Don't Back Down

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, millions of people head to the mall. That's right, the mall. Why in the world is this our tradition? As if the mall weren't bad enough, you've got millions of other people there for the exact same reason - to shop at the after-Thanksgiving sales.

This year, a lady in Florida was trampled in a Wal-Mart. Luckily, the chain has offered to hold her DVD player for her. Nice of them. Of course, they scored $1.5 billion this year in a single day, so holding a $30 DVD player isn't going to hurt much - even if they pay for it (and there's no sign that they will). So what is so special about that one particular day that people are driven into a frenzy?

Maybe at one point the Christmas decorations came out on the day after Thanksgiving (they do at our house). But these days, you can find Christmas supplies around Valentine's day the year before the Christmas actually arrives. Habit is one thing, but come on people - $30 DVD players are nice and all, but are they really worth trampling someone?

We took a bit of a holiday this weekend to visit some family out-of-state, so there wasn't much here to look at. Sorry for the late notice. Anyway, nothing quite like an eight-hour drive (each way) to get you in the holiday spirit. Next year I think we'll watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and drink some egg nog instead.

I went over to the SprintPCS website the other day, to find that there are a number of rebates that they offer. In the text of at least one of those rebates, you'll find this wording:

"Customers purchasing a phone without a PCS Free & Clear Plan with Vision will receive a mail-in rebate. See details below."

From this information, it suggests to me that I can A: Purchase a phone without a service plan and expect to get a rebate and B: Find out more information about that rebate below. It may be true that neither is possible.

Working backwards, we find the information on the mail-in rebate:

Mail-in Rebate: Customers qualify for rebate if account is kept active for 30 consecutive days. In certain markets, PCS Clear PaySM customers qualify for a mail-in rebate if the account is kept active for 60 days after the first invoice date and does not have any unpaid past-due amounts at the end of this period.

That doesn't help. I want to buy a phone without a service plan, and as informed earlier, I should receive a mail-in rebate. The details of this mail-in rebate specify activation, which means that I am looking in the wrong place. So I write SprintPCS Customer Care, which is always an adventure to itself. Their (repeated) response? That the rebates on the phone are only for new lines of service. I've yet to get a response (after four tries) from soneone who will tackle the issue presented in the quote above. So here it is again:

If I can purchase a phone without a plan, why is it that I cannot find out how much of a rebate that I'm able to receive on this phone? It's in black-and-white on your own web site that I should receive a mail-in rebate if I purchase a phone without a plan. How much is the rebate, how do I go about collecting the rebate, and why is it that none of your support staff have any idea that this wording is even contained within the rebate information?

Why do I want to purchase a phone without a plan? That's really none of their business, but I want to do it because I already have a plan. The "purchase with a plan" option is only valid on a new line of service, and I just don't want to do that. I want to purchase without, and when I get the phone, I'll transfer it to my current plan myself. Why is this such a difficult process?

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently managed to hack the Movable Type search module in order to provide Last-Modified dates on my search results. This is useful, as it may help save in bandwidth costs. Instead of having a Last-Modified date of whenever the search was run, the Last-Modified date will be from the last modification of the search results.

Read "Modifying MT Search" »

A couple of weeks ago, I started rolling out a new site design. I still haven't finished. Monthly and category archives, specifically, are still using the old design. Not a big deal, but I'll get to them.

In the meantime, I had come across what I saw as a problem on offering virtual feeds. For those who don't recall (or didn't see), a virtual feed is created by performing a search and choosing the "syndicate results" checkbox. This produces an RSS 2.0-compliant feed of your search. I use an offshoot of this to produce the per-entry feeds, complete with comments, for your subscription pleasure.

Read "Last Modified Search Results" »

In this latest example of waste, we see the government spending $7-9 million to replace sand on a beach. Why? Among other reasons, so people like B.J. Fersner can continue to own their beachfront property.

Where is the logic in that? Listen, I don't fault people like Ms. Fersner for choosing to live where they do. Whatever floats your boat. But why is it that the government ought to step in to the tune of millions of dollars just so your precious property won't be washed away?

So that you don't think I'm completely without feeling - I don't want the lady's house to float away. I really hope that it doesn't. I just have a big problem with the government making sure of that. You want to live on the beach, you need to shoulder the burden. Buy insurance, pay the millions yourself, I don't care. Just don't expect it to be taken care of for you.

