They really work, as long as they’re not charging “event price” then you should be able to use the coupon. Make sure you go to a garage that is listed on the coupon and print it out. You can always find a printing service at a Staples, Kinko’s, hotel lobby, or a public library. Note the restrictions, too.

• Alliance Parking Coupon/Locations
• Central Parking coupon
• icon theater parking coupon

Momma says: You can also print out a few in advance, but we presented the coupon upon checking out of the garage.

Originally posted on Blogger.

停車 (Parking) is a 2008 film out of Taiwan. The movie stars Chang Chen. The rest of the supporting cast include Kwai Lun-mei, Jack Kao, Leon Dai, Peggy Tseng and Chapman To.

The movie revolves around Chang Chen and his parked car. While buying a cake, someone double parks next to him, preventing him from leaving. Because of this, Chen gets involved with the happens of Chengde road, where his car is park. Chen patiently waits from late afternoon to sundown. The first is a one hand barber next to his car. The barber is played by Jack Kao and tells him that the car probably belongs to the people on floor 3. Chen goes up and finds an elderly couple with their granddaughter Nini. The grandfather calls him Xiao Ma, the nickname of their deceased son. Chen goes along with it and ends up having dinner with them. When he’s done with dinner, the double parked car is gone. About to leave, Chen receives a phone call. Distracted by the phone call, he sits on the cake he bought. Now Chen’s butt is covered in frosting and he goes back to the barber to clean up. After cleaning up, he finds that another parked car has blocked him via double parking. Chen goes to a nearby tailor store to ask for help. Chapman To is that tailor and doesn’t help him. Chen calls the towing company to get the car towed. The towing company is busy from it being Mother’s Day and a Sunday. The towing company tells him to take a cab. Chen finds a cab but the cabby refuses to take him to his destination. Leaving the car angered, he kicks the double parked car. The car is not empty and filled with triad members. Just as they are going to do something bad to Chen, To runs out being chased by triad members. The barber steps out and tells the triad head to let them go. The barber and triad boss are old buddies and chat about a little history and their current situation. Chen’s car is still double parked, but by a different car now. Chen heads to the fourth floor to ask if its their car. Chen than gets into an argument with them and is beaten up and thrown into a park ditch.

The movie is trip as there are many small subplots along the way. I didn’t even bring up Peggy Tseng’s character. One of the subplots revolves around Chang Chen and Kwai Lun-mei as his wife. There’s also the subplot of tha barber that gets somewhat explored.

This was a slow moving movie, but for a purpose. The slowness in the beginning turns into lots and lots of things going on in the second half of the film. Peggy Tseng makes her movie debut. I’ve not seen Peggy before because she’s in Taiwan commercials and appeared in a few MVs, two things I see very little to none of here in LA. I think she gives a breakout performance.

I highly recommend this film.

AMCD also spotted this one… no blue lights on top, so a lot more clean cut….

I really hate this type of parking as well, so I appreciate getting pictures like this.

If a car was to turn in right to this junction… and the child had stepped out onto the road to get around the parked car… well… you can see the result. The turning car wouldn’t see the child until the last minute…

MG from “Down under” spotted another great bit of crap parking!

Simply put, just because you can fit in, doesn’t mean you can fit in…

Parking Meter.

We have noticed lately that Westminster CEOs (Civil Enforcement Officers in charge of issuing parking tickets to vehicles illegally parked) have never been so desparate to report the atrocious conditions under which they work every day. Our Nutsville colleagues have brilliantly described the working conditions of a CEO in Westminster (by interviewing one of them) and exposed how badly these individuals are treated on a daily basis. It should be noted however that, while CEOs issue parking tickets on behalf of Westminster City Council, they are employed by NSL Services, a company to which the council outsource their parking control operations.

In the wonderful posts published by Nutsville, there are two main things that have drawn our attention more than anything else.

