Are they really “rewards” if you charge me extra for them???

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Today we’re going over to Disney to go to the movies, specifically to pay another visit to AMC’s amazing, new dine-in theater over at Downtown Disney because after a week of religious dieting and exercise, I’ve been salivating for their incredible crab rangoon dip like you wouldn’t believe! Seriously, words cannot describe just how much I’m looking forward to this meal…

That said, although also not super expensive, it’s definitely not necessarily cheap, either, because it is theater food and all, and so before leaving today I find myself faced again with the dilemma of whether I should finally bite the bullet and just sign up for AMC’s rewards program, but frankly … I just don’t think that I have the heart to do it, and the reason being is pretty simple – they want to charge me to be a member.

Their new program, called Stubs, came out around a year ago and replaced their AMC MovieWatcher program where you would get handfuls of $0.50 and $1-off coupons when you bought your tickets, good for concession stand purchases and every so often a free movie ticket altogether. The new program is a lot simpler in terms of the rewards themselves – for every $100 you spend on tickets or concessions purchases, you get $10 to do with whatever you’d like. So if I do the math right, for tonight’s dinner & a movie excursion alone, we’d probably earn $10 by the time we’re all said and done…

…but I just can’t in good conscience pay somebody for the courtesy of carrying their rewards card, no more than I would pay an annual fee to a credit card for a slightly more lucrative cash-back offer. It’s not that it’s overly expensive, either – it’s $12/year, which would easily still put us in the black for the amount of movies that we see each year, but I don’t know – something just seems not right about me having to pay you in addition to my recurring patronage for the right to receive rewards on behalf of that loyalty. It doesn’t seem very thankful to me for this business to say, “No, no – we do appreciate your business … so just give us a little more and we’ll totally thank you for choosing us as your preferred theater!”

I mean, I know that running a movie theater is a tough act to make a profit on to begin with, hence the ever-increasing ticket prices and the absolutely ridiculous concession prices, so I’m sure some executive at AMC simply saw this as an untapped source of revenue. And for every guy like me who puts his foot down stubbornly and refuses to participate, I’m sure they’ve still got a handful of other people who are willing to suck it up and eat their first reward to cover the fee because they know that they’ll make up for it in the end eventually. Frankly, if they would’ve instead just raised ticket prices, I think I would’ve been reluctantly fine with that because at least those are part of the expectations of what we pay for when we go to the movies.

But as much as my better math skills persuade me that it’s a perfectly profitable deal on our side, I just can’t do it, and thus whenever their friendly staffers repeatedly ask me at every transaction if I want to join, “Not unless you guys have stopped charging for it…” will continue to be the only reply that I can muster. Even reflecting back on it myself, I’ll admit that it may seem like kind of a petty stance, but I just don’t think I should have to pay you twice before you’ll truly appreciate my business…

Cleo vs. The Bathtub

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Wanna know one of the more obnoxious ways of being woken up in my house?

How about finding that your dog has gotten herself into the bathtub and now can’t get back out again?!

Go figure, this is the one puppy that not only doesn’t fear baths like any good, god-fearing dog should, but actually looks forward to them to the point of begging at the side of the tub for us to let her play in the water.

Apparently this time she got tired of begging and didn’t realize until it was too late that there isn’t always water waiting for her inside said bathtub…

Canada is looking better every day!

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If only you weren’t so cold and had some sort of Disney World of your own, Canada, I’d be packing my bags and migrating north because this is truly brilliant…

Fox News’ Lies Keep Them Out of Canada
http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/9037-fox-news-lies-keep-them-out-of-canada.html

“Canada’s Radio Act requires that ‘a licenser may not broadcast … any false or misleading news.’ The provision has kept Fox News and right-wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom.”

I always knew that restaurant.com seemed kinda fishy…

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My friend and fellow humor columnist Erik Deckers retweeted this story earlier on today that caught my eye as suspicious, namely because every once in a while I’ve found myself faced either with super bargains or even free giveaways for gift certificates from restaurant.com. I never actually bought into them because I was never too impressed with the actual selection of restaurants that they offered, and now after reading this news story and actually understanding how their system works, I can kind of see why most of my favorite restaurants wouldn’t have any desire to give these guys the time of day!

From the consumer side of things, it’s just like Groupon or any of those other social couponing sites – you buy a coupon for less than half of what it’s actually worth, so a $25 gift certificate to Big Chuck’s Beef Emporium costs you $10. What a deal, huh?!

From the restaurant’s standpoint, however, it’s a much darker story – of that $10 you paid to restaurant.com for your gift certificate, the restaurant itself actually gets absolutely nothing … it all goes to restaurant.com, and the payback for Big Chuck’s is that they got a customer referred from restaurant.com that they might not have otherwise gotten and hopefully the customer will actually end up spending more than the value of their gift certificate or possibly even become a regular after the promotion.

