably challenge him. Fortunately, I have an astounding ability to suspend disbelief. I really liked the hyper-optimistic, wonderous 70’s feel to it, as well: it’s a nice contrast to the other superhero movies that have been digging for darkness recently. I really didn’t care for the flying scenes: it looked very much like it was CG (a problem I had with Spiderman, as well), and either the makeup or the computer effects made Brandon Routh look creepy, or as Wayfare so sagely put it, “like one of those marionettes from that show with the rockets on strings [Thunderbirds].” I did like the new heat vision effect, though. Finally, I think it could have used a bit more Lex Luthor in it: either a scene showing him learning more about the crystals, or actually making some kind of weapon out of them (he talked about it a lot, but never did).

I had low expectations for Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, but it appears as though they should have been a lot lower. I knew it was mostly candid footage from this impromtu concert/event he threw, and I thought it would be really cool, or maybe even inspiring to see some of that. I also thought he’d be funny. Wrong on both counts, with rare exceptions. The biggest single problem was probably that they spent a ton of time on this weird couple (the “broken angel” people) that had nothing to do with the show. They were weird, scary, and a little funny, but certainly didn’t deserve the amount of screen time they got. The editing seemed to be off, with lots of slow periods following random people, and putting the events of the day in decidedly non-chronological order (and only the first few scenes had subtitles telling us what we were looking at… they seemed to have forgotten to continue with that after the first 20 minutes), then at other times the energy seemed to be building up and things were actually getting entertaining (such as when Dave would be up MCing or telling jokes behind the scenes), and they’d cut away halfway through.

I’ve started watching Grey’s Anatomy, and I think I’m going to like it a lot. Of course, I’m a sucker for the medical shows (Scrubs, of course, ER, MASH, House, and that other one that got the Fox treatment a while back and was cancelled).

Like I said, I played a lot of frisbee this weekend, which served to remind me of two important things: first, that I am woefully out of shape still (which makes me shudder at how very out of shape I was a few months ago, because I feel great now compared to that); second, that I have the most fantastic frisbee in the whole world and must always be careful not to lose it. You will remember, of course, that it was one thing I was really hoping the car thieves didn’t take when they trashed my car’s interior and ran off with anything remotely valuable. It’s a DinoSoar neon pink fabric frisbee that we bought at Wasaga Beach about 15 years ago, and I’ve never seen one like it since. It’s basically a self-inflating rubber tube with fabric around it and stretched through the middle to give it the frisbee shape. But since it’s flexible, it doesn’t hurt when you get beaned in the head, and you can catch it by just grabbing at it and squishing it up in your hand. It floats, too. I have a standing order with my friends: if you ever see one like it, buy it. If you don’t love it, then resell it to me, so I can stop worrying so much about possibly losing the one I have. The only downside to it is that it doesn’t get the same kind of distance that many hard frisbees can give you (and you can’t do the ultimate frisbee “kick-off” over-hand throw).

I had hoped to have some time to game this weekend, too: I had a hankering for some Master of Orion 2, and brought the disc back to my parents’ house, but never ended up installing it. Soon, my precious…

I didn’t end up getting into the Sword of the Stars beta, which probably is what kicked off the MOO2 craving. Reading CTRL-ALT-DEL, I followed the link to Darkstar One, which sounds very interesting. I’m in the process of downloading the demo, but it’s going to take all night. Hopefully I’ll have time after work tomorrow to run through it.

Also talking about games, I’ve got to mention the euchre game this weekend: we started down 7-0, and came raging back to win. What was amazing was the last hand that put us over the top: I went in on my own to take all 5 tricks, and when I called that I was going on my own, my partner groaned in pain: looking after the hand, he also had a hand that would have taken all 5 tricks on his own (with a different suit, naturally).

I can’t believe I forgot to mention the latest perils of my poor car.

After being stolen, the window that cost over $300 to fix so that it would go up and down no longer works. I don’t care enough to fix it again. I rolled past the 200, 000 km mark last week, but was on the road back from Toronto, so I forgot to get a picture of the event, as it were. And of course, the aforementioned grinding/harsh resonance noise at certain speeds that could be the beginnings of a transmission failure.

On the home front, I’m looking for something semi-productive to do with my time during the summer. Voluntarily working out hasn’t exactly… happened, and my weekends have been spent in Toronto, so I haven’t gone off exploring the paths like I had planned.

