Last year there was a serious flaw. Their websites, and I’m presuming their servers, were overloaded, slow, and crashed. It was an epic failure then, and I bet there are a lot of people who are hesitant to take part this year for fear that their abilities to just browse the site, let alone place items in their cart and place their orders.

Hopefully the BB and FS IT folks have learned from this, and are ramping up for tonight.

There’s a message on the BB and FS “view cart” pages that says all carts will be cleared to allow fair access for all customers. Take a look at the screen captures:

BestBuy view cart screen shot from 2009-12-24 at 2.45.49 PM

FutureShop view cart screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.46.08 PM

What’s interesting is that there’s a partial failure. When you click on the image with the text explaining the cleared carts on the BestBuy site, it takes you to their homepage. When you click on the one on the FutureShop site, it takes you to http://localhost/ Clearly someone’s brain is already on vacation. Why does the image need to click through to anything anyways? What’s even stranger, is that the FS site is pulling it in with jQuery and iFrames. Why?

Code view from FutureShop website - screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.56.09 PM

Also, according to the FS twitter account, the site is going to be closed at 3 to 6 p.m. EST and it will be open from 6 to 8 p.m. EST to browse before the sale starts. I wonder why they’re doing this? I don’t think it’s going to build up the anticipation. The flyers were leaked about 4 days ago. There isn’t anything that I’m hoping to score from FS. There are a couple of things I’m looking to get from BestBuy though.

Here’s my shopping list for this season:

• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand A
• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand B
• 2x NAS RAID array’s
• 2x 8GB SDHC class 6 cards
• 1x inexpensive laser printer – this isn’t for me

That’s it. Nothing all that special. HDD’s are on sale at NewEgg and TigerDirect, so I’m likely going to get them from there. Having said that, their prices are “Boxing week”, so I have plenty of time to get them.

I’ll let you all know how “well” I did once all the purchases are done.

So, in an effort to block the spam, I’ve setup a few spambot’s to bounce-back spam to the sender. If anyone gets a bounce-back, please give me a call and let me know so I can put your address in the white list.

What the problem? At some point the mechanism just stops working. When I twist it, the stick doesn’t move. It’s just… well… inside and there’s no method for getting at it. Other times – and this is my own doing – I would leave the stick up, and when I put the cap back on, it squishes the stick and it’s on the inside of the lid and around the rim part. Needless to say, a complete waste of a product that I love.

About 2 months ago I bought a new Chapstick – mmm… strawberry flavor. I’m usually pretty careful with them. I always make sure that the stick is inside the tube so that I don’t waste any on the cap. About 2 weeks ago, I went to use it, and nearly the entire cap was full of the stick, and the mechanism wasn’t working.

So, at this point, you’re probably wondering… “well… you’re messed up… who cares? They’re only a about $2… go buy a new one.”

I care! I care so much, that I called Wyeth (the makers of Chapstick) to let them know that there seems to be a pretty high rate of failure (about 20%) with the ones that I buy. They apologized, got my information, asked for the lot number (printed on the bottom of the tube) and said that they’re going to send me three or four replacements. I imagine that I’ll have them within a weeks time.
I wasn’t looking to get free replacements – although I’m pleased that they are. I just wanted them to know that there’s a problem with the technicals of the mechanism, and maybe they should look at modifying it. Perhaps a thicker thread might do the trick.

I’m certainly willing to buy a new one. I even let them know that. I like the product so I’ll continue to use it, despite the manufacturing flaw.

Anyways, thought you might want to know. If you have a problem with a product, it never hurts to let the company know.

Kudos Wyeth…

It snowed Friday night, I shoveled on Saturday. It snowed nearly all day Saturday, and then Rosalee and I shoveled for about an hour on Sunday. We had about 20inches of snow to shovel on Sunday – yes… 20inches! That’s not including what I did on Saturday!

Here’s the evidence.

I’ve finally found someone that created a “tweak” (thanks for the word Evan) in the form of a script. Once installed, all you need to do is hit CTRL-ALT-T, and it enables it. Having said that, it will enable it for all e-mails sent. So just hit CTRL-ALT-T again, to disable once you’ve sent the e-mail. You can also enable/disable this function from the scripts menu.

Pretty simple.

Thanks and PROPS go out to Rob Buckley for developing this.

Head over to his site to get the Entourage Read Receipt script.2

The one measure that will affect you directly, is that now you have to setup an account (it’s easy and best of all, it’s FREE) to post messages or replys.

Sorry… but over 300 spam posts a day is a bit much to sort through.

I want to setup an account

Adios Quinn

I’ve been saying for 2 months now that if the Leafs don’t make it to the playoffs this year, that they would dump Pat Quinn. Well, I guess I was right! C’mon… 7-years and not even close to making it to the finals… SEE YA!