First, unlike what Conservative Councillor Danny Chalkley will tell you, CEOs are given PCN targets, that is a minimum number of parking tickets to be issued on a daily basis to cars, motorbikes and scooters. We are told that the more PCNs (or parking tickets) are issued by one CEO, the more overtime that CEO will get, meaning more money at the end of the day. CEOs are all desparate for money, they live in atrocious conditions in London, a large proportion of them are immigrants into the UK, with a poor command of the English language and no family or relatives to help them settle in. Life in London is incredibly expensive, it is the second most expensive city in the world after Tokyo, so we are not surprised that CEOs are desparate to get as much overtime as possible by meeting the targets imposed by their employer, NSL Services, in conjunction with Westminster City Council. The Nutsville post goes on explaining how badly a CEO who fails to meet their target is treated, with the threat of losing their job if they carry on not meeting their daily target. CEOs work under enormous pressure on a daily basis, and their employer treats them like rubbish, knowing that most of them can’t do any other job, given their immigration status in the UK. We wouldn’t even treat a dog in the way these people are being treated.

The second thing that we have found absolutely horrifying is the the state of the facilities offered to CEOs by NSL Services. Nutsville have published disgusting photos of the canteen, wash rooms and toilets offered to these poor NSL employees, who have no choice but use them. With Nutsville’s permission, we have inserted those photos below for you to see.

No wonder why, according to Nutsville, the Chief Executive Officer of NSL Services, Suzanne Hussey, has gone mental about the publication of the above photos and has threatened her employees of dismissal should they be caught out sending any information about NSL to Nutsville, and probably to other third parties as well. We wonder whether Ms Hussey also uses these toilets, wash rooms and canteen, probably not, eh? But well, why would she care after all, given that she probably enjoys the use of nice and clean facilities at her office, while her employees use crappy and disgusting ones such as the ones shown above? Health and safety sounds like a foreign language at NSL Services, doesn’t it?

Well, we have been looking at the UK regulations in terms of health and safety, and particularly with regards to the provision of toilet and wash room facilities. So here it goes:-

“You have to provide adequate toilets and washing facilities for your employees. Adequate means you have to provide (…) CLEAN FACILITIES – to help achieve this walls and floors should preferably be tiled (or covered in suitable waterproof material) to make then easier to clean”.

Should a health and safety investigation be carried out at the premises of NSL Services in the light of the above? Perhaps someone may have reported the issue already?

It should be noted that a large proportion of our readers are based overseas, that is outside of the UK. So, our dearest readers from Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, USA, Portugal, Singapore, Belgium, Holland, Greece, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Argentina and other countries around the globe, have a look at how CEOs are treated in the Central London Borough of Westminster, and for those of you who are thinking about immigrating into London to work as a parking attendant, you now know what to expect, you’ve been warned! And for those of you who are accountants, lawyers, doctors based overseas, have a look at how these poor people are treated by NSL Services in London, absolutely disgusting, isn’t it?

We hope we’ll soon have the pleasure to see nicer and cleaner facilities for CEOs in Westminster to use, and please note that all this dirt wouldn’t have come to light, if Councillor Chalkley, of Westminster City Council, had not imposed a highly unfair, unjustified and unpopular tax on motorcyclists to park. But the tax is still experimental, we wonder why Mr Chalkley can’t make his mind up about making it permanent.

Please join and support the legal fight to get the bike parking tax in Westminster scrapped before it spreads all over the UK and the European Union. The next demonstration is on 7th December 2009, don’t miss it! For further details, visit  http://www.notobikeparkingtax.com/

Soutenez et participez au proces dont le but est de forcer la mairie de Westminster a supprimer la taxe de stationnement des deux-roues avant que le concept ne se propage a travers le Royaume-Uni et l’Union Europeenne. La prochaine manifestation aura lieu le 7 decembre 2009, ne la ratez pas! Pour plus d’informations, consultez http://www.notobikeparkingtax.com/

If you have a story you would like to see published on UKFRANCE.org, please contact us here.

