play, WoW frustration, and so on
Mood: frustrated
Music: Barenaked Ladies - "Light Up My Room"
Posted on 2005-08-10 09:58:00
Tags: charlottesweb worldofwarcraft tipping
Words: 377

So rehearsal went pretty well last night. It was sort of weird being there - I felt very much like I didn't exactly know what I was doing, which seems pretty accurate. The cast seems very nice, as does the stage manager. I'm less nervous about learning my lines (but I still need to work on it!) because, well, I'm going to be saying them a lot in rehearsal. Which seems obvious in retrospect...

It was fun, though. Hopefully I'll pick up this whole acting thing as we go. Rehearsal again tonight!


World of Warcraft is frustrating because I can't really get it to work. I'm running it on Linux through Cedega, and it kinda works but crashes every 5 minutes or so. There are like 6 things to try, and so I might just make a list and try all combinations of all of them, or something. Maybe I'll write a script to do each one of them to speed testing. Hmm. Anyway, I'm determined to keep trying until I get tired of trying. That's commitment for you!

A topic that's been making the blog rounds is the practice of tipping. This round of discussion started with the fact that some restaurant in New York is ending tipping and adding a 20% service charge to the bill. Here are some interesting statistics on tipping and why Mr. Pink doesn't tip. Myself, I think it sucks that it's legal to pay waiters less than minimum wage (as low as $1.59/hour in Kansas!). Given that they do, however, I feel guilty not tipping 15% unless the service was quite bad. If I could change the world, though, I'd make restaurants pay waiters minimum wage and make tipping optional. But I've never been in a job subject to tips - anyone who has care to jump in?

A neat trick I saw on the Google Blog is using the * operator to make Google fill in the blank. So, you can do things like Austin is the * capital of the world (live music, obviously!), Pittsburgh is the * capital of the world (steel, peroghi, or robotics), Rochester is the * capital of New York (murder(!) and technology), and Houston is the * capital of the world (energy or oil, depending who you ask). Pretty nifty!

7 comments

Comment from onefishclappin:
2005-08-10T11:15:55+00:00
Dallas is the new evangelical capital of the world
My hometown... gotta love it.

Comment from onefishclappin:
2005-08-10T16:43:32+00:00
I always hate when places don't include the full cost on their menus. I wish tips/living wage for employees was included in the price of the meal. It seems odd that the "price" of your meal only represents about 80% of what you actually pay. Of course, not everyone tips well, but the establishment doesn't suffer for that.

(Note that working during peak times is most profitable for waitstaff, so if tipped was eliminated, it might be harder to find people to work the busy Saturday nights instead of Sunday afternoon. Also, it's well known in the restaurant business that smokers tend to spend more, so many waitstaff will elect to work a smoking section for the additional money, even though they would not otherwise choose to be near smokers. They are economically coerced to expose themselves to 2nd-hand smoke.)

Similarly, I wish Rice would (have they??) do away with the "base cost" that was ~50% of the cost of the meal plan so each meal seemed cheaper. (Of course this screwed you over at Sammie's when you paid more for a la carte items because they didn't take the base cost into account, so even when you used your meal plan, you paid more.

And I've always liked places that include tax with prices - makes paying so much easier and might do away with stupid stuff like pricing at "$9.99" to make it feel cheaper than "$10". Including tax would reduce usage of change and make it easier on the employees. I bet the places could even make money by rounding up to the nearest dollar (or $0.50) value.

The only places where I regularly see this is at low end vending places (sports events, etc) where turnover is key and they don't want to have to use a cash register most of the time.

Comment from abstractseaweed:
2005-08-10T21:38:17+00:00
I agree about the rounding off thing. At first glance, before I think about the numbers, "$7" seems less than "$6.99" because it's fewer digits and without big numbers like "9" in it. Kudos to Freebirds, for both including tax in the listed price and rounding to the nearest quarter.

Comment from gregstoll:
2005-08-10T21:40:34+00:00
Yeah - including tax in the price and making it a nice round number is a European thing (or at least, it's common in Europe) and I've never understood why they don't do it here. It's so convenient!

Comment from quijax:
2005-08-10T17:19:03+00:00
Boulder is the * capital of the world comes up with "incest" as it's first hit. I was expecting "freak" or something like that.

Comment from onefishclappin:
2005-08-10T17:23:53+00:00
The "bike" and "Hybrid car" options are a little better...

Comment from gregstoll:
2005-08-10T21:39:23+00:00
Wow...that was unexpected.

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