There is one thing I truly hate when shopping: When an employee thinks they assuredly know something & they are wrong.

I stopped into Rite-Aid this morning (on Moorpark road in Thousand Oaks, California) and experienced just that. I had stopped their fairly early to pick up a tube of Krazy Glue. When I got in there, there were a few employees throughout the store, as they were going though and organizing the merchandise on shelves. All the employees where doing this, throughout the store. The only exception being the woman working the front register, yet she was behind the counter organizing merchandise.

The point of this in my story is significant, as when I entered over 80% of the store had been cleanly organized -- items put in their proper locations and there were no randomly abandoned items sitting on various shelves.

I began walking to the back of the store & passed a small clearance rack that was set up, and on it were all shapes and sizes of bubble bath. In the middle of the rack, very cleanly arranged was a bottle of Hello Kitty bubble bath. Being my wife loves Hello Kitty, and that half price is much more reasonable when it comes to that particular brand of bubble bath, I grabbed it. I eventually worked my way to the back of the store & got my glue, picked up a few cans of Spam Lite, and saw that there was one other customer in the store. She was the only other shopper in the store at this time, and as I walked passed her cart (she went to ask an employee who was arranging chips a question) I stopped it from rolling off as it seemed there was quite an incline & it was moving pretty fast (she didn't see me stop it, not that this is significant).

At any rate I got up to the register with 6 items: 1 tube of Krazy Glue, 3 cans of Spam Lite, a 4 count box of Cadburry Creme Eggs, and the bottle of bubble bath.

When I walked up she was on the very last register organizing stuff (as I mentioned previously) and told me "next register". I got very confused because she was the only employee behind the counter (the registers are all along the wall behind the same counter), and the only one in visual range for that matter. Generally you don't tell a customer that unless someone else has a register open. She repeated it and I began to look around wondering where this 'next register' was and she finally said, "I'll ring you up on the next register". Being that she was in the middle of something, and her choice of phrasing, this was in no way obvious. But at that point I understood so I walked back and around to the next register. A few seconds later, she walked over and began to ring me up...

She picked up the bottle of bubble bath and said "This one has no tag". The tags had been removed, so I explained to her that it was on the clearance shelf for 50% off. She said "No, this item isn't on clearance". I responded it was in the middle of the clearance shelf and she re-iterated "No, this item isn't on clearance, I need to find a tag for this" Now, it seemed obvious to me that part of the reason it maybe was on clearance was perhaps because it was missing a tag (and the lid was loose, making it seemed it had been opened once before). But apparently this didn't occur to the employee. I then told her if it wasn't on clearance I didn't want it. At that point I mentioned the fact that it was with several other bubble baths of all types on the clearance shelf, and it was cleanly in the middle of the shelf, but it made no difference. This employee was 100% certain that the missing tagged already opened bottle of bubble bath, symiler to all the other bottles of bubble baths (including Shrek bubble baths) was somehow different.

So assuming the employee was somehow right then ironically this is what had to have happened in order for the bottle to not have been on clearance:


At around 10 to 15 minutes before I entered the store someone else entered the store (it had to be within this time span, as again all the employees had re-arranged 80% or more of the store's shelves, and it was obvious the bubble bath clearance shelf had recently been re-arranged). They went to the normal bubble bath isle, which was a different isle than where the clearance bubble bath was. They grabbed a new bottle of Hello Kitty bubble bath, opened it, then removed all the tags (they also rendered part of the bottle slightly dirty). After this they walked over to the clearance bubble bath isle. They re-arranged all the bubble bath on the shelf (about 3 feet across), removing a couple bottles here and there and managed to get the bottle of Hello Kitty bubble bath to fit cleanly. They then placed that bottle on the shelf and left everything looking like it had been arranged that way by an employee. They then bought the bottles of bubble bath that they removed (as there were no superfluous bubble bath bottles sitting on that shelf or a shelf nearby). Leaving the clearance shelf all nice just for me to find it a few minutes later...

So, which is easier to believe? That the bottle was on clearance? Or that the narrative above with all the copious detail actually occurred just as I posted, and the employee was in fact right?

A side note - when I was at the front counter, there is a sign there that say if an item is rung up at a higher price than the advertised price or the price marked on the shelf the item is free. Which would basically mean that they owe me a free bottle of Hello Kitty Bubble Bath.

You may wonder why the long blog post about a bottle of bubble bath of all things? Well, it's exactly this type of thing that makes my blood boil. It doesn't matter if it's a different of $5000 or $.50, it just plain makes me furious...

But, what can I say, I guess Rite-Aid employees aren't up to par with the employees at any other chain store... Guess I should stick to CVS and Longs Drug...

