Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Protesters in New York were angry at plans to kill 2000 geese. “Gassing 2000 geese is not a long-term solution,” their signs say. And they’re right. We need to gas all the geese. That is a long term solution we can believe in.

I’ve complained about stupid, shit-generating geese in the past. Now there’s even more reason for even more people to join my crusade to kill and destroy Canada geese.

A U.S. Airways airplane crashed into the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon after geese apparently entered the engine causing it to malfunction just minutes after takeoff, CBS 2 has learned.

I’m serious. We need to start killing these fucking things (and deer and squirrels, too).

I’m pretty upset with this one (more than my normal state of being upset).

On December 8th, well before Christmas in my book, I ordered some Christmas presents. You can bet (since I’m posting this here) that they took my money and haven’t bothered to do anything. I just filed a complaint with paypal, so I may be able to get my money back.

They’re a real great website to order from. They don’t offer a phone number. They don’t reply to emails. And they go on vacations over the holidays, for over a week at a time, or so says their auto-response email. But they do list a phone number, 614-895-2170, if you dig through the details of the paypal transaction; the downside is that it’s disconnected. As is another phone number, 866-488-2170, which shows up through some Google searches as their “service number”. Real pros there.

On the upside, I don’t feel as bad because I just read this thread at Amazon. Apparently eftgifts was offering some kind of Playstation bundle for Christmas. They of course failed to deliver the Playstations, and in some cases shipped boxes filled only packing materials.

I guess this will cure me of ever again not buying from the retail giants.

UPDATE 2009-01-18: It’s been 5 days and EFTgifts has yet to respond to my PayPal complaint. Only 5 more days until I learn whether or not I can get any of my money refunded.

UPDATE 2009-01-24: Paypal agrees that EFTgifts ripped me off. EFTgifts didn’t even bother to respond to my complaint.

After careful review, we have concluded our investigation of the Buyer
Complaint described below.

We have decided in your favor, however, we were unable to recover any funds
from the seller’s account. As stated in the PayPal User Agreement, recovery
of funds associated with a Buyer Complaint cannot be guaranteed.

Please know that we will make our best effort to recover the funds in
question if they become available in the seller’s account in the future and
will take appropriate action against the seller. Such action may include
issuing a warning, a temporary restriction, or terminating the account.
Keep in mind that PayPal uses a number of factors to determine when to take
action, including member complaints. Due to privacy laws, we cannot discuss
the details of any action taken. We hope you understand our policy and that
it assures you that you are safe using PayPal.

Well I certainly don’t feel safe using Paypal. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that once they are sent more money by anyone else, that money will become mine. If so, that’s a really twisted way to handle these types of situations.

If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s a hangover.

However, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s a headache that shows up before I get out of bed and gets progressively worse throughout the day, all without any apparent reason.

On the upside, I am feeling much better now.

For the last several years, I’ve had my cell phone bill automatically charged to my credit card. That card recently expired. Did Sprint send me a friendly reminder? No. Hell no.

What did they do?

Well they tried to charge my credit card. When that failed, they sent me an email. The body of that email was blank. Attached was a suspicious RTF document. After diving in to check the header information, and running several virus scans, I opted to open the document which, in the end, contained nothing more than a notice that credit card was expired.

This leads me to ask, who the fuck sends RTF attachments instead of regular email?

The incompetents at Sprint, that’s who. Fortunately I’ve grown used their continuous bungling, else I’d assuredly be steamrolling my way to being delinquent and then cut off.

Another software update, another version of iTunes, and another reason to wonder just what the fuck is going on in Cuperttttttttttttttttttttttto, ahem, Cupertino?

The software update tried to install some new software that I had never heard of and that seemed completely unnecessary. That pissed me off.

The new iTunes install was not pleasing either. As I’ve complained before, it auto-places a shortcut on my desktop, which I never want. But this time it went so far as to remove the shortcut from my quicklaunch menu, which is where I do want it.

And just what about the new version of iTunes? None of the new navigation is particularly useful, but I did find a nice bug. When I use a dual-monitor setup (like I always do at work) and I have iTunes visible on the secondary monitor, and when iTunes is in Cover-flow mode, it actually causes my keyboard to lock onto a key I’m typing whenever it flips from one album cover to another, which iiiiiiiiiiiiih, ahem, which is highly annoying.