The parking lot at JR’s building is guarded by a formidible adversary, an automated parking system that doles out timestamped magnetic tickets. When ready to leave, you (hopefully get the ticket validated inside and) pop it into a machine along with your credit card*, and now feeding the magnetic ticket back in at the exit gate will let you out again.<\/p>\n
The firmware on the system leaves a bit to be desired. I got a bit of a shock once when it asked for $192 in parking fees for a few hours’ stay. Turns out the system’s internal clock got corrupted somehow and, without any sort of bounds-checking, recorded my entry time as sometime on January 117th, 1980<\/i>. (Building security came out and overrode the gate when I showed them the date printed on the card.)<\/p>\n
Just recently I found a much more friendly glitch. For validated guests, parking is nominally $12 a day. However, on weekdays there is a discounted “evening” rate, where evening is defined as between 6pm and 1am, of a paltry (for downtown asphalt rental) $3. (After 1am it rolls over to the next logical day and charges the full rate.) However, it calculates whether or not it’s a weekday<\/i> relative to midnight, creating a 1-hr window on sunday evenings where the parking fee is decreased by staying longer<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Not that I’m a paragon of godlike infallibility**, but it’s amusing to run across sloppy little goofs like that, as long as they aren’t mine.<\/p>\n
* or carefully de-crinkled dollar bills; the credit card stripe reader hasn’t worked for months.<\/p>\n
** Freshman year of college, I threw together a program in Qbasic (bleh) that used the computer’s modem to call other rooms and act as sort of a morning wake-up-call service. Mostly because Kristoff was a cheap bastid and didn’t have a working alarm clock. He was the first user \/ beta tester, in the call list for 8:00 AM. Unfortunately, a small math bug in the program caused it to instead call every hour on the hour starting around midnight. I found this out when I woke up to find a very haggard-looking Kristoff at the door, ranting that “some fucker’s been pranking me all night, every hour on the hour…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The parking lot at JR’s building is guarded by a formidible adversary, an automated parking system that doles out timestamped magnetic tickets. When ready to leave, you (hopefully get the ticket validated inside and) pop it into a machine along with your credit card*, and now feeding the magnetic ticket back in at the exit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}