Si vous avez une experience a partager et que vous souhaiteriez voir publiee sur UKFRANCE.org, n’hesitez pas a nous contacter en cliquant ici.

Winslow, AZ

Robin says, “I watched this lady whip through the parking lot and then park taking up 4 spots! She then got out and walked into the store as if nothing was wrong. As soon as she was out of sight I had to take this picture.”

Another day and yet another card fraud uncovered. Auckland City Council is a little red-faced after being warned that cards have been skimmed in one of their larger car parks in downtown Auckland.  Don’t laugh yet, as they are only the first of many I predict who will see this type of attack escalate.  ATM devices are getting harder to skim and easier to simply blow up for their cash, so any other unattended device taking card payments are the next big thing for card fraudsters.

Fantastic one this one as it finally alerts authorities to stop believing hardware manufacturers who sell them systems clearly designed to be compromised!  Card park systems that simply read your card to bill you for payment should have been left in the 1990’s when authorities and private car parks could trust the public with insecure card systems.  To have an unattended system that processes a payment from your card without any verification today is simply put STUPID!  Yet we see almost every car park around the world using them.

Nice thing about South Africa is that we always follow what is fashionable or what the big technology brands manage to shove down our throats with a few extra golf days and a lunch or two, so it cannot be a surprise that South Africa, like New Zealand, offers the public the same wonderful automated payment process at their public car parks.  In fact these state-of-the-art systems have been rolled out at our lovely new airport parking extensions from Johannesburg to Cape Town (Durban too?).  Nothing like popping your parking ticket into a slot where it gets swallowed, checked, then held while the same slot then needs your card to process the calculated parking payment, and then have it spat back at you, all in one smooth action.

Wait, no cardholder verification required? Nope, none, nada, nothing!  We are living in 2009 and trust you completely, so much so we even put these systems at our airports for the fraudster’s convenience so that they can fly in, commit their crime, and fly out again to the next city and their next target.  Nothing like customers demanding convenience to make us do stupid things in terms of payment systems.  We need to ensure things are secured as soon as possible here in South Africa, and we need to ensure it is done before the World Cup or we will see the same old and I bet wonderful new attempts from our local and international call-a-fraudster groups at hacking all those foreign high value credit cards on unattended systems such as the parking kiosk.

I can hear some readers of this post thinking why all the nonsense over a compromised parking ticket fee or card payment? Card skimming is pretty sophisticated, so you can bet that cards being skimmed are pretty much communicated to fraudsters abroad in seconds, printed and encoded onto new cards, and then used within hours abroad on a terminal where signature is the only thing needed to verify the ‘cardholder’, or even better online with e-commerce sites that do not verify the user.  So your parking ticket payment of ZAR25.00 at Cape Town International airport at 10am on a Tuesday in South Africa, can actually be costing you US$300 (ZAR2,220) for a 2am club entry in LA, or worse…

on peut tout voir…ou presque

http://nadarian.wordpress.com/

Bad parking place!

Submitted through the FAIL Uploader

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Si curios oi??
Com que no es possible trobar aparcament a la zona del carrer de la creu (ja portava un parell de voltes) he agut d’aparcar el cotxe al parking de pago de sota l’edifici de caixa de girona. No es cap novetat perquè últimament mai no trobo parking i sempre li deixo.
Avui he hagut de programar la tele nova de la meva àvia, que pobre dona li surt per defecte la V.O. de les coses i no si enten per canviar-ho…. bueno total que m’he estat 1hora i 40 minuts al parking i m’ha costat 3.73 euros la broma. Sort que la meva àvia que ja sap que em molesta moltíssim haver de pagar per aparcar em subenciona el parking que sinò no m’acostaria al centre de Girona ni morta. I ja em sap greu pels botiguers del centre de tota la vida, però a l’espai girones el parking és gratis i no he de patir per on deixo el cotxe.

