Skip to content

The Events that are: My Life

Things that go on in my life that cannot be catagorized somewhere else, sort of a catch-all

Convenience Fees, a Logical Fallacy

Rachel and I are going to Portland this weekend (after we were preempted by a family emergency)!

Rachel suggested we see Ovo, a Cirque du Soleil touring production, and I thought it was a great idea!1.

I went to go purchase tickets2 and was about ready to check out when I noticed there was $26 in fees3.

“Convenience fees” are nothing new, Ticketmaster has been making untold millions on them for years. And perhaps in the beginning it really was a convenience for people to not have to trudge down to the ticket office. However, these days I believe that offering tickets online is more of a convenience for the seller instead of the buyer. So why the fees?

I called Hadley Media, the marketing group that was responsible for the discount, and asked about it. Their response was something that I’ve grown all to accustomed to hearing: “That’s a fee typical of the industry.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an argumentum ad populum4 and is a logical fallacy.

Why not simply include the “fee” in the actual cost of the ticket? What would you do if a company listed hamburgers on their menu for $2.65 and then charged you $1 for actually consuming the food?

To me, that’s lying. They are not disclosing the true cost of the item in a place where such costs are purported to be. When a company uses such tactics, my trust of them lessens.

I should make clear that Hadley Media doesn’t actually sell the tickets or charge the fee, they’re fault in this matter was explaining the fees as: “everyone does it”. Shockingly, even Ticketmaster isn’t behind this. Interestingly enough, this fee appears to be the result of a joint venture between AEG, Outbox Technology, and Cirque du Soleil presumably designed to compete against Ticketmaster.

  1. We had wanted to see Cavalia when it was in Seattle, but didn’t jump on it fast enough. ↩

  2. Noticing that I have a 15% discount through work! ↩

  3. Technically, five of those dollars were for sending me my e-Ticket, however the only alternative was to pay $7 for will call ↩

  4. appeal to the people ↩

Something Blue

I was at a wedding over the weekend for some friends. During dinner, there was a trivia game and each table (ours was a table of five UPC folk) were able to submit their own questions for round :

  • After the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, what type of plane was JoEllen evacuated on?1
  • What is Chuck Noris’ first name?2

Round two was an entire section on wedding trivia — who knew weddings cost so much and people married so late in life. This one in particular stood out for the comment delivered with such comedic timing half a beat later:

“In the phrase ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,’ what does blue signify?” (half-beat) “Balls.”

The correct answer is actually purity, love, and fidelity3. I liked the first answer better — which also indicates that I’m apparently still 12 years old.

  1. DC-3)

  2. What is the tallest building in the US? ((Willis Tower ↩

  3. Carlos ↩

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_old ↩

Approach for 2012

I’m cleaning up my room and came across this note. I wrote it a few months ago as I was doing my planning for 2012.

For 2011, my word was “Pace“. This year, I picked four words about how I’m going to approach this year: Explore, Focus, Finish, Fun.

I didn’t just pick these four words out of thing air, there was a process to get there and this piece of paper was my thought process. Click to embiggen.

Empire Builder 8

Rachel’s grandmother passed away last week, so we’re making the trek to Montana for the funeral service. We were going to visit Portland this weekend, but that trip has been preempted by this.

Since the funeral isn’t until Monday, we decided to inject some fun and take the train to Montana and then fly back.

We’ve never ridden on a train for travel, except when I was in Europe. So this will be a first for both of us in the US, which Rachel calls Darjeeling Limited-style.

The train ride takes 23 hours, so I’m hoping to provide some updates en route.

Cheers!

[flickr]6932078754[/flickr]
Free booze? Yes please!

Dreaming About Tomorrow

Generally, I try to be content with how things are. This has been a challenging mix of rejecting the status quo when I believe it is required but also not getting sucked in by Shinny Object Syndrome (rushing off to the next latest and greatest thing, what I think George Leonard would call “The Dabbler”1). This has been a careful mix because I feel like I’ve spent much of life “moving on” from one thing to the next, always trying to reach some je ne sais quoi.

