Uncategorized – Page 28 – Auxiliary Memory

Credit Card Trickery

There’s a new danger you need to watch out for regarding your credit card. It’s perfectly legal and not really dishonest, but it’s on the slippery side of things in my opinion. I’m referring to paying for magazine subscriptions with credit cards and having publishers automatically renewing your subscription almost a year later because they kept your credit card number on file. A variation on this is offers to try free trial subscriptions that requires a credit card to start. Or even worse, getting a free magazine at a store and having that store giving you credit card number to the publisher so they can automatically renew the free magazine later. There must be fine print somewhere that we agree to all of this, but I never noticed it.

The first time this happened was when my wife got a free subscription to Sports Illustrated from Best Buy. I think it was for four months. She assumed the magazine was free until the sub ran out and it would quit coming. One day, after we had been getting the magazine much longer than I thought we should, I asked her to check her credit card statements, and indeed she discovered she had been charged for a renewal automatically. A call quickly fixed the problem, but ouch.

Another time, with Time Magazine, and later with PC Magazine, I got small postcards in the mail, with teeny-tiny print saying my subscription would be automatically renewed at a future date unless I contacted the publishers and canceled my subscriptions. These cards looked like junk mail that normally I would have put directly into the recycled bin. I realized I had gotten these subs from very cheap online offers that I paid with a credit card. I called and had both magazines canceled.

The trick is to pay with checks when first subscribing. I did that for both PC Magazine and Time after that. I let Time lapse when they wanted to up the subscription from $29.95 to $49.95. The other day I got an email asking me to come back for $20.00 – but it required paying with a credit card. I didn’t bite.

Last week I got an online offer from Encyclopedia Britannica to get their Ultimate DVD collection for $19.95 and with the added bonus of a free one-year’s subscription to their online edition. I had done this a couple years ago and decided I would again go for such a great bargain. Back then the free one-year subscription came as a code on a piece of paper that I registered online. This time when I registered the 2009 Ultimate DVD they told me I had to give them a credit card number to start the free one-year online subscription, with the warning they would automatically renew the subscription in one year for $49.95 unless I canceled a year later. I’m not going to remember to do that.

I felt cheated by this, because I paid the $19.95 really for the free one-year subscription to the online version. I planned to compare the online edition of EB to Wikipedia. I think this is the last time I will buy anything from Encyclopedia Britannica.

I get all kinds of enticing magazine subscription offers in my email. Legit ones, but I know they will store my credit card and automatically renew and I don’t like that business plan at all.

I’m starting to wonder if there should be a law against storing people’s credit card numbers. It would make ordering books from Amazon.com a little more time consuming, but overall I think it would be safer for the consumer in general.

And I understand that magazines don’t want to waste tons of money sending out endless subscription reminders. My solution to magazines is to quit sending those paper reminders by mail and send electronic reminders by email. It’s better for the environment and it will save you money. If you wouldn’t store my credit card number I might even be willing to pay online. Otherwise, I’d print out the email and send in the payment.

Since I’m working to abandon paper magazines this doesn’t matter, but if publishers want me to subscribe to electronic editions I need to know they aren’t going to automatically renew my subscriptions.

One way I was inadvertently helped to fight this problem was when my credit union switched credit card companies. It was then when I realized how many businesses kept my number on file. They all contacted me telling me my old number wouldn’t work anymore.

I wished that VISA and other credit card companies had a way for me to charge with a number that had a limited lifetime. What I might need to do to create a workaround is to change credit card banks every year.

Jim

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes. And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial. Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year. Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed. Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year. After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities. Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more. When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time. I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly. Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes. Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is: Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes? When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon.

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan. I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio. And, I am enjoying reading it. I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me. But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch? Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted? If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way. I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too. I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit. I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status. It was plain old escapism. If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls. I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years. I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t. If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student. I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes. I think many people are better than I am at reading. I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader. When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing. That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me. I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each. I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them. Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes. I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table. They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life. I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading. Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life. Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time. I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime.

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim

True Blood

You’d think the public would have put a stake through the heart of vampire stories long ago but as long as creative new repackaging like the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer and HBO’s new series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries come along, the undead will continue to haunt us. I have to admit that I have a life-long prejudice against vampire stories. Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula was a cliché when I was a kid, and the concept seemed tired even back in the 1950s. I was arm-twisted into give the living dead another chance with Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which I truly admired, and that taught me to be more open about vampire stories.

The world of literature is full of recycled plots, characters and concepts. Who would have ever thought that millions of books could have been written around the concept of the private detective? True Blood blends murder mystery with the occult. I guess some ideas are primal and go back as far as the origins of consciousness. Being killed by a bite to the throat may even be an ancestral memory from when we were animals. And isn’t it interesting that Christian symbols are weapons against these evil creatures of the night? Especially since both myths use blood as the conduit of resurrection.

I did not intend to get into another HBO series, but I just happened to be in front of the TV when the premier episode started and within seconds I was hooked. Right from the beginning I was thinking, “Geez, this is great storytelling.” We’re not talking Shakespeare here, but A-1 quality Weird Tales. Just high octane lurid pulp fiction, told with humor and a sense of style.

