This morning I watch three short videos on YouTube featuring ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. Several hours later I added a book to my Amazon.com wishlist and get the resulting ‘here’s what else you should buy" page. Oddly enough a Jeff Dunham DVD is one of the items suggested to me. Quick looks thorough my browser’s history (shown below) Dunham only came up from YouTube and I’d not previously looked at any Dunham related items in Amazon.com. Coincidence? What do you think?
My favorite line: "A teletype panel shows up-to-the-minute traffic bulletins."
I just realized that back on November 23rd, I posted my 2000th license plate photo to my flickr account. Here’s that lucky plate: 
"And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, thought, and indeed championed it, as soon as it was digital possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous."
— William Gibsion, spook country
Stores have been confusing me a lot lately. Despite many being concerned about ID theft, a lot of store have stopped having us sign for credit card purchases if it’s under a certain amount. In Starbucks you don’t have to sign if the purchase is less than $15. In Borders, less than $20. (These numbers may not be 100% accurate but they’re close. I’m working from memory here.) Since there’s nothing to sign, many of these merchants are asking to see your ID to prove you’re you in lieu of comparing your signature. (Yes, many others are making you sign, and asking to see ID. This annoys me even more.)
The other piece of background information involves these two stories (1 & 2) from Consumerist.com. It seems that according to the Visa merchant agreement, "merchants cannot refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to provide ID." Doing so may lead to said merchant loosing the ability to accept Visa cards. (Writing SEE ID on the back of your card, unless that is your signature, is not valid however, no matter what you think.) You can probably see where I’m going with this.
On Sunday I was in Borders and ordered a beverage and cookie in their coffee shop. I handed over my Visa card and the clerk asked to see my ID. (Before even starting to process the transaction to see if my purchase was approved.) Since I’d been wondering what would happen, and since this was the third Borders I’d been into that day (but that’s another story) I thought quickly enough to provide the following response: "No."
The clerk gave me a puzzled look. Obviously this wasn’t the response she was expecting. "Excuse me?" she responded. I repeated my answer and said that it was against the company’s agreement with Visa to require me to show ID as a requirement to complete my transaction. She wiggled her head a little and asked me to repeat myself. I politely explained again that they could not require me to show ID to complete my transaction according to their merchant agreement with Visa and added that "I would be happy to sign a slip so that she could compare my signature to the one on the back of the card." (Not remembering at the time that since my purchase was small that there would be no slip to sign.)
She flipped my card over and looked at my signature. I will admit that the card has seen better days and that the signature is a tad worn, but it is readable enough to compare to anything else I may sign. She then proceeded to show me the back of the card as if my worn signature was a problem. I stared back and continued to refuse to show my ID.
A pause, a sigh and a "whatever" later she ran my card through and completed my purchase. See, that wasn’t so hard, wasn’t it?
I got my coffee and my cookie ate them, then headed off to the front registers to pick up and pay for the book I had on hold. (My source of frustration and travel to three stores in one day.) In this case, the purchase was above the threshold for signing and I signed the slip presented to me. I was not asked for ID. Ironically, the signature on my card wasn’t compared to the one I’d just scribbled either.
Can’t wait!!!
Bill Drew posted a mini-rant on his blog yesterday titled "Blog posts with no content". In this short post he complained about those who create blog posts that had no narrative but that "contain only links to things they added in del.icio.us." His reasoning: "If it is important enough for you to post a link in your blog, then write a full post about the topic."
Sorry Bill, but as someone who does the thing you’re complaining about (sort of) I respectively disagree. To explain the "sort of" I don’t post my del.icio.us links as a blog post but if you subscribe to my blog’s feed you will get one item per day that contains the items I bookmarked that day. Since most people read my blog as a feed, I believe this would count to Bill.
I post my bookmarks because people might be interested in what I’m currently researching, preparing for, or just looking into. On a day in which I have six new links to the Kindle, this would imply that I’m thinking about it. Recently I’ve been adding bookmarks for Web site dealing with Creative Commons. Not because I have something particular to say about it right now, but because I’ll be presenting a full-session on the topic at CIL2008. Maybe I’m bookmarking sites in preparation for a blog post in the next few days.
In any case, I like seeing people’s new bookmarks without having to get yet another feed from del.icio.us. It’s something they’re doing and so I like all that info in one place. Ultimately, I find a lot of cool new resources from such posts so it’s worth my time to at least glance at them.
Now, as for reposting tweets on your blog, that’s the one that bugs me. Mainly because if I read your blog chances are you’re a Twitter friend too and I don’t need to see those posts twice. More importantly a day full of Twitter posts as a blog post completely takes them out of context of the conversation at the time making them mostly unintelligible.
