Walmart Shinanigans

So I’m going to do my best to write a scathing post agains Walmart and at the same time try to stay as civil as possible. This all took place last night. The names and places havn’t been changed. Mainly cause I’m to lazy to think up some other names and places.  And to think this all came about due to Valentines day. Walmart I don’t love you. Consider our relationship over. And I’m keeping your microwave.

So I get a Valentines day card in the mail from my Parents. I must say that I’m slightly relieved that they still love me. I havn’t been doing the greatest at staying in contact with them recently. Needless to say it is a wonderful card and I need to call them and say thanks. To my suprise there was a check in the card for $50. For those who don’t know I just moved in to a new apartment and I’m kind of shy on some of those nice things like microwaves and vaccum cleaners so this presents me with an opertunity to aquire one of these modern marvels. Of course it’s a little after 9 which means if I’m going to take my time and not feel rushed I have to go to one of those 24 hour places. Namely Walmart.

I get to Walmart and go to their appliance section. They have, as expected, a fairly good selection of microwaves ranging from those tiny turn dial throw away kind all the way up to the nicer stainless steel, large enough to cook a sofa and three of your friends, style devices.  I spot two in my price range with larger stats than the only slightly cheaper counter parts. The cheaper of the two coming in at $65 and the other at $70. A little logic and some simple math makes this choice clear. The $65 model has 100W more power and is $5 cheaper. One little problem. There are none left on the shelf. So what next?

Well I had my girl friend on the phone with me while I was looking. Some may know that she just started a job with the big W and I don’t mean George. She was telling me that she thought you could price match with out providing proof of the price. That’s per one of the test to be a cashier she had to take. So I decide it’s worth it to roll over to Super Target and find out what the competition looks like.  Come to find SuperT has the $70 model on sale for $60. They happened to be out of stock for that item but Walmart had 4 or 5 of those still in stock. Perfect. I’ll get the $70 microwave for $60 and save $5 in the process. So I ask the nearest red shirted wonder if I could get a copy of the ad or something on paper as proof of the price. They said they couldn’t provide me with anything like that. Ok, well if my girl friend is correct I can just roll over to wally world and tell them and I should be good to go.

So I roll back over to Walmart and decide I better double check on this price matching system. I step up to customer service and inquire about their price matching. I explain that they had it cheaper over there by like $10 and the girl says “thats fine just tell them at the register”. SWEET! I’m about to be able to pop my horde of popcorn that I discovered while unpacking my apartment. Looking forward to my buttery goodness waiting for me at home I head back and pick up one of the microwaves mentioned before being listed at $70 and head up to the register. I tell the girl at the register that I want to price match with Super Target and that they wouldn’t give me proof. She instantly gets snippy with me and tells me it’s her job to safe guard Walmart from rip offs etc. and that she won’t do it and that she has to go talk to her manager. She apparently chose to wear the minimum amount of flair. May be I should have been talking to Brian.

She returns a few minutes later and tells me its only for advertised prices. I say it was advertised in their store at that price. What if I took a picture of the price tag? She then revised her statement to say only if its in a mailed ad like the sunday stuffer in the news paper. I then point out that the lady at customer service not 10 minutes ago told me I would be fine. She then proceeds to tell me that that person miss understood me and that she won’t do it. What!? I was just told you would by customer service! I even offered to show her the picture I snapped of the price over there and they still wouldn’t price match! What does it matter if the price is on a sheet of paper printed half a week ago or if its torn from the store via my camera phone 20 mintues earlier!?

Long story shorter I noticed the $65 model being re-stocked and sitting on a palette which I promptly snatched up and replaced for the suddenly more expensive non-price matched $70 model. I got my microwave after all but I’m still less than happy with the crap Walmart was putting down and I was unfortunately picking up. I had two Walmart employees tell me I could price match with out proof and one that said I couldn’t. How the heck does that one employee over turn two others? I’m done with Walmart. Ok they have a big selection and competitive prices but thats about it. Their treatment of customers and double talk puts the nail in the coffin for me. I’m now going to actively go out of my way to not shop at Walmart. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have this sort of experience and I hope that others will follow suit to avoid Walmart and their opressive market crushing tactics and arrogant deminor. Screw you Walmart! We’re through! And I’m keeping your microwave!

Shameless lifenotebook.org plug

Every one knows the guy who does nothing but repeats the latest popular comedy sketch. Or the guy who always smells funky despite being a pretty cool guy. Or how about the guy who can’t get a date to save his life for one of any number of reasons. Point em’ over to the lifenotebook.org and for that matter take your self over there. You might learn a thing or two you can use to help that guy out.

Apple Quicktime vs. Theora vs. Xvid

For all you super geeks I need pre-face this with “No this isn’t a benchmark shoot out!”. Sorry. Basically it’s just me expounding on a subject that I have some knowledge of and born of a conversation with a buddy who can’t give me a good reason why he thinks Quicktime sucks. He has his opinion and he is entitled to it. I’ve simply decided to lay my thinking on the subject out on the table.

