Shabbir's Diary

Um, you really want my opinion?

The Bank of America chat help line is in fact, incredibly helpful.  They managed to transfer my chat window between two departments without losing me, and then they answered my questions patiently and solved my problem.

The survey I was given at the end made me laugh though.  What kind of meaningful suggestion fits in this tiny space?

Returning An Enterprise Rent-A-Car At JFK Airport

[See update at bottom for Enterprise Rent-A-Car's response.]

Be warned.

If you ever have to return a car to Enterprise Rent-A-Car "at the JFK airport", here's a few things to note:

1. Staff at both the Newark Penn Station Enterprise facility (where you might rent a one way rental and pay the $175 one way drop off fee) as well as the Enterprise facility "at JFK" will tell you they have a facility at JFK.  What they'll fail to tell you is that it's not actually at JFK, it's off-site.
2. When you drive into the airport and follow the signs for rental car return, there will be individual signs for all the companies but not Enterprise.  You will now be stumped.
3. When you pull over in the airport cargo area and look it up on your iPhone, it will show you the nearest Enterprise facility is a mile or two away on Merrick Rd.
4. When you get there, if it's Sunday it will be closed.
5. Oh, and it will be in a cellphone dead zone.  So you can't call Enterprise and ask them where it is.
6. (If you need to use the bathroom now, in what is essentially a sketchy neighborhood, being well dressed with a Bluetooth in your ear will gain you access to the bathroom at the nearest gas station, despite the fact that it's only for employees)
7. At this point, since you're not on the highway, the fact that the A/C in your car isn't working on Mother's Day in NYC will become a big problem.
8. When you get to a cell area and you call enterprise, they'll tell you to go to 149-05 131st St in Jamaica Queens.
9. When you ask google maps to look that up, it will not be able to find it.  The "-" in the address stumps the geocoding algorithm.  It will give you an incorrect address with an Enterprise logo on the map, which is wrong.  There's an awesome Enterprise logo on the map, though.
10. Text your wife some choice curse words about how angry you are at the world.
11. When you call Enterprise back and explain that it's not able to find it, they'll offer to help you "remember the address since you forgot".  When you lose your temper because you're overheated from broken A/C/, worried about missing your flight, angry at having been misled about the facility being "at JFK", you'll be transferred to a supervisor who will patiently listen to you ask not to be blamed for this.  She'll then conference in someone at the mythical Enterprise Rent-A-Car facility.
12. When you do speak to someone at the magical facility, they will do their best to guide you in, but they can't actually explain street directions because this part of Queens is laid out so disjointedly.  Avenues and streets start and stop as they are intersected by highways. 
13. After having them tell you the intersection the facility is at, you will find one of the streets of that intersection and drive towards the potential intersection.  This will almost certainly dead end into some sort of park.  (See above)  Call the sincerely helpful facility again.
14. They'll try and guide you in by saying things like, "Go past the Marriott" or ask you helpful questions like, "Do you see the Dunkin Donuts?"   They really do mean well, but this process will require you to drive around until you see a landmark they recognize, and then let them talk you in.
15. You will finally arrive, at which point a tiny brown-haired wisp of a girl will smile at you, check in your car, and listen to you sympathetically, telling you that the Newark staff should have been more clear about the location.  She won't actually charge you for the rental until her supervisors review the situation, and send you off to the waiting shuttle.  For about 30 seconds, you will be enamored and this will be the start of shaking off a truly nasty mood.
16. Your shuttle driver will let you off in front of an unused baggage cart ($5 savings) and load your luggage on it, renewing your faith in humanity.  Tip him.
17. You will sit in a bar, not drinking alcohol (a depressant which would make this thing worse) and writing this up for your blog, which is a cathartic method of letting the whole thing go. 

Consider the fact that when I trekked my way in Pakistan to the Afghan border and went to the black market arms bazaar, I actually found that place on Google Earth afterwards.  Stunning that a rental car facility in one of the most populated cities in the US could be this hard to locate, yes?

UPDATE: 5/11/2009

I just got off the phone with the New York City regional manager for Enterprise.  I had sent the link to the PR people and he said he wanted to respond.  He apologized about the incident.  He said they haven't been able to get signage up at the airport, but have been asking for over a year, and may be close, but that didn't help me and he understood that.

He also said that he agreed, Jamaica's laid out pretty tough for a non-native.  He specifically said he wasn't happy with the way I wasn't given clear instructions and would work on changing that.  He offered to do whatever it took to make me happy with the experience.

Except for the AC, I was pretty happy with the car, and said I thought that dropping the $175 one way dropoff fee was fair, since that was the part that really made my life difficult.  I suspect he thought I would ask for the entire thing for free, but frankly, I don't think that's equitable. 

He seemed concerned that I wouldn't ever rent from Enterprise again.  I frankly don't think that way.  Having been there once, on the rare chance I had to rent a one way from Newark NJ to JFK, I know now exactly where to go, and would do it again.  Enterprise doesn't have a brand problem, or a company values problem, they just have a facility findability problem.

