General

Stupid new projects.

I think the customer loyalty programs are playing me for a fool.

I pay a bunch of money to American Express, mostly so I can get into airport lounges. I never travel by myself, so it was nice that they let me bring two people, my mom and my sister. I’ve only used things at Delta lounges and now Delta has limited it “effective immediately” to just me.

Starbucks sent me an email yesterday about a free drink at 12:03AM. I went it about 12:50PM, just after lunch, and checked the Starbucks app on my iPhone and it said my reward had expired. I wondered what timezone I was supposed to be in. I finally figured out several things.

  1. Starbucks gives me rewards and doesn’t warn me even though they have my email address and my cell phone number as well as an app that could send notifications if it was programmed properly.
  2. When Starbucks says something is expiring on 1/9, they mean that as soon as it turns 1/9 then it’s expiring. You can’t use it on 1/9 like everybody else on the planet would think.
  3. Starbucks can send you email for free stuff at the same time they have random things you don’t know that you even had expiring, confusing everything.
  4. Starbucks isn’t a nice touchy-feely company that would say, eh, it’s just a coffee, have one on us since we’re so confusing in our rules. (I emailed for clarification.) On the other hand Peet’s is.
Of course I’m still suckered into those loyalty programs and probably won’t be quitting in a huff, especially since they already have me already.
 
I ordered the ultrasonic dish I was mentioning before. It was about $170. I figured it is cheaper than my new obsession, which is to get a good microphone, a professional mixer, and see what my voice sounds like. I just realized I could just use the recorder I bought, but I’ve already told a guy that I want to buy his Shure SM55.
 
And I thought it was stupid to go to Radio Shack to buy this thing for $15 that plugged into a small computer (Japanino Arduino variant) I already had. It was a lot more fun than I thought.
 

 

The only secret to getting the Japanino working: go to http://www.silabs.com and get the driver for the CP2104 USB-to-UART controller.