Can I return a defective employee?

Consumerist has a tale of a Best Buy employee claiming there are state and federal laws prohibiting Best Buy from refunding your money due to defective products.

Now that's chutzpah!

Here's my Best Buy story of the day. I go into their store looking to purchase a Keith Jarrett CD. Turns out there are exactly zero Keith Jarrett albums in the jazz section under J or K. I ask the clerk to look up Keith Jarrett on their computer system; he picks an album at random, sees that it is indeed a jazz album, and notes that the computer says that they have two copies in stock. We walk over to the jazz section and re-confirm that there are no such albums.

The clerk then has the audacity to tell me that "one of your fellow customers" must have misplaced the albums. Customer service FTW!

Where's the freakin' sandhog?

Thanks a lot Dekorte.

Now I won't get a goddamn thing done for days.

All these years, I've been calling him Ryu

The later years are the hardest years.

Best dad ever

I love bees!

(I love gasoline too, so this is extra-special for me.)

Embargoed

Gah! Bill Bennett and I agree on something!

(To be fair, I think we agree for different reasons. I suspect Bill Bennett is angry that anyone dares criticize President Bush, whereas I wanted more reasonable people speaking out before we invaded Iraq in the first place. Either way, President Ford shouldn't have placed an embargo on his thoughts about Iraq.)

Mmmm, Tropicana Orange Juice!

Add Meijer to the list of stores I'm avoiding.

Some sicko at Meijer Corporate realized that the people standing in the checkout lines are a great captive audience, and so now they show advertisements to you on LCD monitors while you wait.

Do you expect me to hop out of line, go back into the store, buy whatever crap you're advertising, and get back in line?

Every blog post you've ever read

Hey! Watch me link to this post! Don't worry -- I only link to it because I happen to deeply relate with it at this particular moment. Hey, would you like to hear my political opinions?

Database "version control"

I enjoyed this Coding Horror blog post and the associated comments. If you went by the post title alone, you might get a distorted view of what it's about. (i.e. Should I be able to roll back any database transaction at any point in the future? No, that's not what we're talking about!)

What Coding Horror is talking about is keeping your database schema under version control. This begs the question: is anyone not keeping their database schema under version control? Hell, I'm a frickin' newbie, and even I figured out (by myself) that I should have a couple of SQL DDL scripts that allow me to recreate my database schema. Those scripts are easy to load and diff in version control. And, it makes deployment easy -- just send the scripts off to your DBA.

An unsolvable mystery

Yeah, how did we find ourselves in this war, anyway?

R.I.P.

R.I.P. Mario
1993-2006

Warning: Really awful pun below

This is the worst off-by-one programming error I've ever seen.

On cold Coke

Thanks Adam!

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing can be said

Since I recently referred to Sam Harris, I should link to this wonderful article by James Wood. (Not James Woods, fool.)

NOTE: To read the whole article, you'll probably need to use BugMeNot.

I'm no Savior, man

I think this video will give anyone the proper holiday spirit.

Bangalore

Josh Marshall on the recent news about Indian penis length:

There must be some globalization joke in here. But I'm afraid to find it. Maybe about out-sourcing?

Mean!

I highly recommend Sam Harris' letter to the editor of the New York Times. I grow more impressed with Mr. Harris by the day; I'll have to buy his book soon!

Sanctus

Woo-hoo! New Rufus Wainwright album in May!

Remember the Alamo

So why do I drive down to Detroit to go to Honest John's?

Because of specials like this:

Help us celebrate December 7th with a Kamikaze! $3.00

Handled automatically

So I was all ready to send in my bug report and reduction to Microsoft when I found this article on MSDN. It described my situation perfectly, and gave me just enough hints to fix the bug.

However, I think the article is a bit self-contradictory. At one point, it says,

Once you create a new parent row (for example, a row in the "Customer" table) and let ADO.NET generate its new Identity value, you can create as many child rows (for example, "Orders") as necessary and safely use the parent's ADO.NET-generated Identity value as a foreign key (so the child row is tied back to the correct parent). Yes, ADO.NET knows how to handle these relationships correctly when it comes time to post these new rows to the server.

The real problems come when you want to find out what Identity values have been generated by the server-side DBMS engine. Unfortunately, ADO.NET does nothing on its own to help.

Tastes good, less filling

A Robert Kaplan quote that's so pithy and condescending, it must be true!

The Internet now makes facts so effortless to obtain that there is the illusion of knowledge where none actually exists. With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines, rare is the commentator who does the field work necessary to earn his opinions — or even his prejudices.

John 3:16:16.2788

So somehow I ended up watching a significant portion of the ECW December to Dismember.

My favorite part was the one kid who held up the "SOH CAH TOA" poster. I don't know if that was a clever pun, or just completely random. I enjoyed it regardless.

Meryl's hot

Now that was a good Flash movie.

Without makeup

I have a special way of judging how far a particular version of Windows has progressed.

I look at the Add Font dialog box.

When you drag some fonts to your C:\WINDOWS\Fonts directory, a little box pops up and installs your fonts. In Windows XP, it looks something like this:

What the hell is that? It's easy to see that even though the shrinkwrap packaging says XP, it's still Windows 3.1 at heart.

I'm happy to report that when you try the same thing in Windows Vista, the associated dialog box looks like Windows XP! I call that progress!

Depth charge

So I found a fun bug in Microsoft Excel XP. (It probably affects other versions, but I use XP on a daily basis.) While Wolf Rentzsch may be conflicted about talking about such a thing, I'm cool because:

1. I'm not a contractor;
2. I didn't try to find a workaround*.

Open up Microsoft Excel and create a new workbook, if it didn't do that for you automatically. Open up the VBA editor. (An easy shortcut is Alt-F11.) Open up the ThisWorkbook code module and enter the following code:

Option Explicit

Public Sub Workbook_Open()

Dim depth_charge As String
Dim i As Integer

For i = 1 To 88
depth_charge = depth_charge & i & ","
Next i
depth_charge = depth_charge & "89"

ThisWorkbook.Worksheets(1).Range("A1").Validation.Add _
Type:=xlValidateList, AlertStyle:=xlValidAlertStop, _
Operator:=xlEqual, Formula1:=depth_charge

End Sub

Now have fun trying to terminate the Microsoft Excel process.

* (You may be wondering, why not just use the Win32 API to create ComboBoxes programmatically, instead of creating a half-assed combo box using Excel's data validation feature? To which I say, kill me now.)

Aaaaaaaaaagh

And here it is, your moment of zen.

I always get an A on every quiz