I wonder if any of these teachers can actually see just how ironically stupid this makes them look. But it just goes to show the sad society that unions always seem to breed, where blatant stupidity is always preferred over basic intelligence...

You see, Steve Jobs made a comment regarding problems with schools. Ironically, the comment seems to contain nothing more than a blatant truth. Boiled down, he basically said:

Schools will never be able to get better until principals can fire bad teachers.

Seems like basic common sense right? Well, I guess common sense is something no longer expected from teachers unions or their members. Either taught or put into practice...

You see, the California Federation of Teachers is demanding that Steve Jobs apologize, or they will create a negative award just to give to him.

Ya know, if those unions would half spend as much time trying to improve the overall quality of their members performances as they are on trying to get a basic common sense statement apologized for, maybe the environment where these type of common sense statements could be made would no longer exist...

But then again, expecting anything other than mediocre standards & a defense of blatant idiocy from a public employee union is like expecting honey from a juice of a poison ivy leaf.

> Link

This is a new one for me, and once again the police are shown to be nothing more than corrupt thugs who believe they are above the laws they are supposed to enforce. This time the dishonest thugs are cops in Bartow, Georgia.

The story goes like this: A couple tires to prevent people from speeding in their neighborhood (to protect their son), so they install a camera to take photos of speeders (overall very expensive equipment). They catch a no good thug of a cop going 17 MPH over the posted limit. They then go to the police. What do the police do? They charge them with stalking...

Conclusively proving that Bartow County police officers are nothing more than law breaking thugs who attack anybody who tries to point out their dishonesty...

It never ceases to amaze me the extent cops will go to show publicly just how corrupt they are... My only hope is that one of these days the cops will be prosecuted as vigorously as cops go to charge and prosecute the innocent.

You can find the story here.

Apparently Amazon some time ago had a promotion that when buying a DVD box set, you could get a second of equal or lesser value for free. The problem is, when the offer was used, Amazon misteakenly took the price down for both DVD box sets, selling both boxes eiter for free or at a fraction of the price of one of the box sets.

The problem comes in that Amazon did not realize this, and shipped orders after having honored that price. Amazon's own policy states that:

If an item's correct price is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation.

So the worst case scenario is that Amazon will cancel your order if you do not wish to pay the difference. But being Amazon did in fact ship the orders it is now stating that they will charge credit cards the difference in price if the items are not returned unopened.

Based off of Amazon's own policy, they do NOT have the right to do this. The only right they give is either you first agree to pay the higher price, or the order will be cancled. Their policy as it was written when this occured does not allow them to charge you AFTER the shipment occured.

The problem is it's fully possible for someone buying multiple items besides the DVD's to not have understood what the discounts were for exactly, but then checked out after feeling the final price was exceptable. They then could recieve the items, and opened them the moment they got them (as I often do myself) only to find out later that they now OWE ADDITIONAL MONEY for the order. At this point it would be TOO LATE for them to return them.

This is a totally unexceptable circumstance, and Amazon's hard defined policy does NOT allow Amazon to do this. If I had purchased DVD's and been given this deal I would simply refer Amazon to their own policy and say that if they were to charge me they would be in direct violation of it (which would give me the legal recourse to cancel the chargebacks on the credit card).

The fact that Amazon is trying to overlook their own policy here is completely unacceptable in my book, however.

I really want one of these

For some time now I've been passively seeking a coffee maker. Ironically, the combination I'm looking for in a maker seems not to exist, though it is in fact ideal...

Essentially I'm looking for a coffee maker that can both grind the coffee automatically, and when it brews it goes into a thermos style pot, as apposed to a glass pot with a heater on the bottom. The primary reason for this is that the heater element, while maintaining heat, effects the coffee negatively, often burning when left for any length of time. A Thermos style pot, on the other hand, can maintain the heat for a very long time as well, but eliminates any possibility of the coffee burning...

It's actually somewhat amazing to me that the thermos design is often seen as a lower quality feature... But then again, I still can't understand why anybody would buy pre-ground coffee at the same time. Yet more often then not, I tend to have a harder time to find whole bean coffee in your average store than ground...

At any rate, if any of you out there happen to find or know of a coffee maker with both a grinder and a thermos pot, please post a comment pointing me in the right direction. I would greatly appreciate it...

[update]

Ironically, after posting this I did a quick Amazon search & found the exact type of brewer I was looking for... It's reconditioned with a very good price (compared to the origional)...




Of course, due to the irony of my life, if I hadn't made this post in the first place, I would have never found it otherwise...

It never ceases to amaze me exactly how much of the global warming support focuses on attacking those who disagree with the theory as apposed to addressing the science. Those putting the argument forward spend 90% of their argument trying to attack the detractor, and the other 10% is spent selectively focusing on specific environmental events, as if somehow those specific events are proof positive...