As part of the Seoul government’s effort to make the city more accessible for women, it has created thousands of parking spaces just for women…. From VOA. Full story

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Los Angeles, CA

Elizabeth says, “Saw this one just off of Rodeo Drive. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but almost half of the car is in the red ‘no parking’ zone. It’s also several feet from the curb and was parked in the 3-minute parking area for at least the hour that we were away from our nearby (legally parked) car.”

Έγραφα εδώ για την ανάγκη χώρου στα κέντρα των πόλεων για ασφαλές παρκάρισμα ποδηλάτων αλλά και υπηρεσιών γύρω από αυτά.  Όπως αποθήκευση κράνους και ρούχων ή ντους πριν πας στο ραντεβού σου.  Είδα τώρα και μια έτοιμη λύση.  Φανταστείτε σε κάθε υπόγειο γκαράζ της Αθήνας ένα κουτί σαν την εικόνα αριστερά.

Είναι έτοιμο, αυτοκαθαριζόμενο και συντηρείται με ηλιακή ενέργεια.  Δηλαδή αν είστε ιδιοκτήτης πάρκινγκ το αγοράζετε και το ξεχνάτε.

Αλλά επειδή από τους ιδιοκτήτες πάρκινγκ που έχω γνωρίσει δεν είμαι πολύ αισιόδοξος ότι θα γίνει ποτέ, ίσως πρέπει να εξετάσει το ενδεχόμενο να τα επιχορηγήσουν οι Δήμοι.  Σε κάποιους από αυτούς τους τεράστιους άχρηστους πλακόστρωτους χώρους που φτιάχνουν, συνήθως με συνοδεία αγαλμάτων, να παρκάρουν και ένα από δαύτα.

Υπάρχει και εναλλακτική πρόταση από την Ισπανία μόνο για την ασφάλεια των ποδηλάτων αλλά δεν νομίζω ότι έχει πρακτικό τρόπο να αξίζει τα λεφτά του στο κέντρο της πόλης όπου ο χώρος είναι πολύτιμος.   Οι χώροι και οι θέσεις στάθμευσης είναι πλέον πεδίο μάχης.

At Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, one continual complaint by students, faculty and visitors alike is the nightmare of finding parking on campus.  In my Product Development and Launch Business class we conjured up possible solutions to ease the difficulty of finding a parking place.   The main complaints about the parking situation are: the lack of available parking in comparison to the number of students/cars and the distance from the parking lots to the campus core, and a trek lasting about 10 minutes.  Our solution exceeds all others because it tackles both of these issues and rewards people for being environmentally friendly.

Our solution involves creating a multi-level parking structure that would accommodate both compact and larger vehicles.  Special carpool passes can be purchased for $100 per quarter, which closely maintains the current system – except now multiple people will be contributing to that fee rather than forking out the money alone.  Then to ensure that people are not cheating the system, as well as for public safety the structure will be monitored by security guards.

Our process of establishing a solution uses surveys and discussions with students about the current parking situation and evaluating the concepts other institutions use.  The best way to reach a wide variety of students is through online brainstorming sites, like Dialogr, and situational concept tests to establish the best solution to this problem.

By combining a global issue (Global Warming and Carbon Emissions) with a local problem (the lack of parking on campus in general and close to classes, as well) we can create the best solution for all.  By giving incentives for each student to become more eco-friendly we in-turn provide a reason for Cal Poly to consider this solution, to reduce the university’s carbon footprint, hoping the combination of the two would create a seamless transition.  Wouldn’t you want to park in a parking structure called “Sustainable Solutions”?

The pupils of parents who persistently breach parking rules around a school are threatened with expulsion…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: health. The blog is also related to: activities.

South Carolina

Dana says, “I took this photo at the local K-Mart. I didn’t notice there were two bad parking jobs until I took the picture though! So there you go, a two for one!

Parked cars on Bridge Road, Richmond.

No more fighting for parking

City College offers alternative instruction

Genevieve Jerome | Staff Writer
jeromeg@imail.losrios.edu

Have you ever rolled out of bed in the morning wishing you could go to school in your pajamas?

