Open Letter to Wal-Mart
Dear Wal-Mart,
I don’t know if you’ll ever see this, but I have a message for you.
If your express lane clearly states “10 items or less” (which it does) please allow your cashiers to enforce the sign. A few nights ago the shopper two people ahead of me checked out with 37 items. I counted them as they went across the scanner. He was obviously not an express shopper and should have been in one of the other three non-express checkout lanes that were open. My “quick trip” for two boxes of Pop Tarts turned into a lengthy wait.
Also, please do not allow people to exchange/return items in the express lane. On this very same trip, the young woman in front of me in line attempted to:
- Return some clothing without a receipt.
- Exchange some other articles of clothing.
- Buy some lip gloss and gum.
Of the three transactions, only #3 should have gone through. Because of the obvious lack of training you provide your cashiers and the confusing requests my fellow customer made, I was stuck for another 15 minutes in addition to the overly long delay the “37 items” guy caused. If someone wants to exchange/return items, please force them to go to the customer service desk where properly trained employees can handle the transaction.
Thank you for listening.
Followup to My Ubuntu User Post
I just received an email from an Ubuntu User employee who apologized for my banking fiasco yesterday and offered to send me a T-shirt and some stickers as a way to make up for the inconvenience of losing out on my debit card for a week.
WOW
I’m very thankful for their efforts in tracking me down and making right on something that wasn’t really all that wrong to begin with. I guess I’m just overly paranoid about my bank account and personal information. In a way, I’m justified in this because of all of the identity theft that goes on. Working for a security company as a security expert heightens my paranoia to a greater level, I guess.
Thanks again to Ubuntu User Magazine for making things right and doing so in such a prompt and great way! (Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m a sucker for a technology T-shirt.)
Thank You Ubuntu User
I doubt the folks at Ubuntu User Magazine will see this, but I want to send an open letter to them anyway…
I checked my personal checking account online at the banking web site and found a strange transaction from Topeka, KS. I’ve never been to Kansas, let alone Topeka. Red flags went up all over the place, so I called my bank for more information. They said that the charge came from “Ogden Publication.” While I had them on the phone I Googled for that company’s name and found a list of their publications. It was all rural living and self-sustainability type stuff. Nothing I’m really interested in. Nothing I really care about. Nothing I would ever order.
I told the bank to go ahead and file a claim. The first thing they did was cancel my debit card and issue me a new one (which will arrive soon.) This is a reasonable thing to do, so I was happy with that. While I was on the phone the banking lady tried to sell me on some mortgage stuff, and I was only half listening to her. Somewhere during her conversation, I remembered that my Ubuntu User Magazine subscription was coming up soon. I Googled for “Ubuntu User Magazine” and clicked the “Subscribe Now” button, which took me to the domain opifs.com. I pulled up the whois information on opifs.com and found it to be under the name Ogden Publication.
Seems like the charge was legit after all even though Ubuntu User Magazine is not listed under the main Ogden Publication web site even though it should be.
I told the bank lady (who was very nice, very professional and very helpful) that we didn’t need to file a claim, so she canceled that action very quickly, but told me that it was too late to reverse the debit card cancellation. Damn.
That means, thanks to Ubuntu User Magazine, I’m without a debit card for about a week.
My message to the magazine? Please put the name of the magazine being subscribed to in the name of the bank transaction or, at least, put your title under the listing at Ogden Publication’s web site. Shouldn’t be too hard of a task, I don’t think.
PS: I do like Ubuntu User Magazine. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have allowed the auto-renew to go through.
EliteXC on CBS
I just finished watching the EliteXC fights that were on CBS tonight. The fighting was high quality, and I have a great deal of respect for anyone that gets in the cage. I also have even more admiration for those that do well, and everyone did well tonight.
However, I have some major complaints about the support staff that surrounded the fighting.
The fight between Gina Carano and Kaitlin Young went to the end of the second round, and then was stopped by the doctor because of Young’s eye. I disagree with this stoppage. The cheekbone around under Young’s left eye was swollen, but it was not impairing Young’s vision at all. Young’s eyes were clear, and vision was fine. I think the doctor pussed out and stopped the fight “in case” vision became impaired. You know what? That’s the ref’s job. He is there to pause the fight if he thinks that an injury has become dangerous enough to warrant a doctor’s inspection. At that time, the doctor can review things and stop the fight if necessary. If fights were stopped because something might go wrong, then the fights should never happen at all. I don’t know what kind of doctors New Jersey has or what kind the NJ Athletic Commission has, but I’m starting to think that the doctors were proctologists hired to make sure the fighters’ visual abilities aren’t impaired.
Also, the fight between Robbie Lawler and Scott Smith was a championship match that was stopped before the end of the 3rd round because Smith got poked in the eye. The stoppage was another doctor stoppage. Again, I think it was a proctologist was in charge of checking for eye damage. Because the 3rd round didn’t finish, it was declared a No Contest fight. They got a camera right up in Smith’s face immediate after the doctor stoppage, and his pupils were equally dilated, and his eyes were very clear. If there was a problem, it was a scratch to the eye. In this case, if the fighter says he can see clearly, then let the fight continue. I know that the fighter will almost always say that they can continue, but without fancy optometric equipment (which I doubt is handy in a fighting cage), a doctor cannot determine if a scratch impairs vision or not. In this case, they must trust the fighter and let the fight continue.
