Best Buy Capitalizes on Actor's Death
I stumbled upon this information today. The Best Buy in Mission Valley San Diego attempted to cash in on Heath Ledger's death mere hours after his passing. You can read all about it here.

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Best Buy Charges Customers for Exchanges
This weekend I witnessed a friend try to exchange an item at Best Buy. He had mistakenly purchased the full-screen version and wanted to exchange it for the wide-screen version. While he did not have his receipt, it still had the Best Buy sticker on the shrink wrap as well as the $19.99 price tag.

The signs on the shelf indicated that the wide-screen version was also $19.99 and as of January 22, both versions are $19.99 on the Best Buy website.

My friend waited online patiently for about 15 minutes to make his exchange. He handed the Blue Shirt both the full-screen version he had purchased and the wide-screen copy he picked up before going to the customer service line. The Blue Shirt asked if he had paid cash or credit and when my friend said credit, the Blue Shirt asked for his card.

The Blue Shirt swiped the card and pushed a bunch of buttons then told my friend he'd have to pay $5.35 ($5 plus 7% sales tax) due to a "difference in price."

When we questioned this "difference in price" we were told, "Wide-screen always costs more than full-screen."

I am boycotting Best Buy and I urge others to do the same. This company has a long history of using underhanded tactics to increase profitability at the expense of its employees and its customers.

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Google blocks browsers
Netmeister has an interesting blurb about experience with Google blocking various UserAgents.

From the posting:

For example, perl's LWP::UserAgent sets the agent string per default to
"libwww-perl/#.#". Google apparently doesn't like that and will not
return results to you. Setting it to something like "Mozilla/5.0 (X11;
U; NetBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3)" would work.

Interestingly, they appear to whitelist agents, rather than blacklisting
them.

What was that about not being evil?

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National Running Day
Wednesday June 3, 2009 is the inaugural National Running Day. I encourage everyone to get out and run. Whether your a seasoned athlete or a couch potato, lace up your sneakers and get out there this Wednesday.

For the runners out there, make sure you run on Wednesday and try to drag some people along with you. For those of of you who aren't runners, Wednesday is a perfect day to start.

The National Running Day website has more information about the day, and tips for people who are new to running.

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Demo -- Update
Rskutins recorded his drum part and sent it to me via the wonders of TCP/IP netowrking. On Friday night I finally had enough time (and motivation) to start recording.

I spent a lot of time fighting with ProTools. It repeatedly crashed. Often, when it didn't crash, it simply stopped recording and reported that an error had occurred. I'm remembering this for the ProTools rant that will be coming in the future.

After 45 minutes I had recorded about 6 seconds of vocals and the 24 second bass line. The next block of Copious Free Time(TM) I have, I'll begin the rough mix of the three parts. Hopefully ProTools won't crash as often during that phase.

With any luck, it'll be mixed in the next week or two.

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