llpricedesigns

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/02/05/0737210/GameStop-Other-Retailers-Subpoenaed-Over-Credit-Card-Information-Sharing :

MSNBC explains the scenario thus: “You’re on the site of a well-known retailer and you make a purchase. As soon as you complete the transaction a pop-up window appears. It offers a discount on your next purchase. Click on the ad and you are automatically redirected to another company’s site where you are signed up for a buying club, travel club or credit card protection service. The yearly cost is usually $100 to $145. Here’s where things really get smarmy. Even though you did not give that second company any account information, they will bill the credit or debit card number you used to make the original purchase. You didn’t have to provide your account number because the ‘trusted’ retailer gave it to them for a cut of the action.”

http://www.ag.ny.gov/media_center/2010/jan/jan27a_10.html

Cuomo has sent subpoenas to 22 well-known merchants that have deals with the three major companies that offer these discount programs: Webloyalty, Affinion/Trilegiant and Vertrue. The subpoenas seek information about retailers’ practices of sharing consumers’ account information with membership program companies; their knowledge of any deceptive solicitations; and compensation from the membership companies. The merchants being investigated include: Barnes & Noble, Orbitz.com, Buy.com, Ticketmaster.com, MovieTickets.com, FTD.com, Shutterfly.com, 1-800Flowers.com, Avon.com, Budget, Staples.com, Priceline.com, GMAC Mortgage, Classmates.com, Travelocity, Vistaprint, Intelius, Hotwire.com, Expedia/Hotels.com, Columbia House, Pizza Hut and Gamestop/EB Games.

Boycott these bad merchants to keep them from picking your pocket. Find alternatives: Amazon, Office Max, The local flower shop, Pappa John’s, etc.,. Corporate management needs a rude wake-up call that they can understand. This double-dipping behavior is really unacceptable.

I wasn’t really following the Mac tablet rumors with baited breath, but when I heard an NPR brief about the unveiling, I visited Apple to look-see. Yeah. Okay. So the pay-per-opinion crowd will pan it (actually, they started weeks ago), but they are so wrong.

This is another game changer, and the price is not a turnoff.

Of course I want one. Don’t know how soon I might buy, but I can imagine myself cheerfully evicting the expensive “timer” calendar from my handbag and slipping iPad in its place. I’d sync at home; I’d sync at work…

It’s not about the slick design.
It’s not about the slick design.
It’s not about the slick design!

Yes, it has that beautiful slick case, but my lust for the product is about the design from inside out, not the other way around. Get that. It’s what’s inside the counts. The suggestion that it’s all about eye-candy is so cliché, so insulting, so petty, so sour-grapes.

THIS is the toy that will kill the netbook Mr. Balmer. Of course, I’m going to keep my precious white Linux EEE pc, but the slew of windows netbooks are going to change or die starting today.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I do not work for Mac but like most Mac owners, I have a PC laptop, and before last week, the OS was Vista.

I was hesitant to upgrade my PC “frisbee” to Win 7, so I was distraught, but not surprised when the first attempt to upgrade was a bust. I was ready to ask for a refund after a second try, but on the third attempt it magically installed. I was surprised — surprised that it was so attractive and easy to use. At first, the monitor colors were skewed to purple, but it was a snap to adjust the balance to get a really clear, color correct rendering of my photos and documents.  All of the settings seemed easier and more intuitive than any Win program I’ve ever used. Bugs aside, bad corporate behavior aside, I have to say Microsoft seems to have done well with this release.

If you’re stuck in Vista, upgrade as soon as possible; it may improve blood pressure.

Viewing those wretched Haitian earthquake images provokes a outpouring of desire to help. The organization, Doctors Without Borders, is “on the ground” and has operated facilities in Haiti for years. That makes them an excellent choice for donations that will alleviate some of the current suffering.

Before the earthquake, Haiti was not so much a failed state as a unofficial, failed colony of the US, a hapless condition Hispaniola’s Western population has endured for at least for the last 100 years.

