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| Sunday, August 11, 2002 |
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Rent-a-hell 
| | There are four car rental agencies at the local airport: Hertz, Avis, Budget and National. Together all four have been putting me through the wringer. |
| | None of these service industries wants to deal wtih customers over the phone if they can scrape them off on some automated service. It started with banks. Then airlines. Now car rental agencies. Plus everything else eventually, I guess. |
| | They encourage inhuman contact by offering lower rates over the Web than the phone. I started with Hertz. Expensive, even with the Costco or AAA discounts. The lady on the phone told me I they had a way to enter the 3-digit AAA  number. Turns out it's a sequence in the middle of the umtpy-digit ID on your membership card. Who knew? Hertz did, apparently. |
| | And sure enough, they had a place to enter the info. Only problem: still damned expensive. |
| | None of the other three offered anyplace to enter the club code, or anything other than a coupon number. (Budget did offer a choice of "Shop all rates," "BCD Code" and "Rate Code," with a little entry window uder the middle one. Clear as brick, no?) |
| | Avis' site worked almost as well as Hertz', but the rates were even higher. I know I have an Avis Preferred membership of some kind, but I can't find the card. The company offers no obvious way to discover membership info on the Web site, so they didn't get my business, either. |
| | National's site defaults to Full Size for car type, but when I tried to change the choice (it's text in a data entry window), it beeped at me and scrolled to the bottom of the page. I said the hell with it and hit "Go" anyway, which gave me an "Invalid pickup station!" error. Turns out the three letter code for our airport (SBA) isn't quite right. One has to find the proper code (SBAT01) from the popout window lookup thingie that shows up when you've made what the system thinks is a boo-boo. The rate comes up $huge, because there's no way to select a size other than the default "full." |
| | Hardly worth it, since the site siezed up with Javascript errors, on both Mozilla and IE. In fact, it crashed IE. |
| | Budget had by far the lowest rates, but all afternoon, every time I would get to the end of the reservation process, it would tell me the site was experiencing technical difficulties and to come back later. |
| | After wasting a good hour or more on this nonsense, Budget finally got functional and now I have a rental car for the week at LinuxWorld. My very own Ford Escort. Wow. |
| | I leave early tomorrow morning. |
At last
| | Larry Lessig has a blog. I should have noticed earlier. It's been going, appropriately, since July 4 at his personal site, Lessig.org |
Getting Real
I just keep trying not to eat them.
| | Unloved, unwashed, common as a parking ticket, the crow is a democratic, working-class bird. You need no fancy excursion or advance campground registration to see these clever beasts. Like the coyotes, they aren't snobs. They don't apologize for their annoying "caw caw" or their filthy dumpster diving. They are curious and oddly elegant gluttons, and today Science has named them Very Smart Animals. Now they can be praised alongside the dolphin and chimp. |
Warchalking, cont'd
Way to start
| | Saw the second-ever performance of the brand-new Shakespeare Santa Barbara at the Fess Parker Winery in Los Olivos last night. The play was Midsummer Night's Dream, and and the setting fit the bill. |
| | On actor talked about the "forked moon," and here one was, hanging in the perfect Western sky. |
| | The performance was extrememly enjoyable. Much better than we expected it to be, frankly. The acting was generally solid or better, and the comedy was top notch — a rare thing. Most of the performance happened on the lawn right in front of the audience, which was spread out on blankets and beach chairs. It was paradise. |
| | And our 5-year old grooved through every minute of it, tsotally absorbed. |
| | Anyway, it's highly recommended for all ten of my readers on the Central and South Coast. Or for anybody looking for a perfect digression on the coastal haul between SF and LA. It's only about four miles off 101 at the 154 exit. |
Desktop deconstruction, cont'd
Time screams
| | Shit, it's already August 11. How did that happen? Wasn't it just July 4? |
| | Yesterday I went by UCSB's little downtown in Isla Vista, where I had never been, incredibly. I bought a used mountain bike there. It was love at first ride. Not just with the bike, but with the store. It has a fabulous vibe. In fact, I liked the vibe of the whole town. Very academic, yet extemely beach. Bikes everywhere. Pizza. Coffee on ice. Kids and hippies co-mingling on sidewalks under tattered palm trees. Ugly yet charming old storefronts. Lots of places that looked run down, but not out. Kinda like me. |
| | And the bike fit in the back of the old Subaru wagon, right on top of the kid's bike, without putting down the back seat. Suddenly I liked that old car again. |
| | Anyway, the students were back. And it's still summer. Weird. |
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