The referee of the final fight (some hard to pronounce Italian name — Margliannio or something like that) stopped the fight as a TKO while Thompson was still standing and Kimbo Slice was still swinging. If Slice landed two more shots, Thompson was going to go down. However, Thompson had been in trouble a few other times during the fight, and had taken the fight to the ground. Slice showed little-to-no ground skills, and the referee should have allowed Thompson the chance to take the fight to the ground… or be knocked the ground. My guess is that Slice was going to knock Thompson to the ground, but the referee should have waited until that happened before stopping the fighting. I think the referee was just too chicken-shit to jump in between Slice and Thompson if it went to the ground-and-pound by Slice.
The doctors and the referee should not be allowed near another MMA fight until they are better trained to handle the complexities and “normal situations” that occur in MMA fights.
Before I finish, I want to say something: Safety is paramount for the fighters. I’ve often heard that the #1 job of a referee is to keep the fighters safe. Bullshit. The #1 job is to enforce the rules properly (most of which are designed for safety first and fairness secondary.) The very close second job is to keep the fight as safe as an MMA fight can be. If someone is still standing, and is about to be knocked out, then let the knock out happen. Don’t jump in because someone might get hurt. That’s an insult to everyone involved in the entire thing, from the fans, to the fighters, to the trainers, to the managers of the fighting organizations. Yes, you want to keep the fighters safe, but their job is to step up and hurt each other in the most effective manner allowed by the rules. You can’t guarantee 100% safety during their “working hours” like you can a software engineer, receptionist, or a CEO. It’s a different kind of job, dammit.
WoW, It’s Me!
It seems like anytime I get together with my friends, I have to put up with massive amounts of World of Warcraft talk. At the Superbowl, every single guy there (and one woman) could do nothing but talk about WoW. I really wanted to talk to my friends. I wanted to interact with them. I couldn’t, though. All I could do is sit there and stare blankly at the wall while they rambled on about things like: raid, instance, mules, mounts, flying mounts, epic mounts, epic flying mounts, gold, farming, their characters, and the various races and classes that exist.
This is a similar occurrence at my gaming table some nights (though not as bad as the Superbowl thing.)
What brought all this up? Well, it was this Real Life Comic that made me think of doing this post. If you haven’t guess yet, I’m the guy that finally speaks in the last panel.
What can I do about this? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
When the WoW talk starts up, I’m like Punxsutawney Phil near the end of winter. Leave me in my damn hole until it’s all over, please.
If You Agree
I’ve been getting a number of emails lately from the “usual suspects” that contain information about freedom, religion, liberties, American pride, and all sorts of stuff like that. The emails are nothing new. I’ve been getting them for years. I actually appreciate most of them because I find them entertaining, heart-warming, or just a good break from the drudgery of my day.
However, in the past 3-4 months, the “please forward this to everyone you know” message has changed. They now almost always read something like “If you agree……forward it to everyone you know, if not simply hit the delete button.”
Most of these emails contain statements that I agree with, but the closing statement more or less demands that I disagree with the statements in the email because I’m not going to forward it on. It irks me that people out there emailing me chain letters that require a moral action on my part. I delete the emails, but that doesn’t have any implicit or explicit meaning on if I agree with them or not.
Just for the record. I rarely forward these types of emails on. When I do, I clean up the forward-header-hell and reply-indentation-crap that is always mangling the emails. Then I forward the message on to select recipients that I feel might have a personal stake in the email or might get a good amount of enjoyment out of it.
If you chain letter me, please be considerate and remove any moral demands that you may have of me from the emails. They’re not going to work and coerce me into annoying everyone in my address book.
Thanks.
I’m Not Alone!
Two weeks ago, I made this post railing against the fact that so many schools are cramming Java down the throats of CS students, which is making them become less effective at coming up with their own solutions to real world problems.
I kept my rant short, but there are a few people out there that have talked in much greater detail about why they also dislike this trend in universities. Here are some related posts of people that agree with me:
A Real Programmer Can Write in Any Language
This write-up by Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg makes me very happy. They are basically railing against the propensity that modern universities and colleges have towards forcing Java on first-time programmers instead of teaching them the foundations of quality software engineering. Most universities are ignoring the basics of how to actually get software to operate properly. Properly means keeping data and processes secure, functional, accurate, stable, and efficient.
Java may attempt to enforce some of these things, but by programming in Java, the person at the keyboard is not taught how to do these things. They take it for granted that their language will do it for them, and this is not always the case. It’s like not wearing a seatbelt because you assume your airbag will save your life.
One analogy that Dewar/Schonberg used was this:
“The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program.”
Another quote from the write-up that really tickles me is this one, “Conversely, we want to say that a competent programmer is comfortable with a number of different languages and that the programmer must be able to use the mental tools favored by one of them, even when programming in another.” According to these guys, I’m a competent programmer. I’ve always been able to take my expertise in one language and translate it into usefulness in another language. I’d like to see a pure Java programmer claim the same thing.
