(Not really a) moral dilemma

Suppose you’re a member of a motel chain’s “frequent sleeper” program. Suppose this chain starts crediting someone else’s stays to your account. Suppose this results in extra free night certificates being sent your way just as you’re thinking of a weekend getaway.

Do you:

Alert them to the issue and return those certificates?
Use the damned things as quickly as you can before they figure out what happened?

Hmmm…

Shocker

Something I never thought I’d see: Charlotte being cited as a model for Toronto in the area of “complete street” design:

But Whitney insists that it is possible to move past the divisiveness and political polarization that has impeded so much progress in Toronto. He cites the case of Charlotte, North Carolina, where an award-winning complete-streets policy was formally adopted in 2007. “Every single street there goes through the process and it’s no longer a question of left or right. Once it’s established, and once it’s integrated into the culture, it takes it out of the realm of politics and it becomes just the way that municipalities do business.”

A camp for me

When I was a youngster, I was always terrified that my parents might at some point decide to send me to summer camp. The thought of all that outdoors crap and assorted male bonding centered around sports and leathercraft seemed like the closest I could have come to hell on earth (and it still does).

This camp, on the other hand, would have thrilled me.

Seven years is not enough

After seven years and four months, I fear I may be losing the G5 tower. It hasn’t been my primary machine in about a year and a half, but I’ve been using it to digitize video while I do my regular stuff on a slightly newer iMac I got in the divorce settlement (and which isn’t feeling 100% healthy itself). The G5 has performed pretty well although it’s been a bit flaky the past week or so. I feared the problem might be an external drive I was using, but that’s apparently not it. Right now, I can’t even boot in safe mode or using a CD. Based on everything I’ve read it looks like I may have a fried CPU and/or motherboard.

I was thinking about buying a new desktop machine next week during the tax-free weekend anyway. I think it’s time.

Travel plans

Pondering travel for the rest of the year. I’m thinking of a few days in and around DC the second weekend in August and my traditional autumn trip to assorted Canadian destinations sometime in October. Any suggestions for the week after Christmas–preferably someplace that won’t have too high a probability of weather issues?

For some reason, I also had the strangest craving to revisit Minneapolis the other day. But not in December…