Since I graduated from college, I’ve been trying to use my time for good, being involved in things that I think are important and extending my network of connections. Over the last year though, I’ve had to trim this back as I’ve simply got too many things going on. I even had to come up with form letter to send out because of all the awesome opportunities I got:

Unfortunately I’m at capacity (actually probably a bit over capacity) for doing things right now and I’m going to have to decline your invitation to help with the INSERT_EVENT_NAME_HERE. This year I’ve had a lot to manage and be involved in, which is a good sign: I’m gaining responsibility and learning a lot! But when push comes to shove, I tend to eliminate the “me time” first because that’s, unfortunately, the easiest thing to eliminate. I’ve slowly but surely been pushing back on that, reclaiming the time I need in order to function in the rest of the areas of my life.

Ultimately, that results in me having to say no to a lot of great opportunities. At some point in the future I may be at a point where my other responsibilities have dropped to a point where I can take on new projects. The time isn’t now though.

This has been a season of saying “no” for me and it’s been heart breaking. You haven’t been the first person or group that I’ve had to say no to and you won’t be the last. The thing that gives me hope is that it means that I’m on to something. It means that I’m cultivating a “thing” that is valuable and people want. I just need to figure out how to clone myself now.

Until we get the cloning thing perfected, I respectfully must decline your invitation to be involved with the INSERT_EVENT_NAME_HERE. Thank you for the consideration though, it does mean a lot that you thought of me.

Sincerely,
Andrew

I was talking with some friends a few nights ago and got some solid honest feedback about what I do really well that I may not know about. A lot it seemed to revolve around this “thing” I’ve been spending my time cultivating: being honest, willing to tackle tough questions, childlike curiosity.

I’ve also had some really awesome comments from friends over the last few months about my passion for engineering, technology, and even my job.

I feel like I’m brewing something amazing, but I don’t know what it is yet. And yet I’m afraid that this thing I’m brewing won’t come and one day I’ll wake up and find that I’ve stopped dreaming, in part because I’ve tried to slow down and all the time I’ve put into it will have been wasted.

I’ve been following Neil deGrasse Tyson for about a year now — ever since I saw him give a lecture, Adventures of an Astrophysicist, at the University of Washington. I may not agree with everything Neil says, but I have the utmost respect and admiration for him. In my books, he is a champion of honesty, curiosity, and willingness. He has spent time enlightening everyone from Congress2 to the Internet at large by doing a questions and answers session on Reddit.

When asked what he would do if he were President by the New York Times, Neil answered:

From www.haydenplanetarium.org:

The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America – as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.

That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.

A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil gets it, he rejects the status quo as insufficient. Neil dreams and he doesn’t get sucked in to Shinny Object Syndrome. Neil has a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).

Sometimes I worry that I don’t have a long-term BHAG. I worry that I’m not ultimately working towards something that is clear to me.

Short term dreams — zero to two years — I love. I can manipulate those short-term dreams in my mind and they feel tangible (which is not necessarily the same as feeling achievable), but how do they link up? How do I take my somewhat disparate dreams and make them into something worthwhile and awesome? I worry that when I dream about my future in the long-term, my dreams are fuzzy; and it’s not because I don’t have ideas — I do. Still, I wonder what is it that I’m ultimately working toward? Am I spending my time wisely?

Exploring the Solution Space (Source: http://blog.intercom.io/criticism-and-two-way-streets/)

I’ve been spending a lot of time doing Exploration, and I love it. But what about Refinement? Sometimes I feel like I’m not spending enough time on the refinement aspects because of Shinny Object Syndrome. At what point do I decide to switch from Exploration to Refinement?

So that’s some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately: How do I spend my time? What is my BHAG? How do I do all of this in as a Christian? How do I know if I’m doing God’s plan?

  1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard ↩

  2. Priorities, Plans, and Progress of the Nation’s Space Program, Senate Commerce Committee ↩