I could rant on this for much, much longer, but I highly suggest that you click the link at the start of this blog to see more of what got me started. I agree with pretty much everything that they’ve written there.
Think Green
I’ve been needing to do this rant for a while, but I’ve been putting it off because of my NaBloPoMo theme, and this just didn’t fit in. I just can’t hold it back anymore.
I’m tired of all of this “Think Green” bullshit that’s been going around. Two weeks ago NBC did a “Think Green Week” and all of their shows had some sort of environmental message. Every. Single. One. I watch a lot of NBC, so I had to swallow lots of Al Gore’s spew during that week. It was a sucky week.
I had to get some unrefined sugar (Jaggerty sugar for you brewers out there) for a batch of beer that I made today. The best place to find this kind of stuff easily is Whole Foods, Wild Oats, or the organic section of Safeway. I hate all three of those. I’m allergic to organic, all natural, never bathe because it requires soap, dreadlock having, hemp wearing, buck the system, defeat The Man kind of people. I used to be like those people (except for the lack of soap part), but that was when I was young and stupid. These hippies that are 30+ in age need to realize that it’s time to grow up, get a job, and pay their way through life….
Sorry…. Sidetracked…. Anyways….
I was in Wild Oats today getting my 2/3rds of a pound of Jaggery sugar (and some Chai something-or-the-other-in-a-purple-box for Kiara) and everywhere I looked was “Think Green”, “Save Earth”, blah blah blah blah.
I’m so tired of having this crap shoved down my throat. Enough already!
However, that is not my main complaint. That’s right. I’m just getting warmed up on this rant. My main complaint is that the freaks of nature that are trying to save this planet have picked the wrong color. Again. The. Wrong. Friggin’. Color.
Earth is not green. Plants are green. 2/3rds of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. That leaves 1/3rd where plants can grow and be seen. Plants don’t grow everywhere, which means less than 30% of the Earth’s surface is green. I’d even be willing to bet that the number is closer to 15% of Earth is green. See up there where I said that 2/3rds of the Earth’s surface is water? Yeah. Guess what color water is these days? It’s blue. Right. BLUE. Not green. Again. Not. Green.
All of these people running around screaming about the sky falling, the globe warming, carbon credits (what the fuck are those anyways?), CO2 emissions, methane clouds from cow farts, and all that crap don’t even know what color their own planet is. I bet Al Gore came up with that whole “Think Green” crap. Yeah. The only green he’s concerned with is the massive amounts of green that is pouring into his wallet from his book and movie deals, and he doesn’t want it to stop anytime soon.
Don’t believe me that Earth is blue? Hey. Check out these photos:
The Blue Marble. Yep. That’s what NASA calls this image: 
Here’s a page full of them. Check them out. All blue. Yep. There’s one that has quite a bit of green in it, but there’s still more blue than green.
I could go on. I really, really could. However, Kiara wants me to come to bed before midnight tonight.
Some parting words.
Forget green.
Think blue.
While you’re thinking blue, I’m going to be out back burning some used tires while pouring some old motor oil into the water table. I’m just giving Al Gore something to write his next book about. We wouldn’t want him to have to give up his private jet (yeah, how green blue is that?) now would we?
Not Allowed
There are some people out there that have some odd thoughts on what they can keep people from doing. There are several web sites out there that proclaim that it is illegal for me to link to their site. I’m not quite sure where they got their legal advice, but so long as my linking to their site is not libelous, then I’m doing nothing wrong or illegal. I didn’t spend a great deal of time looking for these sites, here are a few sites that proclaim that I’m not allowed to link to:
- Inventor-Link LLC
- Advantest Japan
- Denso
- UMR Research
- There are probably more, but I’ve spent enough time trying to find them.
In addition to this, there is a law firm by the name of Dozier Internet Law, P.C. that proclaim themselves to be “The Lawyers for Internet Business”. Their user agreement has the following statement in it:
We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.
Yes, when I went to their site, I did view the source code. It’s fair-to-middle in quality. The formatting of the code is sub-par, but the technical accuracy of the site is acceptable. I would be embarrassed if I had written the code. If they are “The Lawyers for Internet Business” then they need to realize that their source code is also a reflection on their abilities. Perhaps this is why they don’t want people looking at their code.
Also, this Dozier Internet Law, P.C. business proclaims that they will not allow anyone to link to their site. Guess what? I just did it in every word in this sentence.
Another also, I’m not allowed to make reference to the name “Dozier Internet Law, P.C.” if you believe the user agreement that I linked to above. With this sentence I’ve used the text “Dozier Internet Law, P.C.” four times now. I had an urge to use it a fifth time, but I’m holding back.
PS: Please click the links that I have provided. If they are monitoring their web logs (which they probably are) and they are logging the HTTP_REFERER header (which they should if they want to track this stuff), then they will know that I have linked to them. I’m interested to find out if any of these people, companies, or groups will come after me with a cease and desist letter. I’m not asking for trouble, but I’m curious as to the reaction that I’m going to get (if any) by poking this bee’s nest.