The thing is, ask a lot of small businesses that have already been burned by the likes of Groupon – a good number of people use these highly discounted coupons for a cheap meal and then when they’re done, they log on the next day to see where else they can do the same thing with. I’m actually honestly surprised that Groupon is still doing as well as they are because it seems like 6 months ago that story was coming up again and again where business owners were screaming that they just couldn’t afford to deeply discount their products when they were finding that repeat business was next to nil.

Of course, at least with Groupon, the business owner walks away with something … I think the pricing I heard at one time was 50/50, so if a $100 voucher for hang-gliding lessons costs consumers $50, that $50 is split $25 to the hang-gliding instructor and $25 to Groupon…

What’s truly sad about this whole thing, though, is if you take a step back and look at this from the big picture, what’s really happening here is business owners with little to no understanding of the Internet are trusting in these new start-ups to lead the way, and subsequently they’re the ones getting screwed because the start-ups are just salivating at getting a piece of the pie and really, they’re not the ones who have anything to lose! They promise online promotion and referrals to these brick and mortar businesses, and by the time the businesses realize that they gave away a month’s worth of food for free with nothing to show for it, the start-up has moved on to selling the same story to other business owners willing to be woo’ed by the idea of driving customers into their stores from the web.

I guess the moral of the story is to read the fine print, know your business and your customers, and when someone does approach you with the answer to all of your foot traffic problems, don’t get too excited until you stop and think about the potential outcome next month and the month after that…

Automating WordPress Backups to Dropbox

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So several people have been bugging me for a while about signing up for Dropbox.

I know they’re mostly just doing it for the 250 MB referral credit, but up until now I’ve never really had much desire to use a service like that. I guess I’m kinda stuck in my ways as far as carrying a flash drive around with all of my documents on it, plus I’m not too crazy about installing the client on all of the various PCs that I use just because I don’t necessarily want 2 GB of my personal files sitting on all of them. That said, yesterday I bit the bullet and signed up because I finally found a way to make Dropbox useful to me – I’m able to use it to automate backups of all of my WordPress sites.

It was an idea that came to me on a whim – I was pondering how I still haven’t bothered to establish a reliable backup procedure for most of my stuff, and to some extent all of my websites needed to be included in that, even though technically my host is supposed to be making regular backups as well. Pretty much just at random, I searched the WordPress plugin repository for the word “backup” and there in the listings, I found this little plugin called WordPress Backup to Dropbox and decided to give it a try. It ended up being super simple to use, and in less time than it took to actually register my Dropbox account, the plugin was installed, authenticated with Dropbox, and had already started pushing files out the door to backup!

I spent the rest of yesterday watching these things update in the background, and as soon as one site had completed, I’d install the plugin on another and keep going. By the end of the day, I had eaten up about 25% of the disk space on my free account, but already the biggest of my sites had been safely backed up … including My Time with the Mouse… and its massive, 2000-image photo galleries! … and what’s especially cool about this plugin is that it even runs a SQL export of the database and then backs that up, too! A WordPress backup isn’t really much good if the actual data isn’t copied alongside the actual theme files, so I was pretty impressed to find that this plugin managed to do it all in one fell swoop.

One of these days I’m going to sit down and put together a list of all of the plugins that are kind of standard for me when I setup a new WordPress site, and I can tell you already that this plugin is definitely going in that list! Though Dropbox may not necessarily guarantee that your data will be there (it is a free service), backups are all about redundancy and at least this gives me one additional layer of protection to the host-level backups that I already had. Eventually I do also want to set something up to download weekly backups to one of my local machines here as well, but in the meantime leveraging Dropbox as an off-site backup solution works, too. :mrgreen:

Really, there’s no need to sing about it…

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I’d like to punch the marketing executive who thought it would be a neat promotion to have retail workers sing a goofy, little tune every time something mundane happens in their store.

Today I had lunch at Panera and as I was ordering, another girl walked by with a fresh basket of bread while also singing a song about fresh bread!

Nobody is this happy at work. It’s clear that the employees are forced to do that kind of stuff – like how whenever you leave a tip at Coldstone, everyone has to sing some clever jingle about tipping in appreciation. Frankly, it actually makes me less likely to want to tip them just because I don’t want to have to endure the stupid song!

I go to Panera because I like sandwiches and Coldstone because their ice cream is fucking amazing … call me a curmudgeon, but I guess I could just do without the impromptu karaoke sessions… 🙁

“You know – like DOT COMS, but with DASHES!!!”

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I wish that I was making this up – somebody out there actually thought that this was a good idea…

http://dashworlds.com/src/page.php?P=home

“Domain names are free … and all of the popular names are available once again (for now) … and all you need is our simple, proprietary browser plugin to make it all work because, well, I guess technically these things aren’t actual domain names…”

Is it just me or does the Internet bring out the stupid entrepreneur in people sometimes? I once had a guy in a bookstore try to pitch me on his new website idea by suggesting, “You’ll be able to buy anything from it – just like amazon.com!”

“Well then why wouldn’t I just use amazon.com???” I countered.

He got mad and left me alone after that because he didn’t have an answer. 🙄

Thin Post : Scott Sevener, Marathon Runner???

