Regrettably, Dell has canceled your recent order for a Dell Nuvi 275T GPS or Nuvi 265WT GPS

Dear Customer,

This is to notify you that, regrettably, Dell has canceled your recent order for a Dell Nuvi 275T GPS or Nuvi 265WT GPS. Due to our error, the system was shown online at an incorrect price and was far below the correct price for that product, Because of the large difference in price, we have not reinstated your order, but we invite you to visit www.dell.com to re-order this item at the correct price.

As specifically noted on our web pages, catalogs, ads, and customer order documentation, Dell reserves the right to cancel any orders resulting from such errors.

We truly value our relationship and reputation with our customers, and we realize the negative impact from these types of errors.

Please be assured that we are working hard to try and prevent these problems going forward.

We are sorry for any inconvenience that our error may have caused.

Regards,
Dell Employee and Education Personal Purchase Programs

Thank you for being a Dell Customer

I think they mean ex-Dell Customer.

When companies make this mistake, they need to stand behind the company and stand up for their customers. If companies realized how much future business they lost from stupid mistakes like this they would honor the deal in an instant.

In the last five years I purchased two laptops from Dell for a total of $4,000. That’s $800/year that Dell will not be getting from me. Think about how many other loyal customers Dell ticked off with this stupid customer disservice move. I would wager that Dell is revoking this deal for at least 1,000 of their customers. Let’s assume that 10% of those customers spend as much as I do on Dell products.

10% of 1,000 is 100 customers. $800/customer/year * 100 customers = $80,000/year that Dell has lost to its competitors.

The deal was for a Garmin Nuvi 265WT which retails on Amazon.com for $217.84 (at the time of this post) and was being sold on Dell’s site for $130 + tax. That difference is $87.84 and at 1,000 customers that’s $87,840. In just over one year, Dell would have broke even by honoring this deal and now has lost many valuable customers.

What a stupid move. Way to go, Dell!

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My back yard is full of bare spots so I thought it was time to re-seed. Since Walmart is usually cheaper than the competition, I check there first when I need something. I searched for “grass seed” on Walmart.com and got results that couldn’t have been more off.

Below are the top four results for “grass seed” as of April 19, 2009 @ 11:53 AM.

1. South Beach Living: Dark Chocolate Covered Soynuts 7 Pk Snack Pack Delights, 4.69 oz.
2. Planters: Slicked Almonds, 6 oz.
3. Planters: Slivered Almonds, 2 oz.
4. Planters: Mixed Nuts, 6.5 oz.

Out of 431 results, 0 of them were for grass seed. I know for a fact they sell grass seed. What’s the deal?

So where did I get my grass seed today? Home Depot. Why? Because when I searched for “grass seed” at HomeDepot.com, 38 relevant results came up. What an interesting concept!

Walmart, take some notes. You’re probably losing millions of dollars each year because of your poor search engine. It’s time to pay someone that knows what they’re doing (*cough* Google *cough*) to rewrite your search engine for you. And while you’re working with Google, why not just merge and become gMart? Imagine the possibilities!

Scotts, Pennington, and Lesco, I would be furious with Walmart until they fixed the issue. Pull your products and make them pay!

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As I was racing today, I owned one of the longer races by completing it in 5:17. The “time to beat” in order to gain domination status was 5:38. It seems to me that when one “dominates” a race there should be no way for the computer to beat you. Wrong. I beat the domination time by 21 seconds and still came in second. Ridiculous.

Hey EA, is this a bug?

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While writing a JavaScript countdown timer the other day I ran into a very peculiar issue. Every time I refreshed the page, the countdown had 0 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds remaining, regardless of the current time, but it had the correct number of days.

To set the future date I used the setFullYear method of the JS Date object as such:

var futureDate = new Date();
futureDate.setFullYear(2009, 0, 1);


The above sets futureDate to January 1, 2009. The problem is that the hours, minutes, and seconds are not being set with that method. So what values do they inherit? They are populated with the hours, minutes, and seconds of the current time stamp. This doesn’t make any sense to me. In my humble opinion they should default to 0, 0, and 0 (respectively).

To remedy the issue I used the following code:

var futureDate = new Date();
futureDate.setFullYear(2009, 0, 1);
futureDate.setHours(0);
futureDate.setMinutes(0);
futureDate.setSeconds(0);


This is the same as the previous code except I am explicitly setting the hours, minutes, and seconds so they don’t inherit the current time stamp’s values.

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The following steps produce the following error message—if you can call it that.

1. Using Google Chrome, navigate to http://www.google.com/chrome/
2. Click “Download Google Chrome”
3. Check the box labeled “Optional: Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.”
4. Click “Accept and Install”
5. The Google Chrome Installer will launch, download, and attempt to install the program.
6. The following error message is displayed: The installer encountered error 4.
   

7. When you click “Help me fix this.” the following, worthless help screen is displayed.
   

I’ll be sticking to Firefox until Google gets their act together.

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I have a Dell E1505 laptop which has a Synaptics pointing device. The touchpad is configured so that you can accelerate your finger across the right or bottom edge of the pad and it will auto-scroll in the direction you moved your finger.

My Gmail account has a ton of labels and therefore the main page is lengthly. I successfully auto-scrolled to the bottom of the page and was then unable to scroll back up using this same feature! Other websites viewed in Chrome yield the same saddening result. Firefox, Internet Explorer, and all other apps on my computer do not have this issue.

Demo of Working Auto-Scroll:

Demo of Broken Auto-Scroll:

Having trouble viewing these videos in Chrome? Me too. I was able to play the first video before I added the second one. As soon as I added the second video neither of them would play in Chrome but of course it works fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

How about a fix, Google?

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Black Widow

Some Little Red Spider

Ear Wig

Mold

Slug

Another Little Red Spider

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