Twas the month before Christmas
When all through our land,
Not a Christian was praying
Nor taking a stand.

See the PC Police had taken away
The reason for Christmas—no one could say.
The children were told by their schools not to sing,
About shepherds and wise men and angels and things.

It might hurt people’s feelings, the teachers would say—
December 25th is just a “holiday.”
Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit,
Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!

CDs from Madonna, an Xbox, and iPod,
Something was changing, something quite odd!
Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanza
In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.

As Targets were hanging their trees upside down
At Lowe’s the word “Christmas” was nowhere to be found.
At K-Mart and Staples and Penney’s and Sears,
You won’t hear the word “Christmas”—it won’t touch your ears.

Inclusive, sensitive, di-ver-si-ty
Are words that were used to intimidate me.
Now Daschle, now Darden, now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen,
On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton!

At the top of the Senate there arose such a clatter
To eliminate Jesus in all public matter.
And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith,
Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace.

The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded,
The Reason for the Season, stopped before it started.
So as you celebrate “winter break” under your “dream tree,”
Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.

Choose your words carefully, choose what you say,
Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS…not Happy Holiday!

– Anonymous Author

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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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I was blown away by the price difference:

Amazon.com - Garmin Nuvi 250 - Price comparison between silver and pink versions

Silver: $109.99
Pink: $471.99
——————–
Difference: $362.00

The difference alone could purchase
3.3 units of the silver model!

Garmin isn’t the only company who discriminates based on color. Want a black Mac? Better have some “I’m rich!” money laying around. Apple used to have both black and white MacBooks and the typical difference was $100+.

What ridiculous discrepancies have you found?

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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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For some reason, Microsoft decided it would be fun to make it nearly impossible to view the HTML source of an email in Outlook.

Below are the convoluted steps to make it accessible. Most of the steps are for the initial setup which makes a new icon available from the quick access toolbar. After you set that up it’s fairly straightforward.

1-time Setup

Standard HTML email in Outlook

Click the drop-down beside the quick access toolbar and then “More Commands…”

Click the drop-down for “Choose commands from:” and select “All Commands”

Scroll down to “View in Browser” and click “Add >>”

You should see “View in Browser” in the “Quick Access Toolbar” list

Click “OK”

Now you have a handy little icon in the quick access toolbar that looks like a globe.

Each time you want to view the HTML source

Notice the new icon in the quick access toolbar that looks like a globe and click it.

Click “OK”

The HTML email now opens in Internet Explorer. Right-click anywhere on the page and click “View Source”.

Take a look at the source

Wasn’t that fun? Microsoft, if you’re listening, how about making that a tad bit easier? Please add a context menu item for the email itself that will open up the source in the default text editor. Thanks!

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Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is simple. So simple.

• Sign up for an account.
• Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
• Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
• Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
  Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
  Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

How much does it cost?
Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
Total Download Cost: $2.70

Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

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Anytime you have to fill out a form with your email to get something “free”, alarms should go off in your head. They do in mine! And in this instance I’m so thankful for a free little service called 10 Minute Mail. Take a look at the picture below and you’ll immediately see why.

In two minutes I received three emails. I could maybe see why I would get two emails: one as a welcome and another with my free ebook. But why the 3rd? And if they did things right, why the 2nd? Why not just make the “free” ebook link in the welcome email be the activation link? I don’t get it.

A beautiful thing happened only minutes later. My email address self-destructed. Ahhhh the bliss! Never again do I have to worry about receiving spam from that awful company. Thank you, 10 Minute Mail!

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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 synchronizing the drives, I decided to monitor the progress. What I saw was truly amazing.


jeremy@fileserver1:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
879084736 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[=>...................] resync = 8.1% (71688192/879084736) finish=116.2min speed=115709K/sec


Holy cow! 116MB/s!

That means the SATA bus is processing at least 332MB/s since it has to read the data from one drive and then write the data to the other drive. That’s 2,656Mb/s or 2,656,000,000 bits per second which equates to 2.7 bits per picosecond! I’d like to see anyone do anything 2.7 times in one picosecond.

I figured with this much throughput the CPU would be chugging away. Nope. 4%.

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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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