Vampires have come out of the crypt and are demanding their civil rights, and humans are all over them seeking kinky sex, historical knowledge and even their blood. Vampire blood is rumored to have some of the same kind of properties that Chinese herbalists claim for rare animals on the endangered species list and its worth thousands on the black market.

True Blood is about the first vampire moving into the little Louisiana town of Bom Temps. You can follow the news of these events at Bloodcopy.com, an interesting viral marketing tool for HBO. Anna Paquin plays Sookie Stackhouse, a young telepathic waitress that is boy crazy for vampires and solves mysteries for The Southern Vampire Mystery book series. I’m amused that Charlaine Harris shares my last name and birthday, we were even born in the same year, and she lives in this part of the country. I don’t believe in astrology, but my reading taste seems to be in the same house as her writing.

The first episode of True Blood got me hooked, so I’m anxiously awaiting next Sunday night to see if I’ll keep wanting to watch it. I had come this close, picture me holding two fingers in a near pinch, to giving up TV this summer. I’m a TV addict. Shows as entertaining as True Blood, Pushing Daisies, Big Bang Theory and Mad Men keep me coming back. I constantly wonder why fiction is so addictive. I know it’s all make-believe. I know it’s all pixels on a screen. I know television is created by the elite of the world to get rich off us couch potatoes. But I’m mesmerized by good story telling.

I’ve got to admit the vampires are a silly concept. I could be spending time reading about quantum physics or learning to program rich Internet applications, but instead I flop on the couch and watch Anna Paquin pretend to be telepathic and Stephen Moyer pretend to be a vampire. Why is that so interesting? If I knew maybe I could churn out my own vampire stories and become one of those elite people that look down on television watchers but get rich writing stories that get slobs like me addicted.

Jim

Electoral College

An old friend of mine called me today sassing me with jokes about my piece on Sarah Palin. He’s afraid that too many men are going to use their below the belt brains to make their voting decision. I carefully informed him that although I found Sarah very attractive physically, I wasn’t going to vote Republican. He then told me my vote wasn’t going to count anyway. He said because of the way the Electoral College works, my vote, along with all the other democratic votes, won’t be used because it’s winner take all in each state, and currently Tennessee is running almost 2-to-1 for McCain. That won’t keep me from voting, but it sure is a downer bit of knowledge.

His state, Florida, is slightly for McCain, but can still go either way. I wonder if I should move to Florida and register there quickly? Or would it be better to move to Colorado where the democrats have a slight edge and help them solidify the lead. (I have no idea what the voter registration rules are, though.)

To play with these fun numbers, I found www.electoral-vote.com for quick statistics on state by state polling. I wish I knew more about these people to know if their statistics are accurate and if the creators of this web page are biased for either party. Politics really creates some fantastic web activity, and it’s extremely hard to know what’s real and not real. Snopes.com is a great place to check rumors of any kind, but during the election it has become a great political lie-detecting tool.

I can understand the theory behind the Electoral College, but I wonder why we can’t have direct voting, instead of using this ancient indirect method. The Wikipedia article I linked to above is quite fascinating, and gives many pro and con points to the concept. I can understand some of the pro Electoral College points in the abstract, but I just feel the one person one vote concept is more fair. I doubt things will ever change, so keeping an eye on www.electoral-vote.com is probably the best way to take the political pulse each day. If the Electoral College is the whole game, then stats following it are the ones to watch.

Jim

Revealing Your Personality With Science Fiction

Rusty Keele over at BestScienceFictionStories.com has invited blogging friends over to write about their favorite SF short story, and I’m one of the contributors. My post is queued up for tomorrow. I picked “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany from 1967. Be sure and stop by and read all the posts this week. Jason Sanford discusses his love of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from 1950 and John DeNardo picks “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin from 1954, after sneaking in a plea for “Diamond Dogs” by Alastair Reynolds from 2003.

It’s revealing to see what other fans like in the way of short stories, especially when you only get to pick one. If had mentioned two, I might have included “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1957.

To help refresh your memory of great short stories, look at these lists:

Are you a long time fan of science fiction? If you study these lists, even in a casual way, they will bring back a flood of memories. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of great science fiction stories. Our pitiful little minds just can’t hold them all our bio-RAM. I wouldn’t have picked a different story if I had read these lists before I wrote my essay for Rusty, but reading them now makes me realize how hard it would be to pick story #2.

It’s too bad reprint rights are so expensive because it would be huge fun to create my own personal anthology of favorites and publish it at Lulu.com. Imagine a fad of publishing personal anthologies of short stories, where you wrote forwards and afterwards for each story. Wouldn’t that make a unique way to communicate with new friends? In the old days you’d introduce yourself to people and leave your calling card. Imaging leaving your anthology.

Could you define your inner core personality with 12 short stories? I think “The Star Pit” comes close to revealing a lot of my personal programming. Picking the next 11 stories would be difficult, but I think I’ll start going through the above lists and make a try of it. Certainly, it will make a nice blog entry.

Jim