It's nearly Thanksgiving (we had our annual lunch feast yesterday, anyway, so it sure feels like it). That means the holidays are near. As such, there's not a lot of useful stuff this week. No comments about there never being anything useful, please.

DDH Software has created a terminal services client for your Palm-powered device. Now you have no excuse for not managing your servers while you're on the road with only a smartphone (thanks Rod).

While I would normally say that the arrival of Thanksgiving heralds the coming of Christmas, this year it seemed more like Halloween that saw the Christmas stuff in stores. I think they just skipped Thanksgiving entirely. In any case, to get into the Christmas spirit, you can now make your own snowflakes online. Cut 'em, clip 'em and even share 'em (thanks Les).

I probably don't do as much for my wife as I should, so with that in mind, here's a quiz just for her. That's right. You've been waiting, and now you can find out which Office Space character most closely represents your personality. Me? Turns out I'm most like Samir: You get angry...oh yes you do...and you express it oh so creatively. You're a funny short guy and you never really mean to get into it, your friends drag you into it.

Interesting result. I did find that this was the first of these quizzes that I've taken in a while where it's safe to say that I didn't really like any of the choices for answers. Usually there are some I can like at least a little bit. But this time around, none of them seemed to quite fit, so I had to stretch a bit to come up with my answers.

For you science geeks out there, how about deciding which biological molecule you most resemble with this quiz? If nothing else, this one seems to win the longest possible answer award. According to this quiz, I'm mRNA: You're brilliant, full of important, interesting information and you're a great friend to the people you care about. You may have sides to you that no one understands. But while you understand more than most people, you're only half there most of the time.

An interesting result. Now if I just had some clue what the hell mRNA was, I might be okay. Yes, you biology major, it's messenger RNA, which is a template for protein synthesis. Not helping me.

See you next week!

Last night on my way home I found myself behind a truck that had one of those stickers on it. You know the kind - it asks you how they are driving, has a serial number of some sort and gives you a phone number to call and report them. Typically I would hardly notice.

This truck was different. I only say that because I saw him three or four times in the space of about a minute. You wouldn't necessarily think this is odd, but it was unusual, if only because he was doing circles around me. Don't get me wrong - we were traveling in the same direction. He'd pass on the left, get in front of me, move to the right, fall behind, cross back to the left, pass again, move back to the right, etc.

So after about the third time he changed into my lane, I noticed that this was the same guy. He was on the phone while driving, which I can't really fault because I had to be on the phone to call in his number. But the frequency with which this guy changed lanes was amazing. He couldn't sit still. I don't know if he actually cut anyone off, but it sure looked like it from where I sat. So I called.

After answering a bunch of general questions on the location, conditions, traffic and the like, we got to the meat of the story. The operator asked which lane I was in. I told her I had been driving in the middle lane (of three). She asked which the truck was in. I paused for a moment, then told her: All three.

I did take care to explain that he wasn't weaving as if he were drunk, he was just changing lanes rapidly and repeatedly. She asked for my name, and I hesitated, as I am generally leery of leaving personal details with people I don't know. She accepted my report, but I can't help but feel it will be relegated to the back of the file since a real person wasn't attached.

Maybe I should have given it to her.

I've added some redirect information to the confirmation screen that will allow the user to go directly to the entry or the blog that was used in the subscription. I decided to use this rather than a referrer field, as it was a bit easier. Please let me know what you think.

I also added some extra information to the notification email, so you can see the name of the author of the comment (and their URL, if specified). To do this, I flipped some things around a bit, so your notifications will look slightly different than they did with version 1.0.

Read "MT-Notifier 1.1.0" »

I've added a new attribute to the <MTSomeDays> container in this version of the plugin. This attribute is reverse, and you'd use it if you want to list things in the reverse order (ie, going backwards instead of moving forwards):

<MTSomeDays select="week" reverse="1">

Another new feature in this version of MT-SomeDays is support for multiple categories.

Read "MT-SomeDays 3.5.0" »

I've been working on a new plugin for Movable Type. At least for the moment, and barring any unforeseen circumstances, it shall be called MT-Notifier.

The idea is to provide a similar type of functionality as is found in other subscription functions, notably that of the scriptygoddess subscribe to comments script.

Read "MT-Notifier 1.0.0" »