All the piecemeal charitable efforts of thousands of private groups have failed to bring significant improvements to the lives of average Haitians, the country has been a sink-hole for small scale charitable efforts, as frequent eruptions of violence have erased the hard gained advances time and time again.

The economic refugees, who have fled deplorable conditions, have been treated with deplorable contempt by politicians and immigration agencies, not to mention the smug fundamentalist preachers.

I sincerely hope that the massive efforts, which will be needed to reconstruct the capitol to the pitiful state of affairs before the quake, can be extended to transform the political system, the social and economic circumstances of the popluation, and lay a foundation for sustainable development into the future.

If the international community can’t manage successful nation-building in this tiny country, Politicians surely must be arrogant fools to talk as if “America” can do it anywhere else.

I logged  back into my Win-laptop Monday and spent a couple of hours getting the frisbee up to speed. I downloaded all the current anti-malware definitions, then I turned to those critical Microsoft updates again.  I manually selected just the titles that looked appropriate to my setup to avoid  the 94% problem. Still feel  irked that I had to waste so much time.

Last night I installed an update on my Mac. I got an email alert that it was available; a dialog box prompted me to enter my pass;  I kept working. When the update was completed seconds later, I closed the notice dialog. Such a breeze. Guess I’m just spoiled by my trusty OSX software.

RANT ALERT II:

I sometimes run across articles with references to Mac “Fanboys,” the people who prefer Macs to Windows. The pejorative is hogwash, bunk, poppycock, horsefeathers, hooey, twattle, a shibboleth of those with Mac envy.

If it wasn’t just a more pleasant experience working on a Mac, I’d still have to keep one around to find information on how to avoid being sideswiped by Microsft little features.

Today for example. I fired up the PC to see how the notoriously buggy IE would render the CSS for a new page I had just authored. Unlike Apple, which sends its painless updates four, maybe five times a year. I was greeted by yet another Win-Vista update alert, which plodded along for serveral minutes after launch. I don’t want malware, so I usually follow the Win prompt to get the critical patches.

First it downloaded, then it labored to install, then it has to do something else after shutdown. Today it stalled at 94% complete. The computer restarted and re-ran the install back to 94%, where upon it restarted and re-ran back to 94% three times; four times; five times looping to 94% then restarting, all the time warning me not to shutdown.  Ha, like I could shutdown this infernal machine! There is no manual off switch to kill the never-ending loop.  After trying “F8″ then “Control,” then “Esc,” I went to my Mac and looked up “Safe Mode.”
A sticker note I had pasted on the face of my laptop was correct after all. I needed to use “F8″ (and we all know what that “F” stands for), but I couldn’t just hold down F8 during restart.  I had to tap it like a fool during startup or watch it keep cycling through its stupid little loop.  Finally, after minutes of nonsense, I  was able to select reset to a prior install, and then wait.

Minutes later, I was back where I started, and had to to ask myself, Should I go through this obnoxious routine again just to possibly get a  security update, or should I ignore it and take the risk?  Easy. Ignore; forget it! Perhaps I’m leaving the machine open to some botnet attack, but what do I care? At least this Frisbee runs for now. A tragedy of the commons perhaps, but so be it. I’d wasted enough time.

Macs are about twice the price of pc laptops, but they’re  worth every pinching penny and then some. Worth it in time saved, in frustration avoided, in repairs bills dodged, and better security.

So I also must ask, who’s the Fanboy? The people who know how much better the Mac works, or the die-hard Win fanatics, who wish to inflict their sorry software angst on everyone else?

Maybe I’ll check that CSS tomorrow.

Don’t open, just toss. The notice looks official, it looks like some kind of urgent business, but it’s just junk mail. There must be 1001 domain scams.
More Info: http://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=Domain+renewal+group.

Rewnew WordPress.com domains online (from your dashboard) using PayPal.