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I know that this is probably going to sound pretty wild, but I’ve been thinking oddly enough lately that maybe someday I might like to run in a marathon.

It seems weird even writing it out like that because I honestly don’t really like running all that much, although for the most part I think that might mainly be due to my being so horrendously out of shape. I mean, every once in a while I’ll try to throw a few random sprints into my 3.5-mile dog walks at night with Cleo and she loves ’em, but I always seem to end up regretting it afterwards because although I can handle the panting and sweating because it actually makes me feel like it was worth the effort, it also tends to make my shins hurt really bad and that I’m not quite as big a fan of…

Still, I don’t really know why, but I think getting to the point where I could run such a long distance might be kinda fun. I did the math earlier and technically a 5k run is a little less than the 3.5-mile walks that I take on a regular basis, so really, all I have to do is just gradually speed up my pace until I’m eventually running, right?! 😉

I’m sure there’s a little more to it than that, but at this point it’s just a random thought that’s crossed my mind a half dozen times while I’m trying to come up with new and exciting ways for me to exercise without killing myself. Plus, I’ve started to become a little more conscious of all of the marathons that they host over at Disney World, and I don’t know – it seems like it might be kind of cool running through all of the parks and seeing that world from a slightly different angle! Granted, I don’t even want to think about fathoming a 26.2-mile full marathon around the resort at this point, but … something to shoot for?

I guess first before I can really take any of it seriously, I need to get back into losing this weight, and then from there maybe work to incorporate faster paces and more “jogging” into my regular walks and see where that takes me. On the upside, though, have you ever seen a fat guy running in a marathon?!

…mind you, that was meant to be an encouraging thought to look forward to, not a depressing one… 😛

A new edition of D&D?! *grumble grumble*

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So the announcement was made earlier today by Wizards of the Coast that they’ve actively begun development on a new version of Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m not quite sure what I think about this…

On one hand, I have concerns that I’m about to become the very person who has always bugged me in this hobby – the guy who rants about how the latest version sucks compared to his own preferred game of yesteryear. I guess in some respects I’m already at that point – I absolutely hate Essentials because I think it’s over-simplifying and over-powered and adds unnecessary tweaks to an already fragile-from-errata game system. I’m also not much of a fan of the Power Cards that were released sometime last year in a vain attempt to add a Magic: The Gathering, gotta buy new packs of cards every single week!-style element to our weekly sessions. So as much as I don’t want to be the guy who passes judgment, it looks like we’re probably already there anyways! 😉

On the other hand, my concerns about “5th edition” after reading the letter from designer Mike Mearls linked above are that with the direction that it sounds like they want to take, I fear that D&D is going to become needlessly complicated again for the sake of trying to recoup losses of older players who left D&D for Pathfinder and the like because they felt that 4e bastardized older versions of the game that they love. Talk has already been circulating around the ‘net of a modular system where DMs and players could pick and choose the rules that they like and leave the rest behind, thus allowing them to create a rule set that more accurately represents what they want to play, but frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it.

The problem I see is, DMs and players already have the option to take and leave parts of the game that they don’t care for – it’s called house ruling and it’s existed forever to allow DMs to be flexible at their tables. Unfortunately, what’s left from here is allowing the option for a DM to remove core fundamentals of the game (i.e. “I don’t like skills, so instead I have this complex system of abilities grouped by activity that players can buy from with points instead…) and I guess I just fear that without the core of the system really being locked down, more or less, it’s going to make for a really muddy playing field for the rest of us who are completely ok with the core rules as they currently exist in 4e…

I got back into D&D in 2009, so I’ve been playing 4e now for about 3 years. Before that, as a kid growing up we played AD&D (2nd edition) and honestly in retrospect, the thing was so damned complicated that I’m not really sure how we ever got anything done at all! In fact, usually we didn’t, instead opting to spend literally hours on end just creating characters and copying over various statistics from tables in the PHB to our character sheets. I don’t miss Magical Defense % and I don’t miss THAC0 with the current version of D&D … believe it or not, it’s actually refreshing to be able to just sit down and play a game that’s not so ridiculously complex because somebody couldn’t get over the fantasy-reality game barrier that the wizards they were fighting against weren’t frail enough when thumped upside the head with an imaginary broadsword!

Plus, frankly I don’t feel like buying more books and having to learn a new set of rules just because I’m old and crabby like that… 😉

Luckily we’ve still got probably a good 1-2 years before anything is ready for shipping regarding the proposed new version, and I do think that it’s pretty cool that WotC is being so open about playtesting because it gives those who want to participate actively in the development of the product the ability to do so from the very beginning. That’s not really for me, both for time and patience’s sake, but I know people who are interested so I’m sure I’ll still be in the loop on how things are progressing. As for acceptance of whatever the final product of 5e ends up being … well, I’d like to say that I’ll be open to change, but I’ve also seen Essentials so we’re definitely going to have to wait and see if WotC does, in fact, force me into being the curmudgeon that (at least with regards to D&D) I’d prefer not to have to be!