I’m a little bit afraid that it’s going to lead to an over-compensation come fall: I’m going to have Halloween, which is a production all on its own (especially since this year the party has to be super-fantastic so people will come down to London to actually attend). Then there’s curling, and since I’m going to have to pay a ton of money to play at a real club now that the University stopped the business with the intramural league, I’m planning on playing at least twice a week (possibly even competitively!). Finally, I’ve wanted to study a martial art (Aikido or Karate or something) for some time, and I think I might join up when classes start this September, which could eat up another two nights a week.

Madness!

Anyhow, I finished reading the Sabriel trilogy by Garth Nix, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. They’re easy books to get into and read, the characters are quite enjoyable, and they prominently feature smiting the hated undead. Those who know me know of my great disdain — nay, loathing — of the undead; the only two characters I played through the end game of WoW were those with undead-specific abilities, and it’s only now, as they release a new undead dungeon that I’m tempted to return to save the terrified citizens of Azeroth (insects? what were they thinking).

Speaking of books, I haven’t yet mentioned one of my graduation presents: autographed copies of Far-Seer by Robert J. Sawyer, and a book by Scott MacKay (The Meek), who happened to be sitting beside RJS at Word on the Street and made puppy dog eyes at Wayfare and had a book half signed before she could break his little heart by telling him she had never heard of him before. I plan on spending at least part of my upcoming long weekend sitting in a lawn chair and giving the Meek a fair shake, now that Nix’s books are done with. (Aside: it’s shaping up to be a busy weekend: I’ve got to hang with the guys, take the cat back and get her settled, read a book, see Superman, go for a swim, maybe catch some fireworks, and continue to throw time and effort into a gaping chasm from which escape is not even theoretically possible).

As for Far-Seer, well, it turns out I now have two. Wayfare, in her funny parallel dimension where time is decidedly non-linear, claims that I went ahead and bought my copy after she got the one for me signed. However, that clearly can’t be true, as I didn’t take a vacation last summer and subsequently got very little reading done on the whole. Last Potatomas, I got the 3rd book in the Quntaglio series as a gift, so it is very likely that I got the first book over a year ago. What’s incredible is not only did she get this signed book ready for my graduation nearly a year before the actual event, but she refused to ruin the surprise by getting me to return the second copy of the same book when I bought it (assuming, of course, that I actually did buy it after… which I didn’t). It depicts a level of Craftiness that not only demands capitalization, but also italics. Er, that is to say, she’s an extremely Crafty girl. It’s actually quite frightening to be around her: she must possess an alien or pathological detachment from reality (and, I suspect, the flow of time itself) in order to so coldly pursue gifts with such malevolent forethought and patience. Any normal human, faced with keeping a gift a surprise for that long (and the time must have seemed longer yet, as for a long time there was no concrete date for my graduation), would have simply cracked and told the receiver all about it; or at the very least dropped some rather significant hints. Wayfare revealed nothing of her devious plan. She even bewitched poor Mr. Sawyer, who can’t help but blurt out choice quotations from his upcoming book (Rollback, for those who aren’t on the mailing list) — but who made no mention of signing a book for me, nor even a casual mention about anyone on the verge of getting a master’s. So powerful is her Craft that there lies in the dark recesses of her closet, behind the unopened copy of Kiss: Psycho Circus for the PC, underneath the box with her treasured merit badged from Brownies, just to the left of that pair of boots that she’ll never ever wear but just can’t quite bring herself to throw out: there, sheltered from the harsh rays of our yellow sun, lies a present — the perfect present — for someone she hasn’t even met yet. And it’s already wrapped.

My point, dear reader — and I have not forgotten it — is that I have two copies of Far Seer now, both in excellent condition. I am willing to part with one should anyone wish to buy, borrow, or gently smell it. You will, however, have to fetch it yourself, as I no longer trust my car to carry such loads.

I was just talking about how prolific I’ve been with regards to writing: not only for work and all that jazz, but with 10 000 words on BbtP in about 10 days. Almost too much for my poor readers to keep up with (especially the dull travelogue). Now, of course, I’ve jinxed it: it’s been days and I haven’t had a post up. Traffic dropped to record lows on the weekend, and I haven’t made any more progress on my novella or screenplay (too many projects going at once? Hmmm…) ongoing project to piss my free time away into the gaping maw of a black hole. In my defense, I’ve been sick the last two days, and catching up on my sleep.

To conclude, I’ll point you at an interesting link that relates to my last post about electric cars.