traveler's blues amd motel tricks

[kinzel]

So I spent time Wed. evening at a Comfort Inn in Ludlow, MA ... where I had a fairly comfortable room and a promise of a breakfast, so I slept well even if the internet and Haysus weren't talking so much. I woke, found the piece of paper slid under the door, and went into an instant bad mood.... on account of the $1.50 fee for the hotel safe that they'd tacked on.

Oho, worse, it seems that when I'd wandered in the night before I had signed a slip of paper accepting usual rates ... and they usually charge people $1.50 for the safe *being in the room* even if it isn't used. Me, I'd come in, got some ice, watched the weather channels, and gone to sleep ... safe? Why would I dump my stuff in a safe if I was going to be there ...

To be clear, the nice young gentleman on the front desk understood the problem and fixed it quite rapidly, explaining that *yes* they do charge that automatically, and yes, he *could and would remove it* for me, right now sir ... and that the reason they charge it comes not from Comfort Inn, but ... but from the safe supplier to the franchise, which insures the contents, after all, and which needs to make sure it is covered in case of a problem. I am reminded of Microsoft getting a cut of every sale of many computer sales (even those sold without windows -- the Windows tax which finally seems to be getting nuked because of Linux netbooks) as a matter of course, and I am reminded of the Boss who interviewed Conrad ... Just pay the leedle extra, mon ...

And arriving here in Maryland after a wet trip which included about 5 minutes of snow flurry and sleet, hours of thick fog, several out-and-out downbursts of rain, a few flitting moments of sun on trees still with color in them in southern PA ... the place I'm staying has cured the ice-filled out-going coolers emptying the ice reserves by having coin-op ice. $0.25 per ice run for a modest bucket full.... Well then, it *is* an economy motel within easy walking distance (within view out my window!) of the site of the upcoming class reunion. Not only that, there is a Dunkin Donuts, a Chinese restaurant, an italian restaurant, a buffet-food place, a full scale grocery store, a full scale liquor and wine shop, and Rite Aid ... all within the same shopping complex... so I guess I can forgive that quarter for ice. But after all, I *used* the ice I got last evening. The $1.50 safe fee .... not so much.

More as time and energy permits.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

You're aware that we'll soon have a First Mac, right? And its owner comes across as a serious enough geek that he won't like Microsoft at all...

Heh.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Alas, and alack, I think Apple and the Mac have done their share of lock-ins; I'm convinced computing use in the classroom was set back by years by some of the early Apple stuff.

Didn't APPLE abandon in place many school systems using older Apples when it went to the MAC? Too, with Apple/Psystar still to happen it may be interesting to see if Apple is seen to be restraining use of the operating system by tying it to equipment they sell.

We live in interesting times, computing wise. The "economy" motel I'm staying in has a Dell Computer in every room, free wifi, and when you log on you have the opportuntiy to use a bunch of the cloud applications google and other make available....

[ckd]

The Apple II line and the Mac coexisted for quite some time.

The culmination of this was the Apple IIe Card for the Macintosh LC-series machines, which was exactly what it sounds like; it even let you plug in Apple II peripherals (5.25" disk drives, 3.5" disk drives, and a joystick or paddles). That was designed to be a transition aid for schools, though I bought one because it meant I could dig out some of my old Apple II stuff for a bit of retro-gaming.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Oops.. left out the main piece! Apple came out with the Apple IIGS and then stopped supporting it shortly thereafter, saying instead that everyone should migrate to the Macintosh and use an Apple II emulator on the Macintosh (which apparently wasn't all that easily available and/or didn't work all that well... in addition to the Macintosh being a LOT more expensive....)

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Yes, Apple did.... Apple's got a long and dishonorable history of spiting customers (I can't think of another computer company in existence which delivered an entire complete production run of hundreds of thousands of completely dysfunctional alleged major upgrade of software release, or even any dead computer companies! [Macintosh OS 6.0.0. Not ONE, NOT ONE!!! of the CD-ROMs pressed and sent to the world, worked. Not ONE of them! The entire run was Dead On Arrival, which involved the process of--put CD-ROM into drive and install. Reboot or attempt do so (the restart may have been automatic. I don't remember... I was an eyewitness to a live demonstration of an attempted upgrade...) and NOTHING HAPPENED! The machines all failed to reboot, no hard drive spin up, NOTHING. DEAD MACHINE, DEAD, DEAD, DEAD!!!! An older Mac OS version, version 5 of some flavor, had to be put on the machine and installed from Insert CD-ROM into drive, to effect resurrection.), business partners, and suppliers.... Ask what's left of Motorola, and ask Freescale, and ask IBM, and UMax and Power Computer and people who lost their jobs when the likes of Pios went out of business, about Apple and the licensing of MacOS, the blowing up of CHRP/PReP, the doom of PowerPC as a general purpose microprocessor for use in personal computers and workstations, and Motorola taking a $100 million loss and writeoff of its entire investment in development and production setup and initial pilot runs of single board computers using PowerPC designed for running any or all of MacOs, VxWorks, Windows NT, Unix, BSD, OS-9 descendents, embedded applications, QNX, and I forget what else.... Ask the companies that developed applications for applets with OpenDoc, was it? or for the AV Macs and DSP3210 chips that it turned out Apple put in the 660 AV and 880 AV Mac and then came out with PowerMacs obviating any software designed for operating with a DSP3210, less than a year later, hanging all the customers who'd bought into the AV Macs, and all the companies making products that exploited the DSP3210. There were the dead on arrival Mac II machines, from Apple's singing drive controller killing off Quantum drives after there being a whopping total of 48 hours of operation (factory screening) of "burn-in" time on the computers--they arrived at the destination of a end user setting up the machine, turning it on, and having a boat anchor--the drives were dead (this was the infamous "sticktion" problem, which the Mac II was the first machine quite literally out of the box, to show the failures.... for weeks Apple and Quantum pointed blame fingers at one another, with customers not getting satisfaction in the form of replacements because neither company would acknowledge any blame, and direct end users to the other company for amelioration...)

But then, what can one expect of a company which came out with a product that copied the intellectual property, without compensation and without license, of another company, and then sued other companies for alleged intellectual property infringement! Apple was and probably remains an intellectual property thief, suing other companies for alleged theft of property from Apple, that Apple never owned in the first place, and had no rights to! (Notice that Apple never sued Hewlett-Packard for the GUI that HP was using, OpenView I think it was/is called, on some things--that's because HP actually DID have a license from Xerox for use of Xerox graphic user interface intellectual property...)

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

Wait a second, isn't free ice covered in the constitution?

What's next, charging you for the little bottles of shampoo?

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Hotels lost a lot of money when they tried adding "energy fees" to their advertised (and confirmed) rates. "Safe fees" should be the same.

The Windows Tax went away because the government decided it was too much Monopoly-like. (Windows is now essentially free because the manufacturer gets paid by the shovelware companies to fill the disk with their ads, to a total of more than the Windows licensing fee. That's one reson business-grade machines without that crap cost more.)

[pgranzeau.livejournal.com]

If they are going to charge everyone a buck and a half for having a safe in their room, why don't they just adjust the room rate accordingly and include it in their price?