I like Quicktime. It has a very sharp, even at low res and high compression, image quality. It streams nicely and the associate player/software is very well done. Simple to use and mostly non-invasive(ok some windows startup stuff). It’s free to use for playback and you gotta pay for encoding etc. Most of the non-free stuff is enforced just through the player and not via the codec so there is a free version called Quicktime Alternative that has stripped the codec out and paired it with Media Player Classic for windows as a player and the codec can be used by other players. I also own a Mac personally which comes with Quicktime kind of integrated and it works flawlessly. Quicktime Pro is not all that expensive at like $30 so if you just can’t deal on the free end it isn’t exactly going to break the bank to go Pro. For me this is the way to go. Multi-Platform, sharp, high quality, and free options if need be.

Xvid is the next most popular codec but only because it is free and has been picked up and fostered by the pirate community. It makes video look darn good and compress down small which is ideal for shuttleing around those free’d hollywood films. It doesn’t have a specific player packaged with it and is a stand alone codec. One thing that I’m sure some have managed to make it do but that is not done widely is to make it stream. There is no easy straight forward process to do that. This seems to be it’s biggest downfall. Well, that and it’s user base. Don’t get me wrong I love to catch a flick before it comes out but that isn’t going to make this the first place I go when I need to put some legal media on the internet. I guess the main up side to this is that there are open source implimentations which makes this better for the Linux community to impliment but that doesn’t help the rest of us a whole lot if some one doesnt figure out how to move it in to a more professional easier to use framework.

Last but not least Theora. Theora is the Ogg implimentation for video. To be honest I’m not sure why this doesn’t see more wide spread use. Ogg offers higher quality audio at lower bit rate/compressions and I’ve seen Theora make some small files come out looking great. So what’s the deal? The website has cross platform binaries available and the project is open source. So why is this stuck in a similar situation as Xvid? It suffers from the same short comings as Xvid in that it is not widely used despite being free. It came about shortly after Xvid and I think that has detracted a lot of attention from it. I think it comes down to marketing. They have to drop this in to a single drop and go player package for all platforms and then advertise the crap out of it by making version submission posts to slashdot etc.

So there it is. Lack of streaming along with a lack of a ‘just works’ sort of package from Xvid and Theora are the things that really make those two fall short for me. Xvid is good but I’m sure that Theora can best Xvid in quality. Now if only it were in more wide spread use.

Flipsyde, Abortion and the facts…stupid huh?

Ok so I was poking around on allofmp3.com after having downloaded the new Norah Jones album and I ran across Flipsyde. Flipsyde is something of a rap/pop version of Lincoln Parks rock/pop style. The thing that strikes me about Flipsyde is the amount of genuine feeling in the music. So much so that Happy Birthday caught me off guard and started me thinking on the subject of abortion. So, in true tekchipian style I decided to consult some facts and logic. But first I wanted to share the video with every one who reads.

Ok so its sad and everything when abortion happens. It’s also biblically negative. I can find you a million links and a crap ton of scripture references and expound on those. That’s not what I’m looking to do here. I’m just going to expound on some thoughts I had and who knows may be it’ll change some minds or at least set some minds in motion.

In true geek fashion I decided I needed some cold hard numbers. A benchmark if you will. Not so much of abortion rates and all that politically skewed crap. I’m looking to make a decision for my self. So I tried to find info from non-biased sources. I found some info on Webmd.com.

According to webmd’s time line of fetal development by week 4 there are more than 250 cells and a visible structure to the cells that defines all the parts of a human being. Thats pretty darn early. By week 6 there is a heart beat and there is a human shape to the cells. Webmd mentions “legs” as not being well defined. I little note between week 4 and 6 is the whole heart beat thing. We define a person as being dead when they fail to have a heart beat. We know that people can not have a heart beat for a period of time and that we can still revive them. So needless to say there is a little period of time between no heart beat and actually dead and gone. Doesn’t it stand to reason then that we should give the beginning of life as much credit as the end of life? Week 12 sees organs as well defined along with limbs and the afore mentioned parts. I’m not going to go on because the real concern/debate with abortion is when does life start. I think beyond week 12 it’s pretty obvious that it has all ready started.

I’m not really looking to start a huge debate here just trying to look at the facts. Looking at the numbers it seems anything beyond 3 or 4 weeks is killing a living human being. People get their panties in a wad over stem cells and the ethics of that and yet with babies and abortion we’re talking a lot more cells and structure than just stem cells. May be more people should be getting their panties in a wad over abortion too? Regardless I was touched by the message of the Flipsyde video and I’m digging the rest of the racks on this album. Lil something for your mind and your stereo.

Who are the faceless masses?

Ok so I’ve been doing this blog thing for a while now and I used to do it long before it had a name. Back then it was just writing for a personal website. Shoot I should have named it WFPW or something catchy like blogging. Ah well can’t win em’ all. One thing I have not had much luck in is really having contact with my audience. For some reason I rarely get comments and if I do it’s from some one I all ready have day to day contact with. So if you read this blog please,  please, leave me comments or shoot me an e-mail. Let me know what you want to see me write more about. Let me know what you think about some of my thoughts and ideas. And to all of you who keep coming back thank you for reading and I hope some of the writing has been either helpful or entertaining. Keep an eye out for more.

I’m in the process of moving in to a new apartment and making the transition in our work rotation as well as preparing for a command inspection at drill this weekend. So if I don’t write some time in the near future please keep coming back and checking I will write again soon.