If the proof is there, the 90% of the argument spent on detractors is 100% unnecessary. However, yet another article writer is doing this, now stating that:

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers

For starters, this is a wholly unscientific statement. Nothing today comes close to proving the future by any means, so to say this as fact is disingenuous. 30 years ago the big end of the world story was global cooling, yet the global warming side is trying very hard to ignore this historical fact (much like Holocaust deniers)...

But I do have a statement which I believe is much more accurate in response:

Global Warming supporters are on par with those who used to state as absolute fact that Earth was the center of the universe

My statement is 100 times more accurate than hers...

Oh, and for the record, I drive a hybrid insight & have replaced all but 4 light bulbs in my house with Neon bulbs. So the holier than though argument (even taking into account the manner that they try to use to slip it in) is fully moot as well...

Nice try Ellen Goodman...

> Link

I just ran across an article entitled "Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?"

This article addresses a lot of what I've been pointing out. The majority of the debate in favor of the idea includes countless personal attacks (as apposed to addressing evidence)... The argument that thoes who speak against the argument are paid off by fossil fuel companies, as if somehow the other side is fully immune from biased funding... And the global cooling consensus from the past is regularly ignored and that somehow now the global warming arugment is now fully correct...

The author states he was the first Canadian with a Ph.D. Climatologist & was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He goes on to state how he is threatened and defamed for stating his views, showing that the global warming side is far from taking a scientific stance on the issue, but a more personal and emotional stance...

And of corse, by tomorrow it's likely to be that yet another article will come about personally attacking the author, as that is the only means most supporters of Global Warming are able to use efficiently...

For some time now I've been wanting to change my blog template to something a little more common. The current template I'm using was fully developed by me. While it does have it's benefits of being unique, I'm sure the drasic difference bothers some of you out there...

I have my template being setup here (note that this link will probably die after I finalaize the template & implement it), with a few posts coppied over to it to see exactly how some of my stranger formatted posts will look...

For the most part it's done, but I had one major setback. That is, my nagivation bar is not exactly 100% HTML compliant. I've been meaning to rewrite it, so it looks like now I've got to... One day perhaps I'll get my entire site 100% compliant, or at least compliant to most browsers...

Right now my biggest and most ugly offender is my Mortal Kombat section. I've got a major re-do in the works, as I've posted about for well over a year now. It's an awsome makeover, and if you hadn't noticed, I actually have registered a new domain for it... Perhaps with the next major MK game release I'll get motivated enough to fully finish it... But I still advise you to not hold your breath...

Reading a tech blog I frequent, I came across a post with a link to Amaazon's 'Artifical Artifical Intellegence' page, to use satalite images & real humans to help find Jim Gray.

The idea being that the lost Jim Gray's boat can be spotted in current satalite imagery by human eyes in the vast area around his last known location.

I hopped over to the site & began taking part, and after a few submittals I was included with a CAPTCHA, which is an image containing text that you have to manually type in the image. This method is generally used to verify a living human entity is entering the information onto a given web page.

There's nothing wrong with this, and to a degree this is appropriate. However I had a bit of a problem upon being presented with the CAPTCHA, as you can clearly see in this thumbnail (and can click on for the full screenshot):



As you can clearly see, the provided CAPTCHA is TOTALLY BLANK!!! That's right, apparently I was supposed to type NOTHING into the verification box, only that didn't quite take. After getting rejected due to this box being blank, and then trying to refresh hoping to get *something* on a subsequent reload, my account was 'haulted' for 5 minutes. Basically meaning my account was totally locked, and I could NOT take part in the online search.

Welp, that 5 minutes passed, and the page loaded back up and lo and behold, the problem is persisting. The given CAPTCHA is totally blank, and nothing I can do in my browser seems to show anything...

So overall this is deffinatly a great idea, but unfortuantly its obvously been poorly implemented.

[UPDATE]

Welp, i tdoes appear they fixed the CHAPTCHA issue, and they sent me an email confirming this.

I've been able to knock out around 200 or so images... I've been mainly focusing on the solid black images, as these represent areas outside of the photo zone. In essence they're a 'waste of time' so to speak so I'm trying to elliminate as many of thoes as possible. I figured these would have been automatically removed, but perhaps they didn't want to take the chance of elliminating a low data image that may have been a hit in addition to the zero data images...

It feels good to be helping but the closer it gets to 0 without having any positive matches, at least that I found, it seems perhaps something more tragic could have happened... But in all there's only 1 photo being looked for, excluding any images of other possible boats in the area (which is probably close to, if not, zero).

But even if there was the slimmest of chances, it was worth every second spent looking at images of nothing...