I took a short vaction to Fort Robinson in Northwest Nebraska. The Fort is the site of the old Red Cloud Indian Agency; and the site where the Lakota leader, Crazy Horse, was murdered. Officers barracks dating back to the 1870’s (along with more current ones) are available to rent for a modest price, but there is a large camping area at the fort as well. Jeep-tours, horse trail-rides, evening plays, hayrides, stagecoach rides, rodeos, and all sorts of activities for families and kids are scheduled throughout the day at the state park, but visitors can take day trips to the lovely Chadron State Park (birding), to the Hudson-Ming Giant Buffalo kill site (with its 10,000 years old bison bones) Toadstool National Grasslands and Park, Battleground site, Black Hills and Rushmore, Wind Caves, Agate Fossil beds and more. The area is rich in the Cenozoic, or weird-mammal, fossils. Huge Mastadons, camels, pre-horse, rhinos, bear-dogs, huge, nasty-looking wild pigs, saber-tooth-tigers, and so forth. A natural history museum right on the Fort Grounds has a surprisingly fine display about these creatures, including the remains of two bull Mammoths who died battling with their massive tusks locked.

The fort is not an especially well know vacation destination in the upper Great Plains—Mt. Rushmore is the usual destination—but “Fort Rob” is a favorite among those who have visited.

I took a few photos during my stay:

I think this pre-rodeo event is called the hat-swipe.

On this spot, Crazy Horse, Ogallala Chief was killed Sept. 5, 1877

Red Cloud Buttes loom over green lawns of Fort Robinson. View from Jeep-tour to 2nd highest point in Nebraska.

Low fares for fun, but bumpy park rides.

I’ll probably add more photos at Flickr.

Since tornadoes hit Kearney on May 29th, a number of other violent thunderstorms have blasted through Central Nebraska, sending us to our basement at midnight on one occasion, and leaving us in the dark on another. Those storms arrived with hail, whipped rain, and more damaging winds. Yesterday, our power was out for a few hours as even more limbs succumbed in yet another onslaught and pulled some power lines down as they fell.

Just a few mile south of town, baseball-sized hail battered a trailer court, while quarter sized hail only dimpled car bodies at another trailer court east of town.

I did find some astounding photos of that first toranadic supercell (scroll down), or the cloud formation that beat and blended trees and power-lines throughout Kearney. I still haven’t located any photos of individual twisters touching down. The sky is mostly blue today; hope that lasts for a while.

I have been trying to rebuild a blog that crumbled due to a combination of server software upgrades, but every time I get into that project, power outages have killed my connection. Maybe I can complete that task this evening.

A series of six or more F1 and F2, (lightweight) tornadoes blustered through Kearney on Thursday evening, May 29, 2008, doing considerable damage to the power infrastructure, and producing a few amazing sights, but leaving most of the city intact and no reported injuries. The local press seem to have missed the fact that this recent tornado event was a centennial reenactment of Kearney’s last significant encounter with the dreaded storms. On June 4th, 1908, the earlier storm system also sent several twisters raging through the town. One hundred years ago, those twisters destroyed several homes and killed a half-dozen people. The quirky behavior of the fearsome “cyclones” in 1908 were even featured in the August 1, 1908 issue of Scientific American Magazine. The 1908 aftermath was recorded by photo-documentarian, Solomon Butcher, and other local photographers.

I haven’t seen any good snapshots of funnel clouds from 2008, but several people reported seeing twisters before running for cover. The photos below are from a Scientific American article (8-1-1908). They were taken by Edward Bricker, but it is no surprise to to see that George Frank, the genius promoter of Kearney, is mentioned in this article. The photo captions say “One of the day’s seven tornadoes” and “The tornado picked up a castor from a table, unscrewed the top, took off the turntable, and drove the central rod into a tree.”

I didn’t take photos of the storm, or the more spectacular aftermath scenes, but lots of other people documented the the Gehry like distortion of a metal building at the fairgrounds, the stacked automobiles, the tipped train cars, and the exposed appartment on 39th street. I did take a series of photos of tree damage and the clean-up crew that quickly cleared the streets on Saturday. See a slideshow, or click a photo at right.