Random thought exchange

Boxing day starts today?

12.24.2009
News, Rants, Technology

As in the past, BestBuy Canada and FutureShop are starting their Boxing Day sales tonight at 8 p.m. EST.

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.

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Homer Simpson guest appearance on Bones Nov 11

11.15.2009
Play

I’m finally getting around to watching this weeks PVR recordings, and I’ve seems Homer make his debut on Bones.

Homer Simpson x-ray on Bones

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Lunchtime antics

08.28.2009
work

Colin and Hayley will be leaving our department to continue their education. At their farewell lunch today some of my colleagues decided to have a contest…

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Cloudy with a… chance of meatballs?

08.05.2009
Videos

This movie looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun. I saw the trailer this past weekend when I went to see Harry Potter in IMAX. The movie is going to be 3D, and the trailer looked really great.

I have a sudden craving for spaghetti and meatballs…

Trailer
Official website