Online classes can give you that.

As a student who adores waking up to the scent of coffee brewing and opens her laptop before she is fully conscious, I could not imagine a world without online classes.

City College offers many transferable courses to choose from, including hybrid classes, which integrate in-person class meetings with online lectures and assignments. Students can also take advantage of recorded lectures streamed online and on television.

If you’re a student like me, for whom finding motivation can sometimes be challenging and laziness enticing, City College offers online success courses which aid students in developing a better understanding of the subject while acquiring stronger study and organizational skills.

Some students may be wary of online classes because of the mandatory orientations and in-class test taking. This is a minuscule hassle, however, in comparison to the time, energy and gas spent driving to and from campus everyday—not to mention the freedom from having to grind your teeth while fighting for a decent parking spot.

One of my favorite aspects of online courses is that my professors are accessible through e-mail at all hours – they may not respond immediately, but I can get a question in as soon as it occurs to me rather than waiting for the class meeting when my assignment is due. I can also choose to do my coursework whenever and wherever I want – and if you’re an insomniac like me, that means finishing homework at 2a.m.

“I like online classes because you . . . have no distractions, and all the one-on-one help you need is [available] by e-mail,” says theater major Patricia Lynn Hall.

With the convenience that online courses offer working parents and students otherwise pressed for time, I cannot help but wonder if City College will offer online courses exclusively someday.

For more information on online courses visit: http://web.scc.losrios.edu/de/

Today, when you go somewhere, don’t try to get the closest parking spot that you can. Instead, park a little farther away from the entrance than you normally would and walk a little bit. This should take a minute at the most.

If you’ve ventured downtown in recent months, you are probably keenly aware of the changes made in downtown parking. With street closures and construction at nearly every turn, finding a convenient parking spot is almost as gratifying as hitting the lotto – almost. And, considering I don’t play the lotto, I’m much luckier in finding parking spots, but I digress…

A friend picked me up at work for lunch today. We decided to try a new local restaurant, so we braved the construction and street closures only to find ourselves battling the limited parking – and my recent nemesis: the “new & improved,” ever-so-difficult, and unnecessarily cumbersome parking meters.

I have wondered for some time now, whose idea these were and what in the WORLD they were thinking when they decided to replace the “old” meters with the new ones! Have you had the blessed opportunity to try them? Here’s a synopsis of the experience:

1.) Wrangle downtown traffic to parallel park into the last available spot in the metro area.

2.) Abandon vehicle & walk 1 – 5 parking spaces away (depending on the distance from the “new & improved” solar parking meter).

3.) Navigate the digital screen & insert either cash or credit card into the “new & improved” solar parking meter at double the hourly rate as the older, simpler “dinosaur” meters. ($1.00/hour).

4.) Receive paper ticket, indicating your allotted, pre-paid time to utilize the space.

5.) Return to your vehicle, 1-5 parking spaces away from the “new & improved” solar parking meter.

6.) Place paper ticket on your dashboard, in clear view for meter attendants, lest you receive a $15.00 fine for violating the “new & improved” solar parking meter system.

There are so many issues here, I’m at a loss for where to begin, but I’ll give it a whirl…

1.) Gone are the days of the “good samaritan” who deposits an extra coin in your expired meter.

2.) Good luck to the aged in our community who struggle with cell phones, computers, “self-checkouts” at Kroger and NOW the digital parking meters downtown.

3.) Two words: PAPER TICKETS. At first glance, the idea of a solar parking meter may seem like an environmentally-conscious endeavor for our fare Lexington. But… what about all those little paper tickets, with all that black ink printed on them? I’m guessing the tickets are NOT printed on recycled paper and the ink is NOT soy-based, so I’m going to make an educated guess that these “new & improved” solar parking meters are actually LESS environmentally-conscious than their older, simpler, “dinosaur” meters. If I’m wrong, PLEASE correct me – I’d REALLY LOVE to be wrong on this one!