A Little Italy In Colorado
Posted on | April 5, 2008 at 4:02 pm | 7 Comments
The picture to the right is of an intersection on my usual running route that ends in two directions. Currently there’s some construction going on to extend at least one of the roads towards a new housing development that’s also being constructed. And not just any housing development. It’s “Inspired by the architecture of Europe’s classic hilltowns, each residence is designed to be a piece of functional, ownable art.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not sure I’d want to live inside Art, no matter how supposedly functional.
If the developers have their way, this is just the first phase of a huge development that will also include an office park and retail space. Here’s a map. It will pretty much fill up a huge open area, further reducing the “wilderness” around here. And I’m sure the traffic will increase and I’ll have to be dodging more cars on my morning run. Ah well, it’s all for the best I’m sure. Maybe I should look into buying me one of them European-style hillside houses. I bet they’re cheap.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: I got a call from a telemarketer or something, and when I answered, I was actually told by a recorded voice that all associates were busy, to stay on the line, and that someone would be with me shortly. Then hold music started playing. Great. Not only do we now get interrupted by unwanted calls, but we’re expected to wait on hold for them to actually speak to us. It probably wasn’t a telemarketer unless they were from a company I already do business with, since I’m on the No Call list. Didn’t look like a charity either. I’m thinking it was a survey taker, since there is a company by the name that came in the caller ID that does surveys, according to my web search. I’ve been getting a lot of calls from that number, but this was the first time I actually answered. At any rate, I hung up before they could find someone to talk to me.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 43°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “The Game” (Echo & the Bunnymen)
- “I Don’t Wanna Shine” (The Orange Peels)
- “Kenesaw Mountain Landis” (Jonathan Coulton)
- “Red Fox” (Big Country)
- “She’ll Be A Verb” (The Malchicks)
- “Desperate For Dawn” (Shalini)
- “The Killer” (Starlight Mints)
Comments
7 Responses to “A Little Italy In Colorado”
April 5th, 2008 @ 9:58 pm
I’ve gotten that recorded message too, and I just hang up.
I’ve also gotten calls from someone whose name I can’t remember (somebody Smith) telling me that he needed to speak to me on a very important matter that I probably wasn’t aware of and gave me a number to call him back (the one time I actually answered it, it was of course a recording). I’ve also gotten a couple calls (recordings also) from someone who sounded really put out, that he’d been trying to contact me for a while and that he really didn’t want to go ahead with whatever it was he was going to do without discussing it with me first, and this was my last chance to talk to him. It sounded really convincing. Of course the dead giveaway is that none of these recordings ever spoke my name, or mentioned anything about what the call was about, so it was obviously telephone spam.
That last one must have hired a professional actor, and I can’t help wondering if it was telephone phishing. Everyone’s so concerned about security on the Internet these days I wonder if they’ve forgotten about good old telephone fraud, or maybe successful scams on the internet are being “reverse technologied” to phones. That would be ironic.
April 5th, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
My feeling is, if these idiots are calling me, I’m not going to hang up on them: I’ll let the call run as long as it wants to, since after all, they’re paying for it. If I could keep them connected for hours on end, I’d do it.
April 5th, 2008 @ 11:53 pm
It’s amazing to me how much the “do not call” list has cut down on the unwanted calls we get. Especially considering the number of people the feds have actually fined for violating the “do not call” list is essentially zero.
Most of the few unwanted calls we still get now are recorded messages. It’s illegal to call someone with just a recorded message, unless you have permission. There are also laws about the number of operators you have to have available when you’re using automatic dialers that only connect an operator in when a live person answers. But since they’re violating the “do not call” list laws anyway, they probably figure there’s not much to lose in violating the others too.
Occasionally I report the calls on the “do not call” website. But I figure the caller ID numbers are probably bogus, so I usually only do it on the ones where they ask you to call back to a number that matches the caller ID. I suspect that the feds don’t do anything with the reports anyway. Or at least, don’t do anything useful. They probably spend millions of tax dollars filing them away or some similar nonsense.
April 6th, 2008 @ 5:55 pm
The DNC list doesn’t stop anyone outside the USA, and even in the pre-Skype days, bulk-purchased long distance time made it easy to locate your operation in the sunniest tax haven you could find.
If anything, it’s made things easier – in the old days they’d have to fend off complaints, and were thus forced to change company names every couple weeks. But at least they were required to buy lists of phone numbers; now the gov’t practically forces you to take the biggest list around!
April 7th, 2008 @ 11:51 am
My feeling is, if these idiots are calling me, I’m not going to hang up on them: I’ll let the call run as long as it wants to, since after all, they’re paying for it. If I could keep them connected for hours on end, I’d do it.
I would do that if I had time to waste. But there’s bloggin’ (and TV watching) to do!
April 7th, 2008 @ 5:31 pm
I wholeheartedly agree with 2fs’ inclination to cost the telemarketers money, but as I noted it’s hard to do with phone calls because it’s so cheap for them.
However, there ARE technological tricks which can be used on spammers – fake “honeypot” mail relays that attract and effectively trap spambots into thinking they’re about to get their payload forwarded, for up to days at a stretch! I found the configuration process beyond my Linux skills at the time and contacted the author about putting it on a liveCD or even a Gumstix sort of thing; sadly, he didn’t seem interested…
April 7th, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
“if I had time to waste”? All you have to do is not hang up the phone – you’re not compelled to actually listen!