Unless I don't get a chargeback, I think everyone should be pretty happy with the outcome.

Yay for Enterprise customer service!

I continue to improve against Sparbot

At my coach's urging, I have been playing heads up battles against University of Alberta poker bot, Sparbot.  It's the dumbest of their algorithms, playing a heads up hold'em game that's perfectly balanced without taking into account any opponent tendencies.  I'm playing it with it's configurable parameter set to "passive".

When I say "balanced", I mean it's bluffing bad cards enough, and slowplaying good card enough, that in theory you don't ever know what it has.  However if you play a conservative game and don't bluff a lot, and get a decent set of hands, I find that the balancing it does to it's game is a money loser.  Countless times I've called it down with a decent hand to find that it was bluffing and congratulations, you've confused me a little.  Now let me get back to stacking your (virtual) chips.

The same is true for slowplaying good hands, where you want to extract value but it doesn't for "balance" reasons.  When I get to draw for free against a better hand to a potentially better hand, and then make my hand, it's costing itself money, both in expected and real value.

Though my 16 sessions so far probably aren't statistically significant, there's a clear trend to them which I'm going to let my cognitive bias tell me means I'm getting better at playing this opponent. 

As a refresher, I'm playing 300 hand sessions against Sparbot.  At the end of each session I record my results, which gives a positive or negative "small bets per hand" for the session, either positive or negative, depending on if I made or lost money from my original buyin.  I'm not taking a rake out of the pot, since it's very hard to make a profit against the rake.  (I'd never make money, just lose less)

The blue line is a running average.  My opponent's algorithm has a slider setting for "passive" to "aggressive".  Sparbot is set to passive for this experiment.

Are vampires more popular now than before?

One of my friends on Facebook asked this, and the answer is yes.  Let's use Google Insights for search as a culture zeitgeist measurement.

Google's data only goes back to 2004, which postdates most of Anne Rice's Lestat novels.  Vampire popularity appears to have declined steadily from 2004 through 2007.  In 2008 the rush to create vampire entertainment was in full effect, with Twilight and HBO's True Blood driving people online to search for more information.  It appears to be in decline in 2009.

I did another graph, looking at the relevance and interplay between twilight, true blood, and vampires.  The results are surprising.  (click for larger graph)

The graph suggests that the vampire resurgence (which is waning) is probably driven by interest in Twilight.

Consider Larry Lessig for the long list for the Supreme Court

I'm sure that since the transition, President Obama's team has been thinking about nominees for the Supreme Court.  A democratic president means that some of the justices that weren't comfortable with an imbalance on the court could finally get to retire.  And now we have one.

I don't know if they've considered it, and I don't know Larry well enough to know if he'd want it, but I think you should take a moment and consider why Larry Lessig might make a qualified and interesting choice for Supreme Court justice.

Yes, I know he's not a woman, a latino, or an African American.  Diversity on the court is important, and frankly, Larry is a white guy.  But hear me out...

1. Larry is wicked smart.  Not just accomplished, but smart beyond what hard work brings you.  If there's any hope for finding someone who will have a chance at getting past the partisan gauntlet, they would have to be that smart.
2. He's pretty solidly in touch with the middle class.  I don't think Larry has had to worry too much about affording groceries, but I doubt he's ever had to decide whether to get the brown or the black interior for a new boat.  His family, like many American families, is doing well but not to the point where he longer worries about things like catastrophic illness devastating his family's finances.  (Let me tell you, that chestnut about all of us being one diagnosis from bankruptcy, that can happen to most people in this country, even with health insurance.  You should see the bills my sister and stepfather dealt with after my mom's cancer)
3. Besides copyright, his latest focus has been on an issue that serves all of us well, and that is corruption.  While it would make him no friend to the entire Senate that would have to confirm him, any issue agenda you support is made better by a lack of corruption.  We all benefit from his work to end corruption, and I would argue that because of the corruption present in the two other branches of government, only the judicial branch has a chance of solving this problem.
4. Larry is empathetically interested in the law.  After all, he doesn't study these problems because he's interested in making arcane points about the law in some sort of "I'm smart because I know this byzantine set of facts" manner.  Larry delves into problems such as copyright and corruption because they make a very real difference in how we live our lives, and exercise our country's full creative and economic potential.

I don't know Larry Lessig well enough to know if he'd even want the job.  It would mean an enormous commitment for him and end every other avenue of advocacy he's been pursuing.  He may even chafe at the restrictions that being on the Supreme Court require, and may not enjoy the heavy give and take that seems to characterize the 9 justices that seem to disagree ever so politely.

I specifically am not advocating that anyone start bombarding the White House with letter writing campaigns to advocate his appointment, but I think it's worth passing this meme around.  He's one of our society's smartest and most empathetic attorneys who truly understands the impact, both intended and unintended, that the law has on how we live our daily life.  That has to be something that would serve us well on the high court.

Thanks for reading.