May 2006

I can’t quite forget that meeting I had with my current boss, when he came to our store.
He wanted to get to know our department, so we all had a meeting with him.

During his talk, he mentioned something to the effect of,

When you shop, shop with our company. Employees who shop with their company are loyal, and benefit us. Employees who shop around are disloyal, and traitors to our business.

I find it interesting that he said this, but our store’s prices are some of the highest in town.
A few posts back, I had insinuated as to what I get paid for working at the Customer Service Center (which, I should add, is generally less than I’d get as a plain, single duty cashier — if it didn’t bug me to be stuck in one spot all day, I’d switch departments!) in this store.
With as little as I get paid, plus, forced into paying out the nose per week on a lovely wage garnishment (DIE, Asset Acceptance, you lot of asses) I can’t afford not to shop around.

Here’s a classic example: Soda.
I drink sodas when I’m stressed. Lots of them. I stopped smoking, not only because it’s too expensive, but it messes with my asthma too. So, let’s look at the cost of a two liter bottle of soda.
My place of employ:
Pepsi: $1.59 (-5%); Store Brand: 5 for $4 (80¢ each) (-10%).
Wal-Mart (which I can walk to):
Pepsi: 4 for $5 ($1.25 each); Store Brand: 50¢ each.

Yeah, it’s not only cheaper at Wal-Mart, it’s quicker. I can walk to Wal-Mart, save myself a gallon of unleaded, get a couple of two liter bottles, and walk home on my day off, satisfying my soda lust, and still have enough to perhaps get a cheap bite to eat somewhere.

For what it’s worth, I don’t quite care that I’m a “traitor to the company” now. I used to be one of those oddball loyalists, way back when, refusing to shop at Wal-Mart when I worked at Target; refusing to eat at McDonald’s when I worked at Sonic, etc etc.
It’s more like, the company is a traitor to my wallet now. If I were being paid more, then I could afford to shop with my employer. I might shop with my company more, when their prices go down, or my pay goes way the hell up. Their choice.

I’d like to take a moment to welcome my new tenant for the week, Life is Fresh.

Reading through this blog reminded me a little of my childhood, when dad and I used to grow fruits and veggies in the back yard. We grew tomatoes, grapefruit, tangerines, potatoes, collards, and even scuppernongs. Those were happy times for me.

When we moved, I had considered reviving a garden setting, though I will have to hold off for now with the water restrictions being even tighter now. Until then, I can enjoy Life is Fresh.

I don’t do much shopping any more, but perhaps you all could use a good deal or two.
This week’s good deal is over at Buy.com:

Buy.com - PRIVACY DRIVE - 1GB High Speed USB Flash Drive 2.0 W/Portable Vault Software - USBPD/1GB-2.0
This 1 GB USB drive is $28.95.
They also offer not one, but two rebates.
The first one is for $10 back, as a mail-in rebate.
The second one is for up to $30 back, if you try out a service offered with the drive itself for a month. Whether you cancel or not, the rebate is yours.

Essentially:
$28.95 + $0 (free shipping!) - $28.95 - $10 = ($10).
Yeah, they essentially pay you $10 to get the drive.

I call that a good deal!

Okay, so, a week ago, I had installed this extension for Firefox and Thunderbird, named Stylish, but I had been too lazy to do anything with it.

What Stylish is, essentially, is a way for you to apply stylesheets to any website that you visit.
Don’t like that lime green text on that site? Write some CSS to make it go away.
Simple things like that, and then, more complex things, once you understand the Mozilla bindings.

Anyhow.
I was poking around MySpace for some weird reason (likely, boredom), and decided to see if there was anything that could make MySpace look somewhat sane. Perhaps kill the music flash, the stupid javascripts, and the horrible! colour combinations that some of the people use.

I found a script that does that, but I also found a script there that works on every website, and fixes one bug that has always existed on the Windows platform, but is probably so ignored by most users, it’s sad.

Food for thought:
Keyboard users, when you go tabbing through things, is it easy for you to see the outline of things, using Windows?
I’ve always found it a little hard to see what I had tabbed to. MySpace made it a little more obvious today.
Have a look at this: Bright Focus.
This adds a thin border around just about everything when you’ve focused it.

Some like it, and others do not.
See Dive Into Mark: New Focus Indicator for Firefox and check out the discussion there.

Until I can find a posts level plugin that actually works properly, I’ve had to delete my private posts. This plugin I was using with the version of WordPress I am running just didn’t mix, and I couldn’t get the post level flags to drop back to public, so I could store it as a draft.

It was also generating duplicate posts in the DB, so, the plugin is deactivated.

Registering is still good, so you can have your info stored to comment, and not necessarily have to wait for me to approve your comments.

I’ll write something about me later.

If you were subscribed, and logged in, you could experience more of Eau Salée Lunaire.

You would have access to level locked content — things that Google should not index are hidden by this.
You’d also have your data saved for you when you wish to comment.
If you haven’t done so, register for a Gravatar and have it shown each time you comment.

Also, new template coming soon. Something that looks better than this.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a Joe job refers to emails sent with forged headers, usually intended to slander the domain being jobbed.

I’ve been dealing with hundreds of emails bouncing back to me as of a couple of days ago, which coincides with BlueSecurity’s website coming under attack.
As I am a BlueSecurity member, with all of this domain under protection by them…

Reading the article at slashdot will show you an email that many BlueFrog users received, warning us that they are big bad spammers and that we should bend over, taking a big fat spamcock up the ass.

If you’re a BlueFrog member, I recommend breaking out your day-glow strap-on, and fighting back. Keep your frog running, and just bulk report everything you can.

But, with this note, although I will be receiving email via pixelechoes.net, don’t trust anything sent via this domain, unless it is to a Yahoo! Group.

I will be using my Gmail account (j. hobley), until further notice.

lj:forsolei:, I hope this post was